Experimenting with laser cutting half tones

Comic books contain some of the best single colour or limited colour palette art work I've ever seen.  I have a deep appreciation of the liveliness of linework in comic books, and the incredible tonal variations which are achievable just through the use of hatch lines and dots.  As soon as you go from a single colour to two, there are so many more variations and options available to the artist, and many comic book artists are geniuses at exploiting this.  Recently, I purchased the book "1000 Comics You Must Read Before You Die".  This is a great overview and it has led me to seek out some of the comic books recommended either in my local library or secondhand.  I have really enjoyed looking more closely at the work of Guido Crepax, who does sensational pen art as part of his series Valentina; and Frank Bellamy is a master in his use of shade and half tones.  If anyone is looking to learn about using contrast effectively and dramatically, I highly recommend looking at the work of these artists.

I sought to employ what I had learned in my own design.  Having been experimenting with laser cut woodcut prints for a while, I was keen to find a way to create a half tone effect.  After coming up with an image, I divided up the bear up into areas of solid colour, a dense half tone, and a lighter half tone.  The overall design also featured some linear half tones on the bike wheel, which gives it a sense of movement.  I drew my bear on my Samsung Galaxy tablet and used half tone digital brushes which I bought from Retro Supply.  I recommend their digital brushes, and they also have some fantastic video tutorials - well worth a look.  The white details I kept for the bear - the teeth and claws - really pop against this backdrop of solid areas and half tones.

Once my drawing was complete, I had to translate it for the laser cutter.  To do this, I save it as an inverted black and white image.  I also have to flip it horizontally in order to be able to take a print from it - if I did not do this, my writing would be a mirror image when I print it up in ink.  I save it as a JPEG, trace the bitmap of this in Inkscape, and then save this as a PDF.

I was unsure as to whether it would work as a laser cut - I did not know if the half tone areas would be too detailed for it and get burnt off.  However, I kept the image fairly large - A5 size - and it worked out brilliantly.  I cut it out of plywood and some of the dots came away after a few print ups - so next time I would use a pure wood veneer.  However, the image was really successful, and I was delighted with how effectively the half tones, both dots and lines, printed up.  I'm definitely going to experiment further with this technique!  Watch the films to see how I inked then printed it.