immersing a substrate, selected from the group consisting of a metal, a metal oxide, a semiconductor, a metal alloy, a semiconductor alloy, a polymer, an organic solid and a combination thereof, into a surface derivatizing liquid solution of an organic molecular species, said organic molecular species having reactive functional head groups and tail groups;

said substrate being immersed in contact with said liquid solution of said organic molecular species at a temperature and for a time period sufficient to allow said functional head group to chemically react with and chemically bind to and pack onto a surface of said substrate and interact with adjacent molecules to form a single chemical entity which is a relatively ordered molecular monolayer that is chemically bound to said substrate forming a self-assembled mono-molecular layer;

said tail group provides means for chemical differentiation of patterned and unpatterned regions of a coated surface;

withdrawing said substrate containing said self-assembled mono-molecular layer thereon and placing a mask having one or more transparent and opaque regions onto a top surface of said self-assembled mono-molecular layer on said substrate;

exposing said self-assembled molecular layer to radiation, modulated spatially in intensity in regions defined by said one or more of said regions in said mask transparent to radiation with the result that said self-assembled mono-molecular layer absorbs incident radiation in said transparent regions. thereby only modifying/removing said self-assembled mono-molecular layer beneath said transparent regions of said mask;

producing a chemically differentiated surface between patterned and unpatterned regions of said substrate surface, so that after modification, said self-assembled mono-molecular layer has a discontinuous pattern;

immersing said substrate containing said self-assembled mono-molecular layer having said discontinuous pattern into a liquid dipping solution of a thin film material for a time sufficient to allow a thin film to be physically adsorbed to said substrate forming a thin film comprising a plurality of layers of molecules and/or atoms and said thin film is not a monolayer;

removing said substrate from said liquid dipping solution to obtain a patterned article having thin film material only in certain regions thus forming a patterned thin film on said substrate surface; and

wherein after said immersion treatment, said patterned thin film having been formed only on a surface of said substrate is not coated with said self assembled monolayer and the original self-assembled monomolecular layer has a discontinuous pattern;

wherein because said patterned thin film is formed only on said surface of said substrate not coated with said self-assembled monolayer, there is no need for further post-deposition processing.