24 sketched halftone backgrounds to start your next project

New poster design for the Babe City Rollers using some of the elements provided in this article. Two of the highlighter background and one of the pencil backgrounds were used.

Often when I start designing a poster I start by throwing down some grit and dirty elements for a backdrop to lay text and other elements on top of. This just seems easier to me than to just look at a white or solid color canvas to work from in Photoshop or Illustrator.

The technique I use regularly for this is to sketch/scribble with a highlighter or marker an area of color that is roughly the size of the poster I'm working on scaled way down to about 1x2 inches (most of my posters are 12x18 inches). Then I'll scan that sketch in at a high enough resolution, say 2400 DPI, so that when it's scaled up to meet the size of the poster all I should have to do is change the scanned file's DPI to 300 in Photoshop (image size with the resample turned off) and it should end up being about the size I need it to be.

I have created two sets of sketched background that you can download and use for your projects. They come in pencil and highlighter flavors.

Pencil Sketch Backgrounds

I made 15 pencil sketches that will roughly fit on a tabloid sheet of paper. These 15 were all originally scanned in at 2400 DPI and where scaled to 300 DPI with a 45° / 35 LPI halftone. I picked that LPI because it works well with my 156 mesh screen for screen printing.

Download the pencil sketch backgrounds (15 files, ~119mb .zip file)

Highlighter Sketch Backgrounds

Same as above, but these were made with a highlighter. These make interesting fills since when bringing the contrast way up on them, they become solid depending on how hard the highlighter was used on the original scan.

Download the highlighter sketch backgrounds (15 files, ~85mb .zip file)

If you can find a use for these we'd like to see your results! Post a link to your work in the comments.