Johnny Saturn

Illustrator is the industry standard for lettering comics, and there are lots of good reasons for this.  Some letterers have been using Manga Studio, which I understand is well-suited for lettering as well.  Photoshop may be used to letter, but if you do then there are some ways to streamline the process, and that’s what I’m going to talk about in this next series of columns. 

Why would you letter in Photoshop?  Great question.  Maybe you don’t have time to learn a new application.  Maybe you already are comfortable with Photoshop.  Maybe you can’t afford Illustrator.  Maybe you don’t want to mess with one program for art, one for lettering, and one for compositing the image.  Whatever the reason, you can letter in Photoshop with ease, especially if you make the preparations I’m going to cover in this series of columns.

First, you need to make a Custom Shapes file of all your balloon and tail shapes.  Here’s what you do:

1)      Make your balloon shapes.  The shapes can be whatever you want, from the standard oval, to thought balloons, angry balloons, and queasy balloons— whatever you want. 

2)      Use the Magic Wand tool and select the balloon.

3)      Go to the Paths palette, which is usually grouped with Layers and Channels, and can be brought up in any case under the Window pull down.  Hit the Make Work Path From Selection icon, which is the fourth icon over on the bottom of the Paths palette.

4)      Go to the Edit pull down, select Define Custom Shape. Give your balloon a name in the popup box that appears, and then press OK.

To create your own custom shape file, and collect your custom balloons as you make them, here are the steps.

1)      Select Custom Shape from the main toolbar. 

2)      In the options bar at the top, there will be a Shape pull down with an arrow next to it.  Select the arrow, and display the custom shapes in that file.

3)      There is an arrow icon in the upper right hand corner of this pull down box. Select it.

4)      In the menu that pops up, select Preset Manager

5)      In the Preset Manager, select all the shapes that were already in the file, leaving only your new balloons intact.  Select Delete.  It’s OK to do this, because you are making a new file, not writing over an old file and destroying the existing custom shapes.

6)      Select Done.

7)      Go back to the shape pull down box, select the arrow icon in the upper right hand corner, and select Save Shapes.

      Name your new file appropriately.

9)      Now, whenever you wish, you can load your new lettering shapes!  Easy as that.

Well, that’s enough for this week.  There are some important tool presets that I’ll get into that can make your job much, much easier.  There’s also the question of font choice and size, and putting the whole thing together.

Scott.

Note: The reason that I create the balloons and tails separately is because this gives you much more flexibility on how you can arrange your balloons, especially if you are into lots of connected and overlapped balloons.

Note: At the end of this particular series, I’ll include all my presets and files for you to experiment with.