Thanks to Jackpot777 for the idea. Illustrator halftone dots took me a while to figure out myself, so I'm sure these tips will help out lots a few artists out there!
Illustrator halftone dots are a bit more involved and resource intensive, so if you have a sub-great machine it might chug like goo up a straw.
Here we go:
1) Draw your shape
2) Give it a gradient fill (black to white, or grey to white. The lighter the black the less dense the dots will be)
3) Make sure there's no stroke
4) Top menu > Effect > Pixilate > Colour Halftone
5) Max Radius controls how big the dots will be, The screen angles can be left well along as we're dealing with just black. Say ok.
6) Top menu > Object > Expand Appearance
7) Top menu > Object > Live trace > Make and Expand
8) Double click the object to go into that object layer,
9) Press [a] for the Direct-Selection tool,
10) Select any white piece of the resultant object
11) Top menu > Select > Same > Fill colour
12) Press [delete]
13) Now you have a piece of halftone in illustrator that you can move and delete down the the last vector!
Illustrator halftone dots are a bit more involved and resource intensive, so if you have a sub-great machine it might chug like goo up a straw.
Here we go:
1) Draw your shape
2) Give it a gradient fill (black to white, or grey to white. The lighter the black the less dense the dots will be)
3) Make sure there's no stroke
4) Top menu > Effect > Pixilate > Colour Halftone
5) Max Radius controls how big the dots will be, The screen angles can be left well along as we're dealing with just black. Say ok.
6) Top menu > Object > Expand Appearance
7) Top menu > Object > Live trace > Make and Expand
8) Double click the object to go into that object layer,
9) Press [a] for the Direct-Selection tool,
10) Select any white piece of the resultant object
11) Top menu > Select > Same > Fill colour
12) Press [delete]
13) Now you have a piece of halftone in illustrator that you can move and delete down the the last vector!
kthx
1) Make my gradient on a new layer (Ex. Black to transparent over a layer of white)
2) Ctrl+Click on Layer icon to select it (Cmd+Click on Mac)
3) Switch to Quick Mask Mode (Q)
4) Filter>Pixelate>Color Halftone (Values I use are radius=4, 0, 0, 0, and 90 or 45, depending on angle of gradient.)
5) Disable Quick Mask Mode (Q)
6) On a New Layer, fill the selection with the color of the Gradient (In the example, Black)
7) De-select, and hide Gradient layer
It works out pretty well for me.
OEBlaze, I used to do that too, well still do - but I make most of my designs in Illustrator now, so porting halftone to Illustrator is irritating and slow :)
Put a white background under it on the same Layer. Let me know if that works...
Make your gradient much more obvious - like from black to white. And then try it again. Subtle gradients don't really work out so well.