A Ben Day artist on a lesser palette
by Bryce Martin
Our school newspaper was called the Bulldog Growl. I was somehow voted to assume duties as a class reporter for the Growl and our advisor, Mr. Paul Ferguson, designated me as the ben-day artist for the sheet.
On such occasions that my services were needed, a class runner would find me and I would be excused from whatever classroom I was partaking of knowledge to prepare me for life in the outside world some soon day, and I would join the crew in preparing a new issue. Mr. Ferguson would give me my art kit and tell me what holes he wanted me to fill with illustrations or cartoons. Other than specific details he ordered, such as doing a masthead overhaul, I was free to add my own cartoons or to design illustrations as I saw fit.
The ben-day tools included some small, square plastic plates. They had various sized, raised dot patterns on each. Once I made my drawing, I would decide what areas of it I wanted shaded. It was a technique to simulate the dot patterns used in the printing process for newspapers and magazines. If you looked at a printed photograph or even the artwork in a comic book, you would see it was all composed of tiny dots. The ben-day technique merely simulated that process. I would slide the chosen plate with the preferred dot pattern under the stencil carbon and reach for my burnisher. The burnisher looked like a probing tool a dentist might use. It had a rounded end that I rubbed over the drawing to get the dots to appear where I wanted them. I did the actual drawings with other similar tools.
My artwork was added in holes purposely left to help aid or illustrate a particular news or feature story or, as I mentioned, to fill up space, such as the use of a cartoon. The stories were typed with the ribbon removed so the bare keys could strike the stencil. With a typist doing that and me using my art tools it amounted to "cutting a stencil." I was a staff writer also, but all our typing for the stencil was done by a special typist. We turned our stories in for that typist. It took a special touch because, to offer just one example, if you typed too hard an o would not be an o but a solid circle. After the stencil was ready, someone ran copies from the mimeograph machine and others helped in assembling and stapling together the pages.
This "benday" word was so foreign to me and Mr. Ferguson spoke it so casually. I thought of India ink and of Egyptian words and contexts. After mind groping for clues and quickly exhausting those, I asked Mr. Ferguson what the name of the technique referred to. He said it was named for the man who invented it, a man named Ben Day. I thought he was kidding, of course, though I didn't know why. Some years later, I came to find out that indeed a Benjamin Day and his skill with dot patterns was the single driving force behind a popular new art movement.
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