Another newbie seeking feedback...

[SDGlyph]

Hi all,

So I've been meaning to have a go at this for ages and figured I'd start working through the activities... I've been following various letterers for a while but never actually put (digital) pen to (digital) paper yet, so here goes!

Any and all critique gratefully received, I'd really like to get good at this.


First up: started simple with the Spectre page:



Lettered in CCComicrazy in CorelDRAW 9 (yes, my tools are ancient).

Main thoughts here are:

• treated script as inner monologue & grouped lines to reflect arrival of new ideas
• tried to work in the unresolved dual personality by blending the boxes from a typical light yellow to the Spectre's desaturated green
• lead the reader's eye through the script and down to page out
• I could have done with alternate glyphs for the doubled letters...

Second piece: picked the Worlds of D&D page as a relatively straightforward dialogue scene:



In Unmasked BB, again in CDraw. Nice font!

Notes:

• thought this would be a straightforward one for a first try, but it's wordy!
• balloon tails are harder than they look
• I'm not in love with the overlapping tail / balloon in P5, but I couldn't think of a better way to do it. There isn't room between the panels to put it low and link it to the dialogue from P4...
• balloon shapes/sizes/spacing are a bit uneven

More to come but I'll just put these two up for now. Thanks in advance for any advice!

[lordmagnusen]

Both look pretty good. I would advice you to get Adobe Illustrator; though. Some thoughts on each piece:

Spectre: Watch the tangents... that is, keep boxes (or balloons) away from any lines that run too close to their borders. See the second box, for example, it's too close to the roof; or the fourth one, its botton is too close to the fire escape bottom.

D&D: It's a pretty tricky page, yeah, but you did good. I would use more stacked copy and rounder balloons where possible (panel 1, for example). In panel 2, I would have avoided the tail going over the staff; I would have used a shorter tail from the balloon closer to bald guy's head (remember, tails don't have to point to mouths necessarily, the general direction of the speaker is enough). Oh, your tails and connectors are a bit thick, I believe, but that's a stylistic choice. In panel 4, try to stack the copy on winghead's dialogue; so you can do the same with the dialogue coming from out of panel, and avoid covering up art with the balloons. And lastly, the last dialogue , I'd made it ride between the two last panels; covering up the characters' hair, a balloon in the middle of his face is not a good idea.

Anyhow, great job!

[HdE]

Agree on Magnuson's points above.

One extra note on the balloon tails on the second sample: they really are quite a bit too thick for my tastes (and clumsy looking tails will always make your work look un-polished) but a bigger problem for me is that they don;t seem 'sharp' enough at the tail ends. You might want to try using a higher mitre point setting.

Regarding covering art with balloons - simple rules to follow are: use dead space, stay off heads and faces as much as possible. it's okay to obscure the top of somebody's hair, or in extreme cases butt the balloon down onto the forehead. But try not to if you possibly can.

Panels like the very last one of the second sample are sometimes tricky. The whole panel is full of character art, but the artist has drawn it quite sensibly in this case.

To just add a little to Magnuson's comment on that, I'll generally ALWAYS try to position lettering on the final panel of page near bottom right if it makes sense to do so. Here, though, you can't do that.

The best rule of thumb in case like this is to look for the closest possible placement to where you'd ideally put something of there wasn't some important art in the way. That's a good rule of thumb in every panel. It may sound ALARMINGLY obvious, but if you examine an entire page after lettering with this in mind, you may find that the changes you make improve the quality drastically.

Couple of points on the first sample - caption 2, 'huh' is in lower case, I notice. I'd personally refrain from doing that in a caption box, as it looks a little jarring. You can get away with it more in a speech balloon. That said, I'm personally a firm believer that lower case lettering in comics is WRONG.

Also, as Magnuson says, tangents are a problem. For me, the worst offender is caption 4 butting right up to the wall of the building.

On a page like this, finding appropriate space is the biggest issue. Remeber that you can position captions more or less side by side. With a little re-arranging, captions 1 and 2 could occupy the dead space above the building, leaving you a little more free to float the rest of the captions over the artwork.

That aside, good choice of fonts, especially on the Spectre page. You've got a nice tie-up going on there with the style of the lettering and the art. Some letterers never even consider this! If you can take a bit more creative control of your speech balloons and placements, you'll be on the right track. Keep at it!

[lordmagnusen]

Originally Posted by HdE

To just add a little to Magnuson's comment on that, I'll generally ALWAYS try to position lettering on the final panel of page near bottom right if it makes sense to do so. Here, though, you can't do that.

Right, the old "page turner" dialogue, as some call it. I didn't suggest it in this case because it would cover the character's mouth.

HdE makes good points here.

[HdE]

Originally Posted by lordmagnusen

Right, the old "page turner" dialogue, as some call it. I didn't suggest it in this case because it would cover the character's mouth.

Another pointer to be careful of is that positioning a balloon or caption TOO near the bottom right, particularly if you break the panel border, can take the lettering outside the safe area of the page. I'm not ashamed to admit that tricky layouts have caused me to make this mistake a couple of times!

[lordmagnusen]

Yeah, that too.

[HdE]

Originally Posted by lordmagnusen

Yeah, that too.

[Klinks beer steins with Magnuson.]

[lordmagnusen]

Hehehe...

[SDGlyph]

Thanks for the feedback, guys.

On a quick technical note: yep, I definitely want to move to Illustrator at some point. First though, I'll have to be able to justify the cost (and have a computer that won't choke on anything remotely recent...).


With Nate posting his 5+5 amateur mistakes - I'm mortified to see that, even though I thought I'd read about them often enough to avoid them, I still blundered headlong into several of the examples!

I've re-done the D&D page to take into account your comments, particularly tightened the leading quite a bit, stacked dialogue a lot more and made tails and connectors much smaller - I've aimed at approx the diameter of a lettered 'O' at the thick end. Looking at them side-by-side is quite an eye-opener!

Still couldn't keep the last balloon off Beardy's face in P3 but I figured it was better than obscuring the wizard duel.

In the P4-5 transition, I've managed to fit the "Don't you see?" balloon across the panel border to avoid the overlap I previously had, although it does encroach on Mopey Boy's hair. Am I breaking the plane by having linked balloons butt up to the top border on P4 but overlap the right border? At least they can now move down off the top border if necessary.

The other way I considered was to shift Sinister Dude's dialogue in P5 to the right and put the continuation in the top left (closer to the script), but then I'd have the tail paths crossing even if the actual drawn tails don't collide.

How would you handle that bit of dialogue? It seems to be the choice of the lesser of two evils to me.

Thanks again!