Benjamin Henry Day, Jr and Ben-Day Dots

Benjamin Henry Day, Jr. (1838-1916) was an illustrator and printer, best known for his invention of Ben-Day dots.

Day was the son of Benjamin Day, an American newspaper publisher best known founding the New York Sun, the first penny press newspaper in the United States, in 1833.

An example of Ben-Day dots (Benjamin Henry Day never actually worked on the Snoopy cartoons)

The Ben-Day dots printing process is similar to pointillism.  Depending on the effect, colour and optical illusion needed, small coloured dots are placed together, widely spaced or overlapping.

For example red dots widely spaced create pink whereas closely spaced red dots look like a deep red.

Pulp comic books of the 1950's and 1960's used Ben-Day dots in the four process colours (cyan, magenta, yellow and black) to cheaply create shading and secondary colours such as green, orange and flesh colours.

Ben-Day dots are always of equal size and distribution in a specific area.  To put the dots into a drawing, the artist would buy the sheets from a stationary shop.  Sheets were available in various size and distribution, which gave the artist a choice of what tones that wanted to use.

Ben-Day dots were considered to be the signature of the American artist Roy Lichtenstein, who enlarged and exaggerated them in many of his paintings and sculptures.

Many other artists still use them today.  The overlay sheets are still used by  print and by comic artists today.

A Brief Introduction to Roy Lichtenstein

Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997) was one of pop art's most inspired and successful creators.  His first piece of this style was in 1961 when he painted Look Mickey:

After this he painted a range of pieces based on comic strips and newspaper ads, it was through these that he developed his signature style.

Keds (1961)

Popeye (1961)

A study of Goldfish Bowl and Painting of a Golf Ball (1972)

His drawings span two decades and range in date from 1973 to 1992.  They cover still life to abstraction, architecture to surrealism, German expressionism to landscape and women to interiors.

Interior with Mobile (1992)

Lichtenstein's style was mainly graphic and he relied on his drawing skills.

He used an opaque projector to cast the image of a drawing onto canvas, and then that image would then be the start of the painting.

Unlike the cool and mechanical look of the paintings, there is a real warmth in his drawings.

Lichtenstein stated that: "the drawings show the real work...[and] are the basis of my art."  "everything is in the drawings."

Without a good starting point you cannot hope to come up with a masterpiece.  So practice, be creative and maybe you one day you can also become a famous artist.

Torpedo LOS (1963)

Hopeless (1963)