Screentone (スクリーントーン) is the adhesive sheet of patterned grey, gradient, or texture used to add tone and shading to monochrome manga. Until the digital transition of the 2000s, almost every published manga page was finished with hand-applied screentone, and the technique remains central to the visual identity of manga as a printed medium even in its digital simulation.
The physical sheets
Traditional screentone is a sheet of transparent adhesive film printed with a regular dot pattern, parallel-line pattern, or photographic texture. The artist or assistant cuts a piece of tone to the shape required, removes the backing, applies it to the inked page, and burnishes it down. Excess is cut away with a craft knife. Major manufacturers included Letraset (UK) and IC Screentone (Japan, established 1965); IC remains the canonical Japanese brand.
Tone vocabulary
Tones are catalogued by lines-per-inch (LPI) density and percentage of black coverage. A '61-line 10%' tone has a fine dot pattern at low density, producing a pale grey. A '27.5-line 60%' tone has a coarse dot pattern at high density, producing a dark grey with visible texture. Manga assistants learn the catalogue numbers by heart, and a senior artist's tone selection on a single page can specify dozens of distinct sheets.
Gradient tones and special effects
Beyond plain-density tones, the screentone catalogue includes gradient tones (transitioning smoothly from light to dark), pattern tones (sparkles, raindrops, flowers, clouds, foliage), texture tones (wood grain, brick, fabric, leather), and effect tones (radial bursts, motion fields, fade-outs). Different genres draw on different parts of the catalogue: shōjo manga uses heavy gradient and sparkle tones; seinen manga uses denser plain tones and texture work.
Cutting and overlaying
Skilled tone work involves cutting sheets to precise shapes, layering tones for compound effects (gradient on top of pattern; pattern through cut-out mask), and selective scraping with a sharpened blade to lighten specific areas of an applied tone. The technique of kezuri (scraping) produces highlight and texture effects unavailable through any other method and is one of the most-cited markers of skilled traditional manga production.
Digital screentone
From the mid-2000s, most professional manga production has moved to digital tone work in software such as Celsys Clip Studio Paint (formerly ComicStudio). Digital tones simulate the physical sheets through bitmapped patterns at fixed densities and can be applied, masked, and erased non-destructively. The aesthetic result is close but not identical — printed traditional screentone produces moiré interference patterns that digital tones avoid, and many established manga readers report the digital look as subtly different.