Screentoning was originally going to be in the digital touch ups step, but it was getting a bit long, so I broke screentoning into a separate section!

When I drew Incident at the Game Store, I didn’t plan to color the pages because I wanted to make a larger anthology. I’m keeping this step because I already put in the work for it. So it might be helpful for anyone who wants to take the option.

If you’re up to having a signed physical book of Game Store for yourself, you can stop by my Etsy store and grab a copy!

It’s time to use Clip Studio to do something experimental. I’ll be adding screentones to give some of my art a gray tone with only black and white dots. I’m working on a tutorial on screentoning from Whyt Manga. Also check out his comic, Apple Black!

In Manga Studio 5 EX or Clip Studio Paint, there is a Material Tab. It would be in the default UI but if it is not, go to Window>Material>Material[Dot]. You’ll find a variety of textures and screentones from this tab, and you can make custom ones, but I’m making a basic dot pattern. 

I select one of the pre-made tones and edit them by clicking “Settings of Toning…” This will give you the Simple Tone Settings window. Next, set the number of lines for 70, which in this instance, determines the amount of dots in the pattern. Then set the Density(B) to 30, white, then determine how big and fat those dots are. After that, I set the Angle at 23 degrees, this is the rotated orientation of the texture. I made it at an angle that’s not an even number, giving it a tiny bit of flaw to the texture.

So now we can drag this texture to my comic and now the entire screen has screentoned! It’ll make a separate screentone layer with a mask of the texture, so this saves a ton of work than other programs.

Fill the layer masks with a transparent color to mask it out, a staple of digital image editing programs. I then edit my masks with a normal unaliased round brush.

You can also select with my lasso and magic wand tools to mask and unmask as needed. I usually start a panel by selecting an entire panel and filling the general screentone.

I also do some other screentone things, like adding a darker screen tone for the black girlfriend.

II continue these processes for the rest of the pages. I’m nailing down the rough spots I need.

I did more experimentation with screentoning. Trying to stack screentone layers on top of each other and masking with a soft brush to for a gradient look.

Again, I created this step before I decided to color the comic properly. The original idea was to keep the book black and white, so there are many steps before I colored.

Now that this all is done, it’s time to put some words to these pictures!