Pixel Screentones

Come and download the zipped file below. The zip file contains a number of small .gif files. Open PI and import the textures as paper textures for PI's brushes. Set the preview icon to 48x48? or larger to get a more accurate preview of the patterns. Free to use any way you want, personal or commercial. Making them was the fun part for me, but honestly, I still can't come up with a creative way of using them.:D
The idea was born when I was playing around with the free demo of Graphics Gale. Very nice app, but I'm afraid I'm still much more comfortable with PI. Anyway, GG has several similar brushes. Then it occured to me that perhaps making a tileable pattern and importing them as paper textures in PI would do the trick. And they did. So now my PI has similar brushes, plus some more I came up with after playing around with the various combinations of black and white pixels and tiling them into a 48x48 box.
What's nice in PI is that if you activate the draw as object on the brushes, the patterns have transparency, meaning you could move them around and overlay them above other patterns, creating interesting moire effects.. Just remember to reselect the none on the paper textures if you want to draw normally later on. You can also play with the blend modes and fade effects. Lots of potential there. PI seems to remember the paper settings after exiting and reopening, too. Had me confused for a while.

Wow, what a collection, looks great.

Lot of work that you've gone to here GM ... Thank's
Now we gotta see wat you come up with for using them:D

I'm not sure how you mean "PI Brushes"?
Not "Stamps"??

My partner loves GpaphicGale and PI for doing her pixel work but my preference now would be Pixel Studio as it has more features.

Been a bit too busy to do any creating in any program but hope to get back into it before long:confused:
No doubt GM and Dereck are busily creating as I speak:D :D

Can't wait;)

Kiwi, I think what Gman meant is that you can load them in Paper textures and then you are able to paint with the texture in PI.

Being as the textures have many halftone patterns, it would be good for cartooning and simulating the Sunday Comics.

The patterns are importable probably to any graphics program that can use textures either as fill or to paint with, such as PaintShopPro.

PhotoPaint can't paint with textures directly but can clone from another source from a flood fill. But can also be painted from the fill texture with the clone brush. I didn't know that until I tried it either.

This drawing is done entirely with Gman's textures and some at different resolutions to get different dot sizes. It naturally leans towards .gif optimization and a pretty small file size.

Looks great Sally:)
Obviously there are many possibilities using the patterns/textures.
Most of my drawing is done with Paths and actually using the paint brushes is a bit foreign to me as I started learning with Path Edit in 3d, 3d trim or 2d only occasionally using blur, soft edges and so forth.
When I required a certain texture I would make one of my own as a preset or a stamp.
Yep! There's a lot to learn ... Oh dearr!:eek: :D

Wow, great artwork, Sally. Now I know I'm really having an artist's block. I've been fooling around with them for about a week now and I still have nothing to show...:o .
Yes, Kiwi. Load them as paper textures for your brushes. Then they magically appear as you draw. I also lean towards the vector tools and most of my works starts with paths. But I was trying to diversify my style a bit, so I've been experimenting with PI's pencils and brushes. My poor Graphire's stylus nib is getting worn down fast.:D

Since the texture makes good gif's, you can make extraordinarily small size cartoons in download times.

Tried these in Xara to invoke object transparency. Worked fine.

Worked as an image stroke in Expression, but fringes and paper textures didn't accept the file type. If I changed to JPG, they would work.

Rich

There is one advantage that .gif has over .jpeg is in scalability on a 2-bit image, it is not resolution dependant and scales upward nicely.

Changing to .jpeg would allow you to use the textures in the rest of PI, not just the paper textures for brushes.

I was trying the GIF tiles in the June Expression CTP, and they were working.

Rich

As a fringe in EGD. Grayscale can be colorized, and the white shifts to transparent. Rich

Wow, Sally, looks like your vacation fully recharged your batteries. :D . Great works. Also saw the one you posted on the Corel Draw forum. Gotta try fooling around with Photopaint if I can muster the energy. But frankly, the interface drives me nuts...
Rich, I am awed by the things you can turn to brushes in Expression. Converting to jpg might not be the best choice, though, because of the noise introduced. Maybe png or bmp perhaps? But I see that the latest release works with gif, as you said. Very cool.
Glad you folks are having fun playing with them. Me, I'm still waving the mouse around without anything worthwhile appearing :D .
One drawback with these screentone images is that the thumbnail images in the windows file browser are messed up terribly. So I'm not sure about Sally's remark on the scalability of these tiles. Seems to be tricky business for me. They scale properly only on some percentages, but gets messed up on others. Or maybe I'm missing something here....:confused:

Map fills and paper texture in EGD.

Rich

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Grafixman

Wow, Sally, looks like your vacation fully recharged your batteries. :D . Great works. Also saw the one you posted on the Corel Draw forum. Gotta try fooling around with Photopaint if I can muster the energy. But frankly, the interface drives me nuts...
Rich, I am awed by the things you can turn to brushes in Expression. Converting to jpg might not be the best choice, though, because of the noise introduced. Maybe png or bmp perhaps? But I see that the latest release works with gif, as you said. Very cool.
Glad you folks are having fun playing with them. Me, I'm still waving the mouse around without anything worthwhile appearing :D .
One drawback with these screentone images is that the thumbnail images in the windows file browser are messed up terribly. So I'm not sure about Sally's remark on the scalability of these tiles. Seems to be tricky business for me. They scale properly only on some percentages, but gets messed up on others. Or maybe I'm missing something here....:confused:

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Gman,
I know .gif format can be scaled in a true vector program because it does not dither out. However this is probably only apparently true when you scale it in a program that can hold the ratio of height and width correctly. If scale is like in Photoshop where you have to hold down shift to get it proportional, it could do all over the place and Photoshop is a pixel editor. But in a CorelDRAW, it is scalable. It behaves this way also in Adobe Illustrator. In Photoshop, so long as you do not scale it with edit handles which means you have converted it from index color (in which you have very few tools which will work including manual scaling) by changing its image size height and width, it retains its sharp edges but it screws the pattern up a little. In PI, so long as you scale it by its image size, it remains true, the minute you scale it as an object, it can pixelate. In Xara, it is imported or opened as a bitmap and it is a very smooth bitmap, but no longer the checkerboard of squares. It is handling the information differently. In PhotoPaint, it enlarges when using the resample command pretty well. And pixelates if you drag its corners once you have promoted it to an object and enlarged the paper.

Xara, in this case is apparently viewing all index bitmaps as .jpeg or .png since it is automated to change vector to .png rather than any other format. This is my guess. And once open on the desktop, you can use it as a bitmap fill however, it is pixalated as a .jpeg. DRAW can trace it perfectly however and the result can be saved and imported into Xara as .wmf which is the easiest, I think. When I imported the Geisha text that wouldn't display correctly I changed it to .wmf and imported it to Xara. Xara, like anything else, has its own way of looking at artwork. This is neither good nor bad. It is different from DRAW and Illustrator on this.

However it there is a plugin that Xara recognizes and that plugin calls for a texture and can use a .gif, then it would mostlikely display as expected as it is using an interpreter.

One of the differences between .gif which is index color and .jpeg which is 256 color is that the .jpeg for the web is saved at 72 or for Windows 96 dpi. I didn't know this until this last year, .gif is resolution independent. You could save it at any dpi and you'd get the same .gif. The image size on the .gif is determined by the number of colors because it is index color. And these are saved at 1-bit which is black and white. In fact if you look at the resolution in PhotoImpact it doesn't even show a number.

It is an odd commodity.

Gman,

A WMF drawing I converted to map fills. Lots of bugs went to make this. Rich

He may be too busy to respond, but I think it is wonderful.

Sally

The tiles work nicely as paper textures. Rich

Bugs?! :D
Converted to wmf....
So you mean those tiny pixel patterns are converted to vector shapes, or are they still bitmaps?
Sally. I am amazed at the depth of your knowledge on these things. No, I haven't really explored the behavior of bitmaps on vector programs, but your description on how various programs handles resizing is very interesting. Gotta try to understand them more deeply one of these days.
Something to ponder upon also is the resampling method used when resizing (bicubic, bilinear, etc). The results seems to vary and are more obvious with these tiny black and white pixels....
My printer is clogged up due to neglect. I wonder how these tiny patterns are going to end up if you decide to print them?
Or maybe there is a need for bigger patterns for printing?

I converted several old WMF CAD drawings to Expression format, and applied map fills. I used the tiles as paper textures. The dark shades in the tiles make transparent areas and the background shows thru. I can add various backgrounds for variation. As strokes, the white goes transparent, and the grayscale can be colorized. In erase blending, since the grayscale stroke becomes transparent, the dark shades will erase to whatever is below it on a layer.

I am using the tiles as GIFs. They work well in Xara, too.

Rich