Ink Colors used in T206

[steve B]

Originally Posted by sirraffles

Yes, on the T206 series you are correct about the dot pattern. Most of it was not done by hand stippling but through a halftone. I could be wrong but I've looked at a fair number of the T206 cards magnified and it seems that some of the portraits had the halftone enhanced with some hand stippling. The backgrounds often seem to have some stippling too, especially in the skies. Would you agree?

If there was hand stippling plus halftones...I don't think that there were very many things printed like that. It is like a snapshot in time.

Some of the backgrounds are a combination of screened and solid colors. Probably to get the color just right.

And some of the brown halftone areas do look enhanced, often with an outline to strengthen the contrast between colors like a dark uniform and a dark background. Like on Absteins shoulder at the right of the card. That one isn't stippled, so it was probably drawn onto the original art as a solid line.

Enhancing the screened pattern manually would be possible, but lots of work for a production shop. But there are still lots of aspects to how ALC worked that are hard to be sure of.

I know a guy who repaired a damaged halftone for the shop he worked for, a 300dpi image that had been cut in half by mistake with the original no longer available. He said it took about 3 days to line up and splice the two pieces and fill gaps.
I spent a nice couple days fixing plate masks that had been photographed when the camera room was dusty. They'd have redone the whole thing, but time was short and the cost would have taken too much out of the profit. I was much cheaper

Steve B