Now it's time to take our page and turn it from just a piece of art into the story telling
medium known as comics.
We're going to accomplish this by adding our word balloons.
Now, if you listened to me in an earlier video and you left some space for this in your thumb
nail this is going to be a really simple present for you.
There will be plenty of room to layout all the balloons that you're going to need to
use for all the dialogues that you've written for your page.
Now there're bunch of different types of word balloons you don't have to take it literally
and you certainly don't have to use the most common kinds found in comics.
Depending on your style you might want to have border less ones, you might want to have
square ones, you might want to have once that are see through or just a little bit opaque.
It doesn't matter, whatever you think it's going to fit best with the look of your book
and the style of your story.
When you're lettering, it's best to start with the text so to know what size and shape
to make your balloon afterwards.
So let's go ahead and try that out, go down and select your text tool and open up the
sub-tool so you can have a look and see your options.
Alright right now it's set to text and we're going to go down here and check it our text
options.
Now before we get to started with actually typing let's take second to talk about fonts.
Unfortunately you're going to be limited by whatever selection of fonts are already in
your computer and most standard computer fonts aren't going to be the best for lettering
a comic.
What you're going to want to do is go to a like Blambot for example and download a font
that's already been created for the specific purpose of lettering comics.
I like Blambot because the have a ton of really well made free and premium fonts, I have gone
ahead and downloaded the font, Enemy Ace is 2.0 BB from Blambot, it's a free font I think
it looks great and it's going to fit really well with the tone of this comic.
So I'm going to go ahead and select that and then I'm going to start setting up the appropriate
size to make sure it looks right on the page.
About 14 is what I usually like to letter up, so we are going to leave it there and
see what that looks like.
What you do is take the cursor and tap it on your screen and it's going to give you
a blinking cursor where you can start your text.
Okay I think that size looks pretty good so I think we are pretty safe.
Now one what you are going to want to do is to make sure that your justify is done at
the center of the line because your text is probably going in to be going into circularish
shaped balloon.
If it's going to be a different shape, you know what, I would still just leave it on
the center.
If you doing caption, that's a different story I would justify it for the left but for the
sake of balloons or dialogue let's just go ahead and justify it down the center so that
it spreads out in an even and pleasing manner.
Now that we've got that all set up and we have our blinking cursor, let's go ahead and
type some dialogue.
Remember this probably going in a circular shape, so try and keep it in a similar shape
while you are typing out your sentences and make it look balanced and even so it feels
the balloon properly.
Alright, that's an example of text that's been pretty well balanced.
I think it's going to fit into the balloon pretty well of the top and bottom sentences
match pretty well and the middle sentences match pretty well as well, so it kind of creates
an oval shape on it's own.
It's a little bit closer to her head though so let's pick it up with the move tool.
Skewed it up just a tiny bit, but we have a little more room and the balloon is not
going to be crowding her head.
Alright.
Now add a balloon back to this text.
Go back to your text tool, and then you have all these options for creating balloons.
I like to use [xx] with myself so I'm going to select that.
Now you are going to want to make sure that your brush size if you want to boarder on
this, if enough, the boarder is actually going to show up.
I have set to 11, I think that looks pretty good, again, your personal preference.
You can set up whatever you like.
There are also some options here, where if you want to make it square or you want to
make it a weird shape like a polygon or whatever, you can go ahead and slide that too.
I'm going to keep it to simple ovalish.
Now, to use this tool, is just like dragging out a box or any other selection.
Start in the corner, drag it down and out until it looks like it's surrounding the text
in a pretty balanced manner and then let go.
Now every balloon needs a tail, so let's go ahead add one.
Go to the balloon tail section, and, you know these tend to create tails that are pretty
narrow.
So, I've turned mine all the way up to 50 just to get something that doesn't look too
tiny.
Again, your personal preference really that's what this is all about.
So in order to use the tail tool, you are going to first start by clicking somewhere
inside of the balloon, towards the bottom.
I usually like to pick one side of the other, it looks kind of weird if things are coming
out straight the centre of the balloon.
So, I'm going to start on the left edge, click once, drag down to about halfway.
Click again and then it kind of pulls out to make a curve.
And when you think you have the tip positioned about where you want it, make sure it's pointing
at the character who you want to be speaking that's very important.
Go ahead and hit Enter, and then it connects it for you.
That looks okay.
If don't like it just hit Undo, and try it again until you're happy, I might even turn
up the whip just a little bit more.
Let's see what 65 looks like.
Oh!
That's going to be much better.
Click in the center, and then just hover it down until it's where you want it.
Hit Enter.
I like that a lot more.
I think that looks pretty good.
Now you should have a completed web balloon with text and all.
Repeat this process for the rest of your panels.
Now we've completed the lettering phase.
We've gone ahead and designed our balloon, we've laid out our text, we've got everything
reading just the way we want it to.
Now you've finished your page, don't keep it to yourself, it's time to share it.
That's the best part of comics.
What else did you tell the story for?
One of the basic ways to get started is to share it on the web.
It's really simple since you're working digital it's basically already ready to go.
It's easiest if you save it as 72 DPI.
There are tons of DPI options but for web resolution, 72 is all you're going to need.
So make sure you go ahead and turn your DPI down to 72.
That'll give you an appropriate file size to share on something like Twitter, Tumblr,
Wordpress.
Basically whatever.
Everything likes 72 DPI file.
Go to Edit, change image resolution and reduce it to 72 DPI.
I know we started off big but when you share something on the web often times you need
the smallest file possible and 72 DPI is the perfect screen resolution.
It's also going to make your file amendable for just about every website.
Go ahead and hit OK, and depending on the size of your file this might take a few seconds
so just let it do its thing.
Alright, now it's resized, it's a tiny little file ready to be shared on the web.
You're going to go to file, export single layer, you don't need to keep all your separate
layers when you post this to the web and you're going to use Jpeg.
Jpeg is a great file format that's accepted pretty much everywhere.
Find a place to save this name it something that you're going to remember.
I'm going to call mine Comic Web that way I know that it's a website's file and then
I'm going to go ahead and hit save.
It's going to bring out this little dialogue box, make sure your quality is set to 100,
that way your page will look just as good as those on the screen here.
As far as for illustration for comic it's really up to you, I usually just save for
illustration, if you've used some sort of tone or whatever on your comic and you're
a little nervous about it go ahead and save for comic.
Since I haven't and I have a pretty basic illustration, we're just going to use for
illustrations.
If you want to play around all these setting later by all means explore as much as possible.
Make sure your color is set to RGB that is the kind of color that web displays at.
If you're going to print it for whatever reason use CMYK, that's why we're setting this file
up to be showed on the web, let's go ahead and stick to our RGB.
When you're all done with your settings go ahead and hit OK, that's going to show you
a little preview if everything checks out.
Quality 100%, this is the size of your file.
You can zoom in and check everything if you want just to make sure nothing is looking
weird.
When you're done with that, hit OK again and you're all set, and your file should be saved
in the location that you set up.
There you go, now you have your first page of comics, feels pretty good doesn't it?
You've gone all the way through story layout, and character concept and creation, you've
laid out your page, you've penciled it, you've inked it, you've colored it, you've lathered
it, and now it's time to share it.
Some great places to start are Tumblr, your own blog if you have one, if you're a member
of DeviantART go ahead and put it up on your DeviantART page.
Wherever you can so that as many people as possible can see your awesome work.