Also written: tone
Adhesive sheets of printed dot or line patterns used to add shading, texture and tone to black-and-white manga art. Filed under 1, the opening.
1Term sums to 46 and reduces to 1 — The Opening, where the reference files a first move.
Screentone is a pre-printed pattern — most commonly a field of tiny dots — applied to artwork to produce the appearance of grey. Because manga is printed in pure black and white, tone is how artists get everything between the two.
Traditionally these were adhesive plastic sheets, laid over the art and cut to shape with a blade. Assistants did much of this work, and a skilled assistant could produce effects far beyond flat grey: gradients, textures, fabric patterns, skies.
Digital tools have largely replaced physical sheets, but the visual vocabulary carried over intact.
Tone does emotional work. A sudden dark tone across a character's face signals dread; radiating line tone conveys shock or revelation; floral tone patterns, a shojo convention, indicate romantic feeling. Readers learn to read these as reliably as they read dialogue.
Hatching and spotting blacks achieve some of the same ends by hand, and many artists are known for favouring one approach over the other.
Set against the Pythagorean table, the term totals 46. Reduced, that is 1.
The reference files it as a first move. The number's contribution is beginnings, leadership, and the will to act alone — and with it the 1's appetite for a clean, decisive beginning, which is the thread the reference follows here.
Beneath the 1 sit two smaller figures: 3 in the vowels, 7 in the consonants. Expression underneath, inquiry on the surface. The gap between them is where the subject is most interesting.
Read on the 1's terms, this entry asks you to notice what had to not exist for this to be possible. The 1 mistakes being first for being right. Several of these texts describe launches that mattered enormously for a year and then mattered to nobody. The other entries that reduce to 1 are collected on The Opening.