How to Draw Word Balloons for Comics
By Kelly | August 27, 2007
Dialogue in comics is often expressed as ‘word balloons’ which float around the characters’ heads. Although the style of word balloons should depend on the comic itself, as well as the function of the balloon, there are a couple of factors to keep in mind. When making word balloons for your comic, the important factors are legibility and style.
Legibility
Legibility refers to the reader’s ability to decipher something; in this case, your word balloons. You should do everything in your power to make the reader’s job easier. If understanding your comic is difficult because of poor lettering or badly made word balloons, your readers will give up and read something else!
Contrast is key. Black text on white is the highest contrast, and used often in printed work, so it’s also common in comics. White text on black is much harder on the eye, and should be used in limited fashion.
In this example from Roza, I used black text on a slightly off-white background. The contrast is still pretty high, but the colored background blends with the painterly panels, which rarely contain white.
Lettering refers to the words and letters themselves. Whether you hand-letter your comic, or use a computer font, try and make the lettering as legible as possible.
Avoid loopy cursive fonts and novelty fonts for dialogue, those are best reserved for sound effects. Keep your lettering clean and consistent. Blambot provides a variety of comic fonts which are free for indie comics to use as they please. “Anime Ace” is popular for webcomics, and I use “Digital Strip” for my Good Cheese webcomic. Roza is lettered with a custom digital font, based on my own handwriting. Making your own font is difficult, and usually requires costly software, but a worthwhile endeavor if you’d like to give the lettering your personal flair.
Aside from sound effects, limit the number of fonts or lettering styles used for dialogue. Instead of using a different font for each character’s dialogue, use a different color or style for the balloon, use < > to indicate different languages, or come up with your own technique. Just don’t give the reader a headache from switching between more than 3 different fonts constantly.
Spacing between letters, words, and the edges of your word balloon is key to legibility. Make sure there’s enough empty space around the lettering that it can be read almost immediately. You need that buffer zone to separate the busy letters from the background of the comic.
Another legibility trick is to break up dialogue into separate word balloons. A particularly long dialogue can be broken into groupings of 2-3 sentences spread over many balloons and panels. That’ll give the reader more visual interest at the same time.
Style
Word balloons don’t have to be white ovals. develop a style that matches the content of your comic. A sketchy pencil comic would work better with sketchy balloons than with slick vector balloons. You can use color balloons in a color comic, but it wouldn’t work well for monochrome comics.
The word balloons for Roza are drawn loosely, and without any border. This is to match better the art style of the comic, and free the balloons from borders so they can be more spontaneous and expressive. They aren’t vectors, but are just painted on a layer above the artwork.
For Good Cheese, I used Flash to create word balloons. I imported the artwork from Photoshop, and used the Flash paintbrush tool to draw the word balloons on a layer above. There are a couple benefits to using a vector-based program like Flash : first, the balloons can be scaled or transformed as much as you like without any loss of quality. Second, using vectors gives you fine control over the curves, allowing for a more precise and slick-looking word balloon. An added benefit of using Flash is auto-smoothing of strokes, which converts a wobbly circle into a tidy round one. The border of the word balloon is black, but at about 80% opacity, it’s slightly transparent and blends a bit into the comic artwork.
Easy Word Balloons with Photoshop
There’s a quick and consistent method for adding word balloons in Photoshop, using layer styles.
First, place your lettering for each panel. You’ll want to keep each block of text on a separate layer so you can move them around easily.
Next, on a layer beneath the text, I use the ellipse tool (under the Shapes tool icon) to draw a nice roomy oval balloon to house my dialogue. It might take a couple tries to get a good ellipse.
Once I’ve got a good ellipse, I switch to the Line tool from the Shapes menu. The Line tool has advanced options that are hidden- click on the arrow to reveal advance options. The line tool can be used to make arrows. I’ve got mine set up so I can make an arrow that’s all point. It makes a very nice ‘tail’ for word balloons.
Now to give this balloon some style!
You can click the ‘f’ icon on the bottom of the layers panel, or choose Layer > Layer Styles from the top menu, to pull up the Styles dialogue. As you can see, lots of options here.
‘Stroke’ is a nice simple effect for adding a border. A 2 pixel black stroke looks pretty crisp and clean.
Try out lots of layer styles to find out which works best for your comic. The cool thing about styles is that they’re easy to reuse- you can save them to the styles palette, or copy/paste them onto any layer. This ensures your word balloons look consistent. Try using different styles for dialogue, thought balloons, and narrative text. Make a template file which has examples of all your word balloons styles, as well as the font settings you’ll use.
If Kirin says so, it must be true. 
Topics: Comic tutorials | 20 Comments »
20 Responses to “How to Draw Word Balloons for Comics”
Leave a Reply
 |
 
|
The Weatherly Guide to Drawing Animals |
 
|
Drawing the Head and Figure |
 
|
Cartoon Animation |
 
|
The Art of Animal Drawing |
drawfurry.com © Copyright 2007. No material from this site may be used without express permission.
August 13th, 2010 at 6:25 am
What application do you use to draw? Photoshop?
March 14th, 2010 at 9:44 pm
Heh, “making your own font is difficult and often requires costly programs…”
Pfft! If you have a tablet of any sort and an Internet connection (which you obviously DO have, since you’re reading this), download Microsoft’s “My Font Tool” program for XP Tablet-PCs. It says it’s for XP, but it works fine on anything newer as well (say, Windows 7).
November 27th, 2009 at 3:06 am
What FREE programs can I use? I can’t afford the Photoshop purchase, and I can’t get
everything done that I need to in 30 days.
Oh well, Gimp 2 always has a way.
November 14th, 2009 at 9:33 pm
LOL! “this tutorial is awesome” XD Thanks!
September 3rd, 2009 at 12:28 pm
If i wanna draw cartoon, what programs that can use to draw cartoon character and coloring?
Please send me the answer to my email.. Thanks
January 26th, 2009 at 12:06 pm
wooaa!!~~
good job !!
your toturial is good!!~~
it help me a lot man!~
yeah!!
December 27th, 2008 at 4:28 pm
it is very nice tutorial,thanks a lot
December 1st, 2008 at 6:09 pm
this tutorial is awesome
November 22nd, 2008 at 6:07 pm
Really awesome man, clear,well explained and using a lot of examples.
GOOD JOB man!!!
November 11th, 2008 at 8:20 pm
whats wromg with just using the speech bubble shape in photoshop?