The Benday method introduced shading and tinting without the use of the halftone process. Just add a screen of dots (or lines) to you line art, and you can mimic color gradation. We most of us have come across its use in comic books, and Roy Lichtenstein was a big user. A Benday of magenta dots will appear pink — maybe from a distance or through half-closed eyes. The difference between a halftone dot and a Benday dot is that the halftone dot will vary in size depending on the strength of the color detected by the process camera, whereas a Benday dot is always the same size (unless hand-drawn, as they are above). Avoiding the use of halftones meant that shaded illustrations could be printed on the same paper as the text, thus avoiding the expense of a halftone insert.

The Benday process is so obvious and apparently intuitive that it’s a bit of a surprise to discover that it had to be invented. This took place in 1879 when Benjamin Henry Day Jr. came up with the method. Ben Day was the son of Benjamin Henry Day, publisher of The New York Sun. As well as working as a printer Ben Day Jr. was an illustrator. Here’s one of his illustrations for Mark Twain’s A Tramp Abroad.

You can see the Bendays in the background shading — for example the lady’s shawl on the right.

In my earlier days Bendays were added to artwork by use of a Lettraset sheet of rub-off dots.