A Few Notes About Lettering

A lot of people who’ve tried to do comics have at some point what the best way to handle lettering is. I don’t know the answer but here’s how I usually do it for my comics.

I always start with roughs/thumbnails when I do a comic project. I never have a traditional script when I work, but as I’m drawing it I have an idea what the story is going to be and I know what needs to be accomplished on each page. For dialogue I start by estimating how much space I’ll need and sketching out a rough space for a word balloon.

Next I use a text tool to go in and add all the dialogue after the comic is completely roughed out. I try and make sure I use a digital font generator because I’ll know for sure all the text in my comic will have a consistent size, but you’re probably looking at that and thinking “It looks pretty ugly” right? Yeah it looks pretty obviously digitally placed, which contrasts a lot with the artwork, even choosing a more handwritten font won’t look right, at least to me. So yeah, I’m going to go over and hand-write all the lettering eventually.

However it’s still important in my opinion to always start with a digital text box, because at this stage it’s more about proper spacing.

Once it’s all placed where I want it, I set the layer opacity to low and begin tracing the text. You don’t have to follow the text exactly, as you can see my y’s and a’s are very different from the original text, the reason to do handwritten letters over digital is because you want your personality to flow through the letters in the same way the rest of the art 

This looks a lot better than overly clean digital text, huh?

And now with the ink layer there’s much more of a visual consistency between the lineart and the text.

You can always freehand your text too if you want, the reason I use a font generator first is so my lettering stays straight, many people, myself included, have a tendency to slant with their writing without some form of guidelines.

Hopefully this little tip helps you in some way, or at least convinces you to try handwritten lettering in your next comic. It’s definitely extra work but I believe it’s totally worth it.