Image Treatment beginner graphicnarrativeefficient

Screen Tone

Adhesive dot and line sheets cut to shape, giving grey without any grey ink.

What it does

Manga is printed in one colour, so tone comes from adhesive screentone sheets laid over the artwork and cut to shape with a blade. Different sheets carry different densities and patterns: dots, parallel lines, gradients, sunbursts for emotional emphasis. The cut edge is hard and visible, tones do not blend into one another, and overlaying two sheets creates moiré, which experienced artists exploit deliberately.

The prompt

[Subject] drawn in manga style with adhesive screentone. Confident black ink linework, grey produced entirely by dot-pattern screentone sheets cut to shape with hard visible edges and no blending between densities. One radiating sunburst tone behind the focal element for emphasis. Pure black line and dot pattern only, no true grey ink, printed one colour on cream pulp paper.

Replace [Subject] with what you are shooting. Everything else is deliberate: the gear, stock and lighting are what push a generator towards this look.

Works well in

Midjourney, FLUX, Stable Diffusion

Pairs with

Ben-Day Pop Coarse Halftone

The Prompt Atlas

Every prompt here is a starting point. The Prompt Atlas is the full system: hundreds of production-ready prompts organised by outcome, with the reasoning behind each one so you can adapt rather than copy.

See The Prompt Atlas

Back to the Graphic Design Prompt Library