Halftone Brushes

For many artists and designers, the desire to produce beautiful things stems from their early memories. Reading classic comics such as Tarzan and Superman instead of doing homework, for example, marked the beginning of a visual curiosity for many of us.

These Halftone brushes are inspired by the look and feel of the printing techniques of the eighteen and nineteen hundreds. With these brushes, you can create the same visual aesthetics recognizable from vintage comics, prints and illustrations. Use them as a unique highlight or recreate something familiar.

Enjoy 14 Halftone brush styles in this library including 6 dot variations, 4 hatch variations and 4 crosshatch variations. Find them in the Brush Market in app - just tap on your active tool in the tool wheel (read here for help setting up your brushes, tools and presets).
 

Using the Brushes

Like all grain brushes in Concepts, you can alter the scale and angle of your patterns by opening the Brushes menu, selecting a brush, and tapping the “Edit” button in the preview window. This is especially useful with the Halftone brushes, as you can decide the direction of your shadow hatching or set a realistic scale to your comic-inspired print.

Once in the Brush Editor, choose "Duplicate" to create a new brush based on the original. Use the grain rotation and scale sliders to alter the grain's size and angle. If you ever want to return to the original brush settings, just tap "Reset" at the top of the editor. For more on how to edit and create brushes with the brush editor, read How to Create a Custom Brush.

Pro Tips

Layering the brushes can give your drawing extra dimension. When editing multiple brushes for a drawing, be sure to stay consistent with your scale and rotation values, as the intensities of each style will align when the values match one another.

Another way of working with the grain size is to select your whole illustration and scale it on the canvas. Your outlines will scale in relation to the grain pattern.
 

We hope these Halftone brushes give you a useful blast from the past and help you illustrate to great effect,

The Concepts Team

Brushes and artwork created by Lasse Pekkala.

Questions, comments or feedback? We love hearing from you. Please send us an email to concepts@tophatch.com and we'll be happy to chat. Thanks for your support!