Tips on typesetting and word balloons

avalonmao 2016-08-01 05:39:39 UTC #21

I try not to use outlines nowadays and use more or less a standard font. I try not to make my words smaller than 12pt!

Chuu 2016-08-01 06:03:28 UTC #22

You are seriously my hero, Annalandin! I think this link really helped me immensely! Now I've found a font for my series! ;o;//

jennula 2016-08-01 06:43:58 UTC #23

I'm using two font sizes - one standard size and a smaller one (1-2 pt smaller) for muttering or background conversations. I wasn't really doing this before SPEJS though, so my comics had quite a font-size party perviously XD

I was really horrible with not planning in speech bubbles until maybe a year or so ago. Nowadays I'm trying to plan in dialogue in the thumbnails, and after I've scanned my thumbnails and arranging them for making a finer sketch, I usually add the text and speech bubbles so I know if I need to re-arrange characters and such. I would really recommend doing this so you have a general idea of where your speech bubbles will be and so on, it'll help you a lot in the end =)

As for making speech bubbles, I'm using the sppech bubble tool in Clip Studio actually ^^; I think it works just fine, and looks about the same, or even a bit better, than my previous approaches =)

Shanny8 2016-08-01 11:52:37 UTC #24

@jennula I would eventually like to make Clip Studio my "all in one" program, but right now there are things that I do with other programs that I cant do well with Clip Studio right now. Lettering isnt one of things- coz I havent tried lettering with Clip Studio, but I'll try it eventually. If it can do a lot of the things that Illustrator does, then I'll be good with it.

jennula 2016-08-01 12:02:03 UTC #25

I used mainly Photoshop for making comics, but when I switched from Mac to Windows, I couldn't use the student/teacher license I bought for my Mac computer on my Windows computer (but Clip studio worked regardless of system), so I decided to try and ditch Photoshop all in favour of Clip Studio =) I'm not using vectors for anything (well the speech bubbles are vector, but it's kind of low-level stuff I guess) though, so for me the transfer went pretty smoothly. But yeah, some things took me a while to figure out how to do, I guess ^^;

NickRowler 2016-08-03 04:32:08 UTC #26

My word bubbles are more square-ish because I feel like it fits the text better. I draw the panel instead of using straight line tools, I feel like the flow better with the comic. I usually put the panels at the top of the frame or bottom of the frame, right against the edges. I do plan out where the bubbles will be before I start the linework.

My text is usually the same size but if I don't have enough space then I make the text slightly smaller. I will use larger text if someone is yelling or or if I feel like the text looks too small within the bubble.

The only tip I can really give is...to draw the horizontal lines of the bubbles, I turn the canvas 90 degrees. I also recently started turning on the grid (no snap) as a guide so that the lines are not crooked.