Tutotial: Jim Z demonstrates word balloons

Post by **Greg Stephens** » Fri Feb 22, 2002 1:02 pm

Jim Zubkavich has posted a new tutorial demonstrating how he creates word balloons. As with his other tutorials, it's concise and excellent.

View it here: http://www.makeshiftmiracle.com/TutWordB.html

buzzard · Post by **buzzard** » Sat Feb 23, 2002 3:55 am

My brain keeps trying to interpret the illustration as a piece of sequential art.

Wikkit · Post by **Wikkit** » Sat Feb 23, 2002 5:14 am

It must be an evil tutoial!

Post by **Scott McCloud** » Sat Feb 23, 2002 1:31 pm

I noticed that Jim uses the oval selection tool for balloons which sometimes leaves some unnecessary white space. Here's an alternate method I use Adobe Illustrator to accomplish. The following was originally posted on Comicon.com.

***

For most work I letter in illustrator and import into Photoshop as a top Layer. The rest is done in Layers underneath. Because the gutters are filled in white, that means the panel borders are literally windows into each panel.

Apart from general flexibility, the most important virtue of Illustrator is the shape of the word balloons. Ovals and rounded rectangles always look a bit wrong on the page. In Illustrator, though, you can take one of their ovals and squash each of the 4 control points inward to get that perfect balloon shape, then scale it to whatever size you want.

Like so:

I've made whole kits of various balloons and tails derived from that basic squashed oval shape.

Kevin Pease · Post by **Kevin Pease** » Sat Feb 23, 2002 3:16 pm

Ah, Buzzard, but it is sequential art...

buzzard · Post by **buzzard** » Sun Mar 03, 2002 3:59 am

Zing, good point. But it's not supposed to be sequential in time, which is how my brain interprets it at first glance.