Photoshop Speech Bubbles – How I make word balloons
I already talked a bit about Fonts, Lettering and Creating Your Own Comic Font so now I’m going to try to walk through my process of making speech bubbles. I made a video. Not just any video. A video I made really late at night after drinking to much coffee and wondering what I should post. I tried to make a better one but every version kept getting sloppier until all forms of helpfulness went out to door to make way for muttered grumblings and miss-clicks. Don’t even ask why my word balloon points to both Victuals AND Sonja. I guess I was just showing off how abstract my story telling ability could get.
Anyway, when I started making this video I thought it was a great idea. Now that it’s time to post, I am wondering if it’s clear enough. I guess I’ll leave it up to you to tell me. I can always make another one to replace this if I have to. Below the video is also an explanation of what I do to make my word balloons for reMIND.
It wasn’t until a few months ago that I finally found this method of making word balloons for reMIND. I went through all my pages and recreated them from the ground up and here’s how I do it.
First I create a folder in my layers called “Text”. I keep all my text and bubbles in this folder so I can easily turn it all on or off. Next I create a new layer that I call “bubbles”.
Then I double click on the new “bubbles” layer that I made in Photoshop even though nothing is in it yet. A “Layer Style” window will appear. On the left side at the very bottom of the list of layer styles is a filter called “Stroke”. Click on “Stoke”. Make sure it’s highlighted so that the adjustment window will change. If you just click the check box it will turn on the feature but adjusters will not be visible.
Once the “Stoke” property box is open, I change the size to “4″ and the position to “inside” and hit “OK”. A line, 4 pixels thick, will appear over the edge of anything I create in the balloons layer from now on. This line will be drawn on the inside 4 pixels of any shape with an alpha. (a transparent background)
Now I start drawing in bubbles with the “lasso” tool. I love doing these by hand so that I can have an organic hand drawn look. You can even use a solid pencil or hard edge paintbrush if you prefer but the lasso is nice for getting crisp lines easily.
If you are looking for really perfect bubble lines then I suggest using “Paths”. Nate has a great tutorial about using Paths to create word balloons. Check out his blog if you haven’t already. His project is AMAZING!
Now all you have to do is use Comic Sans MS to letter the stupid thing! (I’m going to milk this as long as I can)
LOL Jason, what a coincidence. I'm releasing a pack of vector speech balloons for PS and Illustrator for download over at idrawdigital. this morning.
Weird!
Wow,
I've always struggled with this and have yet to find a way that I'm happy with…
This info will help a lot.
Thanks.
sam
Awesome! Thanks a lot, this is super helpful.
Thanks, great tutorial!
Nice to know you can do this in Photoshop. I've been doing mine in Illustrator, but it can be kind of a pain switching between the two. Might be nice (and quicker) just doing both the art/lettering in one program. Thanks for the tutorial.
Yeah, I letter in Illustrator and then paste them as an overlay into Photoshop. I like the ability to manipulate paths and text on the fly that Illustrator offers. But the lag on my ageing computer when I swap between programs is getting to me. So it always pays to have more than one technique at your disposal, I think.
–M
Thanks all for your comments. I'm glad this was helpful. Sometimes the simple things become way over complicated and cumbersome. Then after you learn a new trick, you assume everyone else already knew it which is rarely the case.
It never hurts to share different methods to achieve the same goal. We become better artists that way.
Man,
I've struggled with drawing these fucking balloons…it always takes me forever although I'm finally getting better at it, this is by far much better. I'm such a dope. Thanks for the tip.
I had never thought of using the lasso tool to draw lineart. But then again, I'm not an artist, so this was very helpful indeed. Don't make fun of me!
I love this. It helped me a lot. :D Should've mentioned it earlier.
I do this a similar way but with the path tool. But what I wanted to mention is that instead of going into the layer style dialog box every time, simply set up a Style with your settings (4px, inside, etc) and then all you do from then on is draw your shape, and click on the style in your style palette – and you've got your line. Saves a LOT of time when you are doing a bunch of bubbles on a page.
Great comic, really love your work.
Oh wow that’s awesome, I never knew about using the strokes options. I just started laughing after I finished watching this video because I think I’ve been making my speech bubbles using the hardest possible method imaginable.