Any tips and tutorials on balancing panel art and text?

[aqua03]

Hello again, I've finally started work on the first episode of DRGN and I've noticed I have a bit of difficulty with balancing the panel art with my text. Either my art is good, but there's no room for text. Or my text is awkwardly placed and there's not enough room for my art. If anyone has any good tips and tutorials on panel and page composition, I'd love to hear them!

Thanks! You guys are always such a great help!

[Shanny8]

A top 5 rule when creating comics- leave space for lettering.

When you layout/design a page, always keep in mind that you need to add lettering to the art. Dont do a 20 panel page- and have a boatload of script; it's not gonna work. When I write/script each chapter/page of my comic I always have an idea of how I wanna do the page, and take lettering into the equation as well. Maybe you should do thumbnails(mini layouts of how you want your page to flow before doing the actual page) to study & figure out if you need to change up some stuff to allow for lettering.

Another rule: not every panel has to have backgrounds. A guideline that I go by- if I have more than 4 panels, then I do a 60/40 split or a 70/30 split; 60-70% of the page will have some background art- the other 40-30% won't(also, space the non-background scenes to create a balance on the page). Facial close ups- I mostly dont do backgrounds, where as further away shots- I will. I'm 50/50 with action scenes and backgrounds- depends on the shot, and the particulars surrounding the dynamic.

[aqua03]

Thanks. That really helps me a lot. Also, should I put the text in first, or a rough sketch?

[Shanny8]

@aqua03 I would suggest so. Lightly rough out the areas where you want to have your word balloons at- that way once you finish the art, you have the space that you need to do the lettering.

[SleepingPoppy]

It sounds like a planning stage problem. Definitely take the time to do thumbs of your pages. It doesn't have to be detailed, just enough that you can see how elements are going to fit together before you draw the actual page(s).

Linking to Nitty Gritty Tips series, as it's SUPER helpful and relevant

Hey Welcome back to our second installment of NGT, where we share weird advice that's too small and specific to bring up in most other situations This week we're talking about Panel Structure! How do you decide what panels go where? Are some panels better than others for different tasks? Can you form a narrative with just a handful of boxes??? I dunno but we're gonna find out! My tip for this week is that if you use a weird panel layout (Like this for example) You can reuse the structure ag…

Hey everyone, welcome back to another week of NGT, where we share weird advice that's too small and specific to bring up in most other situations! This week's topic comes from a suggestion by @yondoloki! This week we're talking about Movement, Lines of Action, and Flow! How do we guide a reader's eye through a page? What can we do to make that page feel alive? What makes a dynamic pose? How can we use flow to change how our audience engages with our work? This week I wanna share this p…

Hey so there are a lot of things about comics that are really specific tiny pieces of advice that don't get shared a lot and most people just have to figure out on their own, so I wanna start doing threads where we share that type of advice! This time lets share tips about speech bubbles! My nitty-gritty-tip is to make sure that the earlier a bubble is supposed to be read, the higher it needs to be on the page. Heres a quick example: [image] I'm excited to see the tips that everyone el…

[Rhonder]

Regarding thumbnailing/story boarding, I can't recommend it enough it makes the process of actually putting pencil (or tablet pen) to paper/tablet so much easier since you know the rough emotions each character has, their pose, and most importantly that the text will fit well. I'm currently working on my first project which is a "short" one-shot, so I decided to rough out the whole thing before I started. Here's an example of one of my spreads:

Like roughing out a page at this level of quality doesn't take too long, and if you add the text at this stage, you can easily see if it'll actually fit or not. If the text does fit, awesome! That panel is good to go. If it doesn't, you should erase and redraw (or use the marquee tool or equivalent in whatever program you use, if digital) the stick figures around until the text and pictures can live together in harmony xD Then after that's worked out, you can move on to the much nicer actual page/panels. And like even as you're doing the real page, you can still nudge things around depending on how the actual art looks and stuff, but by doing this kind of prep work up front you can feel fairly confident it'll jive. That page on the right in my example is by far the wordiest page in the whole comic, but I managed to fit everything in the final version I finished last week :]

[aqua03]

Neat. Thank you all for the wonderful advice! I've never really thought much about thumb nailing before, but I should definitely give it a shot now!

[shazzbaa]

Here's what my text placing looks like!

I start with the really tiny one to like.... just layout how the panels will go, and then I blow that up to see how those proportions translate to the actual size of the page, and try typing text in at that stage to make sure it all fits. Then I'll adjust things -- you might be able to see here that I shifted some of the panels to be bigger or smaller based on how much text needed to fit in them; sometimes a scene will become more or less zoomed out or I'll move the characters to a different part of the panel so that the balloons are just covering up some unimportant background.

And then the last one is the actual roughs for the page!

[mariusthered]

personally i put the text in place first, and try never to go over 20 words in a bubble (i put these on the top layer so i can move them around while sketching, this way the bubbles are in place and not covering figures before the inking begins.

[aqua03]

Huh, I never thought about limiting the amount of words in a bubble. That's a pretty good idea! I was thinking of seeing if I could reduce my word count seeing as my comic could get kind of wordy at times.

[Ironscarf]

My rough pencils have balloons sketched in, but that's mostly guesswork. The first thing I do is scan in the rough pencils, then take a copy of that to the vector program I use for lettering - Inkscape (people who can afford it use Illustrator!). Creating the dialogue, captions and sound effects before doing any more drawing means I can move the art around to fit if I need to. As a rule I'd say it's better to sacrifice some of the art than have crowded looking text, or confusing flow from one balloon to the next. Getting that sorted up front saves time and tears, instead of needing to cut some drawing that you worked on for ages.