Comic Book Lettering Tutorial

[Self-Modifier]

Hey, everybody! I just found this nifty article about how to letter comics, written by a professional letterer. I thought some of the dio-authors around here might be interested, as I think this guy makes a lot of good points:

http://blambot.com/grammar.shtml

I am in special agreement with his note about balloon tails! I can't begin to mention how often you see, in both dios and fan-made comics, a word balloon's tail stretching aaalllll the way to the speakers lips. It's not necessary and it's kind of distracting!

(As a side note, and not to sound like I'm bragging or anything, but I was pleased to notice that in my dio-stories, I instinctively followed pretty much every single one of these rules without even knowing about them! I guess a lifetime of reading, studying, breathing, and living comic books paid off in some small way...!)

[Sonneilon]

Ok... I tend to do all that in general but anybody's who has read comics long enough would do this naturally. HOWEVER... The guy got me on one point. I tend to extend the tails to the speaker's mouth. I've found that sometimes in people's dios, they aren't long enough and I can't figure out who is speaking.

2 other points he doesn't cover.

1. Text size. He speaks of small text, big balloon in terms of someone being quiet. But some people tend to use a text that is too big for their pics and it takes away from the action of the shot.

2. Text vs balloon. I'll admit, one of my biggest fights is to fill the word balloon up properly. The CBC was horrible in that I couldn't get the dialogue to fit well. There was always a lot of border space and a lot of people questioned me on that. Now, I may have had a crappy version of CBC (ie; mine wouldn't allow to save or change to jpg) that allows the text fill up the balloon better.



Solutions:

1. View the image at 100% and decide what your eye sees best and what you can ASSUME others people can see. Of course, people have different resolutions on their screens so that could be a problem too.

2. I believe it was Rambo or ToneGuns that showed that one could BUILD their own word balloons. It's still a crap shoot of using the circle and line tools to make the balloon work with the text. Sure, you can say, why don't you just do the text and then layer the circle over? Uh, because a regular balloon has white insides and if you layer it over text, you just took out the text. MAYBE you can move the layers around, but I've never actually tried that. Uh... Hmmmmmmm, time to try it!



Good topic, SelfMod

[troopsofdoom]

[QUOTE=Sonneilon]2. I believe it was Rambo or ToneGuns that showed that one could BUILD their own word balloons. It's still a crap shoot of using the circle and line tools to make the balloon work with the text. Sure, you can say, why don't you just do the text and then layer the circle over? Uh, because a regular balloon has white insides and if you layer it over text, you just took out the text. MAYBE you can move the layers around, but I've never actually tried that. Uh... Hmmmmmmm, time to try it![/QUOTE]
Layers are the way to go. I type out my dialogue first, adjust the text box and add returns to get it in the shape I want, then on a separate layer I draw the balloon with a circle tool or freehand. I prefer freehand, it makes less white space and doesn't look so plain.

It's easier to adapt the balloon to the text than the other way around. The dialogue is more important than the balloons anyway, so it's better to make compromises with the balloons.

I do a lot of comic style lettering and this seems like the simplest and fastest way I can think of. :D