# Need some minimum allowable area of print for design



## Redneck Jedi (Dec 24, 2014)

Hi everybody!
I'm not a printer, I am an artist and graphic designer (and musician among other things) - I designed a cool picture to print on vinyl and put on the bass drum of the band I'm in, and everybody likes it so much we want to put it on a shirt.
The problem is, if we print it color as is, it will take a ****ton of spot colors, so I wanted to know if it would be possible to print in a stippled single color.
This way, I can reduce the colors to 16 or 20, and then just increase the density of stippling to produce a grayscale (or other monochrome).
My concern is how well the design will transfer using tiny dots- so I wanted to find out what most people here would recommend as being the smallest sized dot I could successfully use?
I've seen people mention 4 point fonts as a minimum comfortable size - so, would that mean a 4 pt diameter dot would be the minimum? If that assumption is correct, if the screen is 20x24 OD with 305 mesh, would it be possible to use a smaller dot?
Seems like if one point is .0138r (1/72) inches, and the mesh spacing is somewhere around .0033 across - I should be able to get smaller than 4 pt.
Recommendations?
-Red


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## TYGERON (Apr 26, 2009)

You can take the color image as is and convert it to a halftone. The different colors will come out as varying densities of dots depending on the tonal variations created. Just like a Black and White photo in a newspaper.
Some adjusting will likely be needed and maybe number of colors reduced to get contrast between tones.
Dot size/line count/frequency depends on how much detail you need or want to achieve and even though you'll be printing a halftone (or dithered pattern etc)
305 mesh isn't automatically the go-to count. And the multiply by 4 or 5 to get the mesh count is a rule-of-thumb suggestion that's been around a long time but not etched in stone.

So, there are a lot of contributing factors to consider.

Can you post a pic?


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## Redneck Jedi (Dec 24, 2014)

This is a mockup of the design we are going for - this is copyrighted by someone else, so we can't use this one, and we have a photoshoot coming up to use as reference for the actual design, but this will give a good idea of what we've got.

I'm not familiar with how to create halftones - I was just creating stipple patterns in AI and using those, but I don't like how the pattern stays stationary even when the object gets moved. If you know where to find a good tutorial on halftones, I'd appreciate that.
I think we're looking at 11x17 as the printed area, and we want to get as much detail as possible without it looking muddled, so any advice on screen selection and ink ratios would be greatly appreciated.
[media]http://i1049.photobucket.com/albums/s397/cwatsondesign/pinupmodel.png[/media]
[media]http://i1049.photobucket.com/albums/s397/cwatsondesign/pinupmodel2color.png[/media]

Thanks very much!


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## Redneck Jedi (Dec 24, 2014)




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