Category Archives: cartooning

Comic Book Halftones in Photoshop

Whenever I want to produce a half-tone effect in Photoshop, I invariably have to look up how to do it. It should be more straight-forward than it is, but we don’t use half-tones in images as much as we did in the pre-digital days.

Below is a good tutorial for the halftone effect that’s been online for a number of years now. (HT Dylan M. for finding this.)

https://www.thegraphicmac.com/create-comic-book-halftone-dot-effect-your-photoshop-images/

Google Doodle Rabbit Hole

You never know where you will end up in your explorations of the World Wide Web.  This morning I happened upon this Google Doodle about Jackie Ormes.

I don’t usually see the Google Doodles since the Chrome browser itself acts as an interface to Google, but this morning I happened to catch a glimpse of this doodle and it caught my attention because of its comics theme. After scrolling through the illustrations, I clicked through to read more since I didn’t recognize the artist who was featured, Jackie Ormes.

After reading Google’s write-up, I decided to do some quick exploration on the web to see some more of Ormes’ work. It wasn’t long before I found The Ohio State University’s blog about cartooning. This Jackie Ormes was truly a groundbreaker.

But as it turns out, so is Liz Montague who drew the Google Doodle that captured my interest. She’s a young cartoonist from Philly who also happens to be the first African-American woman to have a cartoon published in The New Yorker. That’s really cool!

What I enjoyed most about watching Ms. Montague’s bio video above is how she uses various forms of digital media to do her creative work and how she was able to become a groundbreaker herself through persistence and practice.