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Jun 2021

I realize I made this tiny tutorial (to practice making tutorials) a while ago and I can't believe I never shared it here. (It's a gif, so if you don't see it moving, you might need to refresh?)

Obviously, there's a ton of ways to make bubbles, but my thinking when I do it this way is: it doesn't require any special tools outside of copy, pasting, flipping, and having layers-- which are all very basic features to just about ANY digital art program! So, it's a nice and easy way to start making bubbles by hand or if you don't have any advanced tools in whatever program you're using.

It also allows you to make the speech bubble more square than circle! Most blocks of text are going to be square-ish because that's the nature of text blocks, so this can allow you to more easily fit your dialogue.

So, hey! Maybe it'll help you out. Feel free to share the way you make your speech bubbles down below, if you like.

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    Jun '21
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    Jul '21
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Aw I like this tutorial--especially the cute crab. TBH It never occured to me before that you could just flip a few times and you're golden, haha.

Personally I use a customized shape I made in photoshop that's just a squarish oval. Fits all my needs, and then for the tail it's a layer that I draw with a normal brush. I put the circles and the tail layer all in one group, and then apply stroke to the group so everything is saved as one shape.

But also, when I'm drawing traditionally, I use a stencil that has a couple of speech bubble sizes in there, complete with tails. Stencils are wonderful, and you can use them on tablets, as well, if you have to do straight lines or circles and just need a quick analog tool.

If we're sharing techniques, this is the one I usually use when I want to have a more hand-drawn-feeling bubble.

I draw out the outline of the balloon with a chunky brush.

Then I fill it in.

Then I apply a Stroke Layer Effect to the entire layer.

The Stroke Layer Effect means that everything I draw on this layer will have that black outline on it now. So I add my tails with a smaller brush.

And I just draw all my balloons on this layer so they all have the same Stroke effect on them.

That's my method of getting a hand-draw-ish speech bubble without actually having to hand-draw all the bubbles and worry about the edges of the lines meeting up perfectly.

The way my speech bubbles look is pretty specific to my comic, but the way I make them is actually very simple. I draw my speech bubbles as opposed to using any tools that my drawing program provides.

The first step, that I didn't used to do before but prefer to do now is: Typing and formatting the text.

This is for ease of access because the shape of my speech bubbles can be pretty awkward. When I didn't do this first, I'd have to fit the text to the speech bubbles and it didn't always look good.

Next is sketching the bubble:

I usually sketch it along with whatever's going to be on the page.

Then, lines and filling in the whites. And I do this all above the panel layers because I don't mind if the bubbles lie outside the panels.

I also don't wait until the end of making a page to make my bubbles, like after all of the coloring anf shading is done. I usually finish them with the line art.

This seems cool (and quite complex) but your images have been cropped here on the forums and are a little tough to see, and your hand writing is REALLY tough to read, you might wanna consider re-working this a little bit for folks so they can more easily understand what you're showing off. :smiley: Thanks for sharing!

if you click on the image and click to zoom in, you can see them a lot better!

what version of clip studio are you using? it looks a lot different from mine!

Why have I not realised this myself before :sweat_smile::+1:

I draw mine by hand, but just keep hitting undo until my hand decides to draw a decent shaped bubble.

I’ll remember this trick. :grin:

I’ll be honest I hardly ever think about my speech balloons I think I might spend less than a minute on them per page. :sob:

Yes, I am aware! XD I was mostly saying that for ease of access for folks checking out the form via mobile and such. (And again, like I said to someone else who replied, it still doesn't make the text any easier to read;; Oopsie!)

Like, it's fine, just wanted to mention in case you were gonna share on other sites, etc.

Uh oh! That's a habit to break then, imo! It's okay if your speech bubbles don't take a long time to draw, but you should DEF think about their placement as part of the art and readability of your story. They are the number 1 thing your readers interact with, and thusly need to be treated as one of the most important elements, or as a character of their own.

Once I started seriously making sure my bubbles worked right, was when I also started seeing a huge increase in readers and good feedback. It helps a lot!!!

I don’t have any trouble with placement I just work traditionally so I think its just a little bit faster for me to make my speech balloons. No publisher or editor I’ve ever worked with has given me any grief about em (yet!).

I’ve only ever gotten positive comments about my speech balloons if anything at all! Though, I definitely prefer people don’t think about em at all as I think that’s a good sign. “Good design is invisible” or whatever!

I think its I’ve just been doing it for so long everyday for the past decade that its not something I think toooo much about anymore tbh!!