Lettering Thread
Lately, my lettering and balloons have been coming out jagged and pixelated (http://www.spinningtoinfinity.com). I must be doing something wrong.
I letter on the TIF or PSD at full size in InkScape, then export to PNG. Then, in GiMP, I reduce the dimensions and resolution to 980 pixels wide and 200 dpi.
Somewhere in this process, the nice crisp vector lettering is getting junked up.
Comments
Thank god I checked to see if there was a lettering thread first...
(Alternate opening: "Steve, I'mma let you finish, but my lettering theory is the best of all."
(Alternate alternate opening: a joke that isn't, what, two years old now?)
So, over at today's R+M, I went on a bit in the blogpost that comes with the page about lettering. I figured I'd share with you lot, and open things up to font-as-character talk and whether writers/pro letterers should do the lettering. Or whatever. Let's talk fonts. While USING fonts.
Blog post follows:
Okay. Let’s talk about lettering.
I letter R+M. Partly to give Jorge less weight to carry and myself a little moreso, partly because I feel that the writer should also letter for those last minute dialogue tweaks (El’s hamfisted Los Campesinos! reference in the last panel was pretty awkwardly hyphenated my first go-round), and partly because I just have a giant boner for words and the usage of them. Which extends (sure, pun intended) to typography.
(I know diddly squat about lettering, by the way. Took a typography class once, but I forgot to keep the textbook when I graduated.)
There’s three different fonts and three different word balloon styles going on here, which makes it as good a page as any to talk about lettering.
Ballserker talks in Trebuchet, as big as I can make it without drowning out the art. He has thicker word balloon line weights, and those jaggedy lightning tails. He bellows, but electronically, you know? If you’ve watched Venture Bros. at length, the effect I “hear” it as is something like the “IGNORE ME!” guy from that episode with the “IGNORE ME!” guy. Or the old GI Joe figures with backpacks that yelled things.
El has what I consider a “normal” balloon for the strip. I like them round, which is a little Japanese, but whatever. There’s a 7pt stroke around the edge, thin, but distinct, and doesn’t choke out the tail point too badly. 12pt font, maybe 11.5pt? The font is Kid Kosmic, from Blambot; I picked it because it’s simultaneously stiff and curvy, which strikes me as perfect for a robot teen hero who’s more or less (but only more or less) a real boy.
Finally, we have our mystery speaker (it’s Lydon) in the last panel. Lydon, and all humans, speak in Anime Ace 2, also from Blambot. But Lydon’s talking low, and talking from elsewhere, so no balloon border for him, and a long tail that pinpoints off the panel.
I don’t know from lettering, but I do know from delighting in typography-as-character-signifier. I like that the two robots have different “voices”, but all the humans sound the same. I like that square pupils and paying attention to fonts could help the readers spot a Replicant in a pinch.
I like lettering. Possibly you’ve noticed.
(For the record: I just letter in Photoshop, on the original tiff, on a separate layer for each balloon and dialogue chunk. I save it as a psd with all the layers in case I need to edit later, then merge visible layers, shrink it to the site size, and save it as a JPEG.)
@RyanBurton - As mentioned, I know diddly squat about "actual" lettering, so take the following with a grain of salt:
The way I learned what lettering I know was by relettering Yon Kuma/Bear Beater Bunyan first for the iPhone edition, then for a full-page edition for Robot Comics.
I know actual letterers use Illustrator or a vector-based program, so that if they have to resize the font, there's no pixellation.
But I don't have that. So I use Photoshop.
Jorge sends me an unlettered .tiff of the page, at about 300dpi. I open that up in PS, save it as a psd file, so when I save later, I get to keep all the layers. I add a layer for the balloon, on a separate layer from the art.
I draw the word balloons using the circular ellipsis tool, then selecting the option that lets you add selections, I use the tool that lets you drag a straight line to a point, then another line from that point (if an artist wants to chime in with what that's called, thanks in advance) to form the tail. The end result is that I have a selection in the shape of my balloon on a separate layer, yeah?
I use the paint bucket tool to fill this with white (or black, or yellow, whatever color you want the balloon to be). While this shape is still selected and filled, I go to Edit up top, pick Stroke, and add a black stroke (usually of 7pts) with the Center option selected, so there's no gap between the white and the black, but it doesn't impose on the white space as much as using the Inside option would. Deselect everything, and voila, a balloon. If I have to slide it around, to get it where I like, I do so here.
For the actual lettering, I just select the Text tool, which automatically puts the font on its own layer. Make sure the text layer is above the balloon and the art, obviously. On a page with a lot of talking, my layer stack tends to look like art, balloon1, dialogue1, balloon2, dialogue2, etc, but you can also make all the balloons on separate layers, then do all the lettering (so art, balloon1, balloon2, dialogue 1, dialogue 2).
Make your font selection, pick your size (eyeball it, make it fit comfortably in the balloon, don't be afraid to type in a point size a point or half-point outside of the dropdown options PS gives you. Unless someone's shouting, in a panel, try to keep the same font size throughout, or within a point/half-point).
Center the dialogue (with the Center option everything involving text has), and use the enter key to make new lines, but don't leave a space between the last word on one line and the first on another, or throws off the centering.
(So, like: "Come with me if you want to live" looks like:
COME WITH ME
IF YOU WANT
TO LIVE.
in the balloon, but COME WITH MEIF YOU WANTTO LIVE if you stretched it out.)
Make sense so far? That's the lettering part of it, everything else is just merging all the layers when you're done and saving it as a nice enough page that it niether looks like ass nor loads like molasses on a site.
Just so long as everyone does what's best for the end product, then you're good.
@joshhechinger - watch your "I"s in the strip. Anytime you have someone saying "I" as a pronoun (ie. myself), you should be using I with the crossbars.
Example:
I feel like sort of a chump. I hand-letter in all my stuff. I've tried using misc. software to letter, but I grew up on reading stuff that was hand-lettered, and when I started cartooning I hand-lettered. Plus, I figure the extra work you put into it to make it look unique (and not just Comic Sans) is worth it.
@RyanBurton - Dude, no problem. I'm just glad I made halfway decent sense.
@edbrisson - Sort of loosely related to the "best for the story" aspect of writers lettering: depending on the artist I'm working with, I usually want them do the sound effects even if I'm ostensibly lettering, for that reason. I can fake my way through dialogue, but onomatopoeia in comics are so...impressionistic...ideally, that doing them with a computer always feels vaguely off. Like bad CGI in a movie.
As for the "I" thing: you're right, and I know that's the standard, but I've never been a fan of the crossbar. It always reads more like *I* than I to me in comics where the font is all-caps (not that *I* doesn't have its uses, mind...). The barless I is one of my few comics peccadilloes I feel guilty about indulging, because I know I'm just flat out wrong, but it bugs me otherwise.
@costakoutsoutis - Honestly, if you can hand-letter, and it looks good, more power to you. My Ls look like Cs, among other problems, and my hand-drawn balloons are hideously deformed. So it's computer fonts for me.
http://jkcarrier.livejournal.com/189386.html
http://www.comicsalliance.com/2010/03/18/twilight-manga-review/
"Bad lettering" doesn't even begin to describe it...