Screentone
Screentone is a sheet of pre-printed dots, lines or gradients applied to black-and-white comic art to produce grey values. Originally adhesive film cut with a blade and burnished down, it is now nearly always applied digitally as tone layers.
Why manga is grey without being painted
Manga is printed in one ink. There is no grey ink on the press, so every grey a reader sees is an optical illusion made of black dots too small to resolve individually. Screentone is the mechanism: a field of regular dots at a fixed size and spacing that the eye averages into a tone.
That is why manga greys look different from a digitally airbrushed grey. They have texture, they hold an edge, and they survive cheap paper — which is exactly what weekly magazine printing required.
Reading the numbers on a tone
Traditional tone sheets, and every digital tone library that copies them, are labelled with two figures: line count and density. A “60L 10%” tone has 60 lines of dots per inch, covering 10 per cent of the area — a pale grey with visible dot texture. “85L 30%” is finer and darker.
Working guidance:
- Line count controls how coarse the texture looks. Lower is more visibly dotty and reads as more old-fashioned or more graphic.
- Density controls the grey value. Keep a page to three or four densities. Using eleven slightly different greys produces mush; using 10%, 30% and 50% produces a readable image.
- Under 5% or over 70% tends to disappear or fill in on press. Use flat black instead of a very dark tone.
Moiré, the failure mode everyone hits
Overlaying two tones at similar line counts, or scaling or rotating a tone layer, creates an interference pattern — ugly wavy bands across what should be flat grey. Rules that prevent it:
- Never scale a tone layer. Choose the right one instead.
- If you must overlay, rotate the second tone by about 30 degrees.
- Work line art and tone at 600–1200 dpi bitmap, not 300 dpi greyscale. Tone dots need the resolution or the print halftone screen fights them.
- Check by zooming to 100 per cent of print size, never zoomed in.
Techniques that still matter digitally
The two classic hand techniques are worth reproducing on a tablet. Scraping (削り, kezuri) is scratching the tone away with a blade to make a soft highlight — the streaked glow on hair, the bloom on a cheek. Layering two tones builds a darker value with a shifted texture, used for cast shadow over an already-toned surface.
Use tone for form and mood; use line weight and spotting blacks during inking for structure and contrast. Tone applied before the blacks are resolved almost always flattens the page, because it fills the space that contrast needed.
Related terms
- Inking Inking is the stage where a comic's pencil drawing is redrawn in permanent black line. The inker decides which edges become lines, how thick each line is, and which areas are filled solid black — the choices that give a page its depth and contrast.
- Line weight Line weight is the thickness of a drawn line, varied deliberately across a piece of art. Thicker lines advance towards the viewer and read as shadowed or heavy; thinner lines recede and read as lit or delicate, which is how flat line art conveys depth.
- Panel A panel is a single framed image in a comic that shows one moment of the story. Its border marks where that moment ends, its size controls how long the reader spends there, and the sequence of panels is the sequence of time.
- Speed lines Speed lines are drawn line fields that convey motion or force attention in comics. Parallel lines trailing a subject read as movement; radial lines converging on a point read as emphasis, shock or impact. Manga calls them ryūsen and shūchūsen.