New York Comics & Picture-Story Symposium: Featuring Guy Lawley
Guy Lawley on Comics, color and “Ben Day dots.”
- Ben Day dots are colored dots commonly found in older comic books
- INvented by 1879 by Benjamin Day
- 1890’s-1980’s
- Four color letterpress printing on newspaper
- Rotary web perfecting press (1871)
- Comics shift from newspaper to Comic Books
- Originally printed on newspaper instead of better quality paper
- Even the glossy papered comics of today are printed with dots
- Roy Lichtenstein
- NYU based artist uses ben day dots to create large scale comic paintings
- Controversial artist due to the fact that he appears to steal content
- Many artists go about trying to take the dots back from Lichtenstein for the comics
- Four color printing
- Cyan
- Magenta
- Yellow
- Key
- Color Separation
- Creating images for the different color plates
- There are two ways to separate color
- Photographic color separation
- A full color image broken down into separate colors for printing
- Used through the 1980’s for US comic color
- Mechanical Color Separation
- Extremely hands on method
- Always begins with a color guide
- Three different color separation techniques
- Ben Day Tints – “Platinum Age” Sundays
- Ben Day Screen: Wooden Frame with clear celluloid and patterned with dots or lines as to avoid hand drawing each dot
- This allowed for precisely controlled multiple applications of Ben Day dots
- Ben Day Tints – “Platinum Age” Sundays
- Photographic color separation
“They could never have created the industry that we have today if they kept Benday men only. They had to find faster ways of making the [colour] separations.” – Sol Harrison
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- Craftint Multicolor – in comic book s from 1934
- Takes color separation away from the metal plate and onto the drawing board
- This method didn’t have as many options
- “64 colors”
- Acetate – Marvel 1954 DC 1956
- Made through acetate sheets that were painted over to show where each color should be and then those are turned into printing plates and combined into one for mass printing.
- 25% dots are colored dots on white paper
- 50% dots are white dots on colored paper
- Craftint Multicolor – in comic book s from 1934
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- Real Ben Day dots had phased out starting in the mid 1930’s
- It became a generalized brand name like band-aid or kleenex