Speech bubbles & lettering

Fysh

I always dread getting to the stage of a comic where I'm putting in the dialogue and text, because it usually means trouble. Plenty of times I've found that the dialogue I wanted to use can't fit in the panel unless I obscure everything I've drawn; while this is a good form of enforced editing to trim down any bits of text to the barest minimum that's required for the page to work, it's also a real pain. But that's only the start of my troubles.

There's the matter of what font to use - not as simple as you might think, given the whole Ban Comic Sans aspect - and the choice of what text shapes to use.

I'm slowly getting more comfortable with the font issue, by dint of having spent hours of my life looking around for legitimately free fonts. However, I'm still working on a very basic understanding of what does or does not work when it comes to fonts and typefaces.

Text shapes are actually the thing I dread most when making comics. To this day I've never found a way of inserting the damn things that works for me. I may be missing something basic, but I'm stumped as to what it might be. I use Photoshop Elements 5.0 for most things. In this context, I have 3 choices that may work:

1) Freehand: This is my current preference - I create a new layer that sits on top of all artwork layers but below any text layers. I draw in all my shape outlines freehand. Using the Magic Wand, I select all the space outside my shape outlines, expand the selection by 2 pixels, and then invert it. This leaves me with a selection containing all my shape outlines. I then set either the brush or the fill tool to "Behind" with White and fill every outline. Assuming I've bothered getting the freehand bits reasonably right, I get an end result I'm happy with.

2) Assisted Freehand: The name's not exactly right but it's the closest I can get. This is basically drawing rounded-rectangle outlines by using the shift+brush option to draw the straight lines, and adding the corners by hand. Once the outlines are in place I fill them using the same process described in 1). It works, but I don't much like rounded-rectangle speech bubbles, they look too much like caption boxes and don't mesh into the panel very well IMO.

3) Speech Shapes tool: When I first started using Photoshop Elements I was delighted to find that it, unlike the ancient (and dodgy ) version of Photoshop I had been using previously, had a shapes tool for inserting speech bubbles. But it doesn't seem to be very good. While it offers a range of bubble shapes, I cant figure out how to get them to the size I want without scaling proportionally (which is a pain, because I'm usually overly wordy in my dialogue and thus need comparatively large speech bubbles). I also can't find a simple way of getting a white speech bubble with a black outline - I'd figured that I could add an outer glow or dropped shadow to the shape through a layer effect, but as far as I can tell PSe doesn't have layer effects.

So, having waffled this far I'm wondering what other people do for speech shapes and what sites & resources might be useful for lettering tips & advice. I know ztoical mentioned some site ages ago where you could have a font of your own handwriting created - I'm liking the idea more and more these days as I've experimented with hand-lettering comics and while I like the result it's a lot more work than I thought and tends to lead to hand-cramp...

Patrick Brown

I think there are a lot of artists who look at the way pro comics have one guy doing the drawing and another guy doing the lettering, and think of drawing and lettering as two separate things, but really they're not. Lettering is part of the process of making comics, and you've got to be thinking of where the lettering will go and how much space it'll take up as you're drawing.

I letter on the computer these days, but I started out hand-lettering. It is more time-consuming, and I never really got the hang of drawing speech balloons as smoothly as I would have liked, but on the other hand it taught me to compose the images with the lettering in mind. One some of my early stuff (particularly Tamara Knight) I laid out all the pages, ruled out lettering guides, and lettered and drew all the balloons and caption boxes before I did any real drawing at all.

On the early Ulster Cycle pages I roughed the lettering in as I drew, before deleting, redrafting and re-lettering it digitally after scanning. These days I just leave spaces that look big enough to accommodate the dialogue I'll need, trusting to experience that it'll be the right size.