Drawing Letters & Lettering in Comics & Comic Strips Lesson

This lesson will show you all about lettering for making comic strips…you might call them fonts. If you hand draw your comics, learning how to make cool looking comic strip letters is important and an essential part of being a comic book or comic strip artist.

Here Are Even More Comics / Comic Strips Drawing Tutorials

LETTERING FOR COMICS

Suitable lettering can add much to the effectiveness of a cartoon. It can emphasize the spirit of the cartoon and give tone to the drawing. So likewise, it is possible to ruin a fine comic strip with poor lettering. For lettering, a steady hand is necessary. Copy alphabets over and over until the technique is mastered.

Broadly speaking, lettering can be grouped in two classes ; the built-up letter, which first is carefully sketched in pencil and then finished in ink with the aid of a ruling pen, T-square, and triangle, and the “written” letter, a smaller free-hand style generally used in comic picture “talks.”

Two styles of built-up letters are shown in squared background to give a better idea of correct proportions. The matter of correct spacing in built-up letters is important in achieving a pleasing effect.

An example of correct spacing is shown in Fig. 1 and 2.

Comic picture conversation often is enclosed in “balloons” appearing from the mouths of the subjects.

These balloons are usually irregular in shape with a balance observed between the balloons in a panel. Lettering should be the same throughout. Careful spacing between letters is important. Balloon talk reads from left to right.

The lettering, in written style, should be grouped inside with no overcrowding and with slight marginal space around it. Exclamatory remarks are drawn in bold letters in harmony with the subject and its action.

Sometimes letters are drawn in perspective in which top and bottom lines run to a vanishing point. Capitals are more often used than small, or lower-case letters, but either way, make them clean cut and simple.