line art
Artwork to be reproduced with one solid color, contrasted with artwork having tone or shading (halftones), or full color (color separations).
line art: single-color artwork with hard edges, no tones
Line art is any image composed entirely of solid lines, shapes, and areas with no gradation of tone or shading. In industrial printing, it reproduces as pure black on white (or the chosen solid color on substrate), with no intermediate grays, screens, or halftone dots. This makes it the simplest and most economical artwork to prepare for offset lithography, letterpress, flexography, or digital printing, since it requires no color separation or screen rulings.
The technical distinction matters because line art avoids the complications of halftone reproduction. A halftone image requires a screen pattern, usually at 150 to 300 lines per inch depending on paper stock and press type, to simulate continuous tone through dot size variation. Line art needs none of this. A black pen drawing, a mechanical ink line, or a simple two-color design all count as line art. The artwork either prints or it does not; there is no mid-tone area to capture or lose.
Common sources of line art in production include technical drawings, schematics, typography, logos, and woodcut or linocut originals. Electronically, line art is often stored in vector formats where curves are described mathematically, rather than rasterized at a fixed resolution. This scalability is one reason line art remains preferred for labels, diagrams, and corporate graphics across industries.
Practical limits and workflow
Line art still demands clear, high-contrast originals. Pencil sketches, faint blue guidelines, or photographs will not separate cleanly during camera work or digital scanning; they will either disappear entirely or create muddy, broken lines. Artwork must be opaque and definite. In traditional striping for offset, an artist would paste photostat or ink elements directly onto a mechanical board; in digital workflows, the file must be submitted as true black and white, not merely dark gray.
The term remains standard in printing estimating and job specification, even though the distinction between line art and halftone has blurred in modern digital design. Desktop software makes it tempting to treat all images as continuous-tone. However, print buyers still invoke line art because the cost and quality difference between single-color line reproduction and screened or separated color reproduction is substantial, and the choice shapes press setup, film cost, and proof cycles.