Where should the dots go?

In the shaded areas only, as they would be in real four colour printing. Dots over the entire picture read as a filter rather than as a process.

Does the outline have to vary in weight?

Yes. A constant machine line reads as toon shading. A drawn line that swells and tapers is what puts a hand back into a rendered picture.

How do I make it less like a specific film?

Remove the lettering and the chromatic fringing and keep the dots and the ink line. That leaves a general comic treatment rather than one house look.

Sprayed Halftone Comic

comic book cg
spider verse look
printed comic 3d

A 3D render treated as cheap comic printing: dot screens, misregistration and ink lines.

Draw this style

Opens an image model with the prompt in it. The price is on the page before you sign in.

What it is for

Putting print defects on a computer render is a joke about the medium: the most expensive process available pretending to be the cheapest. It works because the defects are what a reader associates with comics, more than the drawing ever was.

How it works

A three dimensional model is shaded flat, then given the defects of four colour printing: dot screens in the shadows, plates that do not quite line up, and chromatic fringing at the frame edge. An ink line of varying weight is drawn over the top. Lettering and action lines share the space with the figure rather than sitting on a layer above it.

When to use it

Use it for energy, youth and anything about comics. Avoid it where legibility matters, because every element of the style is a controlled error.

Told apart from its neighbours

Screentone is a hand cut sheet on a black and white page. Halftone Newsprint in the print catalogue is the real printing process. Toon Shaded is the flat shading under this without any of the print treatment.

Screentone
Halftone Newsprint
Toon Shaded

Where it is used

It carries a poster, a trailer frame, a music video and any picture that wants to look loud.

Comic book animated features
Music videos, titles and game trailers

The prompt

Replace the blanks with your own character, keep the rest. Then run it on an image model.

<character>, sprayed halftone comic render, a three dimensional model surfaced as cheap comic book printing with visible ben day dot screens filling the shaded areas, deliberate colour misregistration so the cyan and magenta plates sit slightly off the black line, a drawn ink outline of varying weight over the render, chromatic fringing at the edges of the frame, hand lettered sound effect shapes and small action lines sitting in the same space as the figure

Run it

What goes wrong

A clean cel shaded render with a halftone overlay comes back. Ask for the plates to be misregistered and for the dots to sit only in the shaded areas, not over the whole picture.

Leave out

clean registration, smooth shading, photographic texture, a single colour plate, a tidy frame

Watch for

This reads as recent comic book CG and it is the most imitated look of the last few years. Drop the misregistration and the sound effects and it becomes a general comic style rather than a specific one.

Questions

Colour plates printed slightly out of alignment, so a magenta edge shows beside a black line. It is a printing fault, and reproducing it deliberately is most of what makes this look read as comics.