Free halftone patterns: vector and PNG

How these halftones are built

A halftone prints a tone with dots of one colour: big dots read as dark, small dots as light. These patterns are made the way a printer’s screen is. Dot centres sit on a grid, usually turned 45 degrees because the eye notices a diagonal grid least, and each dot’s area follows the darkness wanted at that spot.

The largest dot stops just short of its neighbours, so the pattern is a field of separate circles with no merged blobs. That keeps it clean to recolour, to scale, to screen print as one ink, and to cut as a stencil.

Using a halftone pattern

For print and screens, place the SVG over or under your artwork and give it any colour: it is a single path, so one fill changes every dot. The PNG has a transparent background and drops straight onto a photo as an overlay.

For screen printing, lasers and cutters, mind the smallest dot. Each pattern’s page lists it at seven sizes. Dots under about half a millimetre will not hold on a screen or survive a blade, so scale the pattern up until the smallest dot clears that.

How to open the files

• Cricut Design Space: choose Upload, pick the SVG, and add it to the canvas. Set the width you want; the shape is already welded.
• Silhouette Studio: Designer Edition and above open the SVG. The free Basic Edition does not, so open the DXF instead.
• LightBurn, xTool Creative Space and Glowforge: import the SVG, then set the layer to cut, score or engrave.
• Inkscape, Illustrator and Affinity: open the SVG. It is a plain filled path, so you can recolour it, add a stroke or combine it with your own work.
• Printing or sublimation: use the PNG, which has a transparent background.

Each design page lists the file’s narrowest part at seven sizes, so you can tell whether it will survive at the size you plan to cut.

Questions