Thursday, January 26, 2012

The Writer Will Take Your Questions Now (#61) -- Learn While Creating

What was one of the most surprising things you learned in creating your comic books?

I learned how to letter digitally.

You see... After paying out of pocket for the art on my first comic book story, "Power" in Shooting Star Comics #1, I had no money left in the budget to pay someone to letter it. (For the non-comicsians among you, lettering is putting the text captions and word balloons in place on the page.)

So, I hunkered down and researched Blambot, Comicraft, and other font sites and took the crash course, and did an amazingly bad job of lettering my first comic book story. But it was a start, and my second one was much, much better... mostly likely due to the fact that I ended up buying a copy of Illustrator so I could do it right.

4 comments:

  1. I love how all of us are proud of our own work even when we can admit it was bad. I'm not the next Brubaker, but I'm glad I do something even if it goes unpublished.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Here, here. Ain't it the ever-lovin' truth.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Lettering is tricky because so many people think, "What's so hard about that? You're just putting the words on the page." But there's so much more to it than that! And it's one of those parts of a comic that no one really notices if it's done well, but if it's done wrong, EVERYONE can tell.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Exactly, Sarah. Eggs-freakin'-zakly.

    ReplyDelete