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Have you always wanted to create your own comics? Our free comic book tutorials can help you get started. Tutorials cover topics on all aspects of comic creation, including lettering, penciling, coloring, inking, PhotoShop, Illustrator…the list goes on!

 





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Comic Book Tutorial - Lettering, Part 2
Putting words into comic book "word balloons" using Adobe Illustrator

comic book tutorial

Copy or paste your text into illustrator. In this tutorial, and in all the lettering tutorials I will be using the Blambot.com font “Webletterer” Its a great font that is designed to look good and remain readable at really small sizes. As small as 5 pt is still readable.

Select the text, then go to the character menu and choose optical kerning. It does a great job at kerning the text, giving just the right amount of space between the characters. Also select centered in your paragraph pallette.

You are now ready to shape the text so that it fits into the balloon just right.

comic tutorial lettering comic tutorial lettering It usually takes a few times to get the line breaks just right. Its a art and a skill to see them and slice through the sentence and make it fit right into the balloon. To make the text fit correctly you want to shape it in diamond so that it looks good on the comic book page.

comic book tutorial

 Balloon 1 is what you don’t want to do. The diamond shape is not quite right. There are to many words on one line and you do not have equal space. The text looks squeezed in and awkward.
comic book tutorial lettering Balloon 2 is also a no-no. Make sure that you have centered the text diamond in to the balloon.
comic book tutorial lettering In balloon 3 we see the text placed into the balloon just right. As you can see there is equal amount of space all
around the text and the balloon. This is what you are trying to achieve. Equal space on all sides of the text.
comic book tutorial lettering Balloon 4 is the final copy in the word balloon. It is centered and specific words have been bolded for
emphasis.