Love to hand draw? And we don’t mean Wacome tablets and clean hands , but first grade Ticonderoga pencils drawing.
We do! We hope you do too, so we’re going to show you how to convert a lovely pencil drawing into a beautiful screen print!

This tutorial is mainly aimed at knowledgeable screen printers looking to get a value range with limited colours,

Step 1: Scan your  drawing
We’ll trust you to figure out the drawing bit, after a few sketches, make a cleaned up final copy in the approximate desired size for your screen print and scan it in as 300 dpi jpeg.

For this tutorial we used a majestic peacock design Zannasour drew for our lovers ramble rousing on the east coast, Belikos, they’re a super good party awesome rock band, send them some love.

Step 2: Import it into Photoshop and grayscale your image
If you haven’t done so while scanning it in, convert your image into grayscale.

Step 3: Bitmap your image

Right above grayscale, you’ll notice the bitmap mode is now available

Make sure to keep your resolution at 300ppi, set method at halftone screen. In the next window set the frequency to whatever your exposure setup can handle, we set ours to 60 lines per inch, angle doesn’t matter, and set shape to round.

Your final result should look like this:

You’ll notice all the pixils making gray values get converted into black dots ranging in size. This effect produces a range of values with one colour, a perfect tool for screen printers looking to limit their colours but produce great details. Use this as your positive for making your screen. Send us a picture of your results or if you have any questions feel free to email us as well. We’d love to hear from you.