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Stripes, strokes, and an abundance of dots — here’s the recipe for transforming neat illustrations into something bold and retro! Similar to modern-looking shaders, halftone brushes are the ultimate tool to create a retro ambiance and join the rows of creative high rollers.
Ask any artist, and they will confirm that accents are everything. By picking suitable drawing tools, you can evoke diverse emotions and onboard various visual styles. And halftone brushes are a great example of how you can achieve this! They help imitate old-school prints, comics, and newspaper pages, and take you to the ’70s or ’80s in a matter of seconds. Start your exciting journey by picking a halftone brush kit for Procreate, Illustrator, or Photoshop. We’ve got plenty of free and premium options, so all you have to do is check them out and choose the one — or plenty — that suits your project best.
Discover our selection of halftone brushes and, well, brush away!
Our Team’s Top Pick
Alternative Printmaker
Alternative Printmaker is a super helpful tool for Adobe Photoshop, inspired by independent magazine press and alternative music scenes. With these halftone brushes and layer-style effects, you can easily make DIY prints and gig posters. You only need basic Photoshop skills: cut out an object from a photo, place it into the Smart Object layer, and save!
Manga and Anime Procreate Brushes
Have you ever dreamt of creating a masterpiece worthy of Attack on Titan, Dororo, or Naruto? If you just lack tools for this adventurous task, here’s a set of Procreate brushes that’ll introduce you to the world of manga drawing.
The pack includes 6 brushes, repeating the most popular drawing supplies used for manga: liner, inker, brush pen, g-pen, graphite pencil, and marker. In addition, there are 6 screentone brushes for shades, halftones, and patterns.
Halftone Brushes + Bonus Patterns
Add depth and style to your designs and artworks with these textured halftone brushes and patterns! In this pack, you’ll find two types of brushes. Scatter halftones are great for a messy screen-tone look, while the line halftone Photoshop brushes are perfect for a neat finish.
Grim Shader Adobe Photoshop Brushes
The creator of these brushes saw their objective in supplying professionals with a variety of shaders that would cover multiple tasks. And they succeeded — the pack offers 10 halftone brushes applicable to various techniques, from flat art to complex 3D illustrations.
The best thing? These brushes work in five whole apps: Procreate, Photoshop, Illustrator, Affinity Designer, and Clip Studio Paint.
Comics Grunge Procreate Brushes
The most popular pattern brush samples from vintage comic books have been remastered to let you build stories of your own. These 12 grunge halftone brushes for iPad come with 4 worn paper textures you can use to keep up with the vintage comic book style. Each brush looks highly detailed, offering an authentic worn press effect for your designs.
Printing Press Procreate Brushes
Open your own printing office on iPad to create retro-styled illustrations with risograph Procreate brushes! Halftones, grain, and paper texture — it’s a perfect workshop for any artistic outburst. There are 18 halftone brushes in total for your prints, labels, and collages!
The Thrasher Collection
This is a pack of 17 high-quality bold and subtle textures and 8 Photoshop brushes that’ll compliment your grunge-style illustrations. These halftone brushes can be used in a variety of projects such as posters, photos, postcards, flyers, T-shirts, typography, and more so don’t limit yourself!
Mid-Century Mixed Media Collection
Mid-Century brush pack is instantly recognizable by its undulating inky outlines, irregular shapes, naturalistic textures, and endless design potential! The set includes loads of pencil doodles, halftones, and pastel shades. All brushes have been tested on a range of illustration styles to ensure the best functionality and aesthetics.
Procreate Stippling Brushes Kit
Add beautiful details to your images and graphic design pieces with a set of hand-mastered stippling brushes. Perfect for shading, adding textures, and halftone effects, they can be your go-to Procreate brushes for so many projects!
12 Free Halftone Texture Brushes for Photoshop
These Photoshop brushes are inspired by retro-style illustrations and let you paint halftone textures over the dark portions of your artwork to achieve the same effect.
This pack contains 12 halftone brushes for Photoshop with a range of dot patterns, including fine, light, heavy, and dark — each in 3 size variants and with pressure sensitivity for users who work with design apps on iPad and other tablets!
Retro Kitchen
Bring your drawing skills to a new level with the Retro Kitchen artistic tools, offering various halftone brushes and textures for Photoshop! Designed with good old vintage prints and their worn print effect in mind, the pack includes 25 Photoshop brushes and 75 texture options — endless possibilities here!
Dirty Halftones Brush Set & Video Tutorials
We are stoked to introduce this set of dirty halftone brushes! With these brushes, you can add textures and shadows smoothly. The helpful video tutorials include all the tips you need for making florals and quirky letters, as well as applying offset effects to your artwork.
12 Free Seamless Halftone Procreate Brushes
This bundle of 12 halftone brush Procreate tools is the perfect addition to your library. It’s all about halftones and all the cool effects you can do with them. The textures have been sampled out of real life! All halftone brushes respond to stylus pressure and can suit a great variety of projects from product packaging to company branding.
Revelation Halftones for Procreate
Add exquisite halftones to your work in seconds with this set of 48 Procreate halftone brushes. The pack offers perfectly balanced smooth-edged brushes and rough-edged versions so you can try out different looks and choose the best one for your artwork.
Free Grunge Photoshop Brushes Kit
It’s time to make your polished graphics a little rough! In this small pack, you’ll get one brush file with five Photoshop brushes. All of these halftone brush textures were handmade, digitalized, and individually edited for a mind-blowing retro effect.
Scatter Texture Brushes for Adobe Illustrator
Working with textures in Illustrator can be very sticky sometimes. Your computer is freezing, a graphic card is bleeding, and you are completely furious if the program stops working! But now you can create texture with these scatter brushes and halftones — it’s fast and simple to use.
Retro Comics Procreate Brushes
Scratches, lines, dots, and swirls — all the possible forms are at your creative service with 51 halftone brushes for Photoshop from this retro kit. You don’t need to learn any tricks: these halftones are simple and effective. But just in case, the pack includes a help file as a compliment. Create illustrations you’ll love!
Halftone Lines: Vintage Photoshop Brushes
Get yourself some creative backup with 21 line halftone brushes for Photoshop — experts in hatching and vintage effects! The collection can respond to any challenges like shading and texturing, but if 4 grunge paper textures come into play, the composition gets extra points for its “retro-ness”.
Halftone Photoshop Brushes
Shadow hatching usually takes quite a significant time, and if one finds this activity meditative, others can feel the time slipping through their fingers. As a solution, pick these free — and super helpful —halftone brushes for Photoshop that’ll add to your illustrations with every dot.
Patts Illustrator Brushes
Patts is a brush collection with 50 no-stretched brushes and 60 seamless patterns! All the elements are not only good-looking but time-saving and easy to adjust. With a few clicks, you can make simple but beautiful illustrations. The halftones can be helpful with any pattern — even the tiniest ink dots.
Halftone Grunge Photoshop Brushes
Get armed with these 12 grunge halftone brushes for Photoshop to upgrade favorite illustrations in a couple of minutes. It’s a piece of cake: install the brushes and apply the chosen halftones to your image. You can always rely on a help file included in the archive, no worries.
Procreate Pattern Brushes
This selection of Procreate brushes includes 28 seamless pattern brushes split into 3 categories: 14 halftone, screentone, and pattern brushes, 11 hand-drawn pattern brushes (crosshatching and parallel hatches), and 2 texture brushes (toner ink and stipple). There’s also a bonus inker brush that can be used to trace the outlines of your creative product.
Procreate Brushes Halftone
Halftone brushes are great for shading, adding texture to lettering, and creating pop art drawings. So here are another 30 brushes we can recommend — they are screen-oriented, so you can rotate your canvas to change your pattern direction. You can also stack and mix different halftones to create completely new effects!
Newspaper Halftone Photoshop Effect
It’s fascinating how any design product can get a completely new look when converted into its reprographic variant. You can now do it using letterpress halftone brushes for Photoshop: adjust the dot size with 8 available halftone press options to add or reduce details. If your picture needs a certain shade to stand out, use 10 color overlays, coming along with the provided halftone pattern effects.
Halftone Brushes & Bonus Patterns
If you look closely enough, halftones can be found in many forms of print media. The effect is achieved through overlaying various-sized dots of ink that build up color and tone. And now, with The Artifex Forge’s halftone brushes, you can “paint” with this effect to create beautiful drawings and illustrations!
Vintage Comic Book Halftone Brushes
All of these 51 halftone brushes took lots of time and effort to prepare, but the result justifies the means. And it surely doesn’t matter whether you’re a Marvel or DC comics fan. Lines, dot-shaped textures, tiny squares, and inky scratсhes — there’s an endless number of halftone brushes for you to try and combine.
Halftone Photoshop Brushes
Go creative with the tones of your graphics by leaving it all to the halftone dot pattern! Just take your favorite pieces and upgrade them in a couple of minutes. The process is simple: install these free halftone brushes in Photoshop and apply the chosen product to your image.
Dead Head Procreate Brush Set
Dead Head is a collection of brushes for inking, sketching, shaping, texturing, and halftones. There are a total of 32 brushes in the pack, offering a range of styles and uses. Along with the brushes, you’ll find an included selection of Procreate files, containing the original drawings with labels indicating which halftones have been used.
Halftone Procreate Brushes
Screen printing is one of the cool tricks of how you can make your designs retro and distressed. Default Procreate brushes don’t include this kind of effect, so this halftone brushes pack was created. With this little kit, you’ll achieve that grunge look for your artwork.
Outline Procreate Brushes
Simple yet powerful, the possibility to combine two brushes into one gives Procreate users so many options! This vast pack features 108 outline Procreate brushes, including halftones and stamps, which are perfect for digital designs, abstract art, and 3D lettering effects.
Halftone Photoshop Brushes
This set of halftones is a must-have for creating a vintage effect in your work. These are free halftone brushes of high-end quality, made carefully to bring the retro style to life and fill your designs with it. Only a basic knowledge of Photoshop is required.
Polka Dot Halftone Procreate Brushes
These 20 seamless pattern brushes can easily recreate the look of dotted washi tape or layers of wax paper. This is a straightforward halftone brush collection with no extra texture included, but it can also be used to express patterns on clothes, shadows, etc. Adjust the color and size of the brush to achieve different looks!
Black Magic Vector Halftone Brushes
Another pack of halftone brushes we would recommend! Here, 70 halftones come together to give your designs amazing dot textures. The Black Magic Halftone brush kit offers a wide range of brushes to make your work simple, effortless, and fun.
Halftone Textures Set
Touching the works of Guerillacraft always means re-discovering genuine retro motives, and this product is not an exception! Be prepared to turn the most contemporary design into 100% vintage artwork with just one click thanks to these 15 impressive halftone brushes.
With these brushes, you can add halftone shading with a single stroke. The seamless halftone swatches are also perfect for filling in the details, so this pack has everything covered. It works great with iPad Pro and the Wacom tablet!
Free Brush Sampler for Procreate
With these Procreate brushes, the future is so bright that you’ve got to wear shades! This pack of tools is free and offers 14 brushes at your disposal. Keep in mind that there are only 4 halftone dot brushes: the rest of the tools are devoted to streaks.
We hope that with this set you can easily sample different types of halftone brushes and decide which premium options you would like for your projects.
HalfTone – Photoshop Brushes
Inspired by old printing techniques and vintage illustrations, halftone brushes for Photoshop are versatile enough to suit any product so we highly recommend them! The patterns used in these halftone brushes are seamless and scalable.
You’ll be amazed by the number of brushes, too: there are 122 of them in total, including 18 dot patterns, 20 pressure-sensitive patterns, and so much more!
Halftone Press Photoshop Kit
These halftone brushes may be activated in one click while you’re purely concentrated on the design concept. Your only challenge will be to pick the most suitable halftone brush for your project: the pack offers 60 fabulous patterns to choose from. You might lose track of time while trying them all!
Vintage Soul Procreate Brushes
These 28 Procreate halftone brushes were developed to simulate the vintage style of the ’60s to ’80s, which can be used for posters, logos, print media, and more. The pack offers rough lines for contouring, halftones for creating amazing shadows, and distress patterns for adding a final touch to your illustrations.
Beat Tones: Beat Up Halftone Brushes
Whether adding gradated halftone shading to your work or continuous tones, the Beat Tones halftone brushes have you covered with a huge variety of halftone dot and line patterns made from authentic source materials in multiple screen angles. Beat Tones brushes are 100% seamless!
Manga Screentone Halftones Brushes
Hang on, manga lovers: this set of 53 stunning dot brushes will blow your mind! These halftone brushes offer a diverse range of textures and, the best thing is, they are compatible with both Photoshop and Procreate.
Free Adobe Illustrator Organic Halftone Patterns And Brushes
This set includes 10 high-quality organic halftone patterns and 5 halftone brushes to add texture to your vector illustrations. It focuses on fine liners and will provide you with patterns of various densities and seamless halftones you’ll definitely enjoy in your digital art.
Frequently Asked Questions
To create Photoshop halftone brushes, follow this step-by-step guide:
- Create a new file in Photoshop and name it Halftone Brush.
- Go to Brush Tool and choose any brush you like.
- Open the Filter menu and click Gaussian Blur in the Blur section.
- Choose Pixelate option in the Filter menu and pick Color Halftone.
- Save the halftone brush: open the Edit section, select Define Brush Preset, and type the name for your Photoshop brush.