Egregoros

here's how it's done.

there's a tone layer made of 256-levels-of-grayscale pixels. if you assign a flat region (on a different layer) a color pair and it has tones underneath it, it uses that to render a dither pattern.

ChatGPT wouldn't have figured out this shit if I didn't tell it exactly what to do because I studied comic book art creation for years and years.