Tutorial @ "Comic Style" (speech bubbles)

[Little Jo]

Recently Richard asked (me) about a tutorial how to make the "comic book technique" (cf. here). So here are some words about how I do it (I think there are for sure several other possibilities out there).

[Little Jo]

First of all you need a suitable image manipulation program à la Adobe's Photoshop. Like most people I do not have the money to buy such a powerful professional software, so I use the freeware tool The GIMP. It provides nearly the same power like Photoshop (and even can read/write files in Photoshop format) but is, as I said, for free usage. You can download it at the site referred above.

[Little Jo]

First of all you open your photo, which should be enriched by a speech bubble in GIMP. (Please appologize for the German screenshots of GIMP but it uses the Language of my operating system.)

First of all you scale the photo to your final target size, in my case this is 580 in width due to my homepage layout. For this you use the Scale menu entry from the Pic menu (cf. pic).

[Little Jo]

Next you chose the Text-Tool from the tool area (the large letter "A"; cf. pic 3), chose a apropriate font and size (color should be black) and just enter the text by clicking somewhere in the photo (pic 4). You can move around the text afterwards so don't mind where you click (you can move it with the "Cross-Arrows-Tool"; cf. pic 5).

[Little Jo]

Note, that your text will automatically be placed into a new layer (cf. pic 06). Layers are most important for such kind of tasks, because you can place elements in the photo without destroying any content behind the elements -- in our case the text. So it's quite easy to experiment a little bit and move elements/items/text around before you find their final position.

Note, that the layer information is only saved when you save the file in GIMP Format (.xcf) or Photoshop Format (.psd). JPG (or GIF, PNG, etc.) does not support layers, so just make sure you save your masterpiece in XCF Format before you save it also in JPG for publication.

[Little Jo]

But let's continue. Now we create the speach bubble, the element this tutorial is about. For this you choose the eliptic marker tool (cf. pic 7) and border your text in the size you would like to have your speech bubble (pic 8).

Then add a new layer in which the speech bubble will be drawn. Make sure the layer is between the text and the background (you can move layers with the green little arrows up and down).

[Little Jo]

Now switch from the layer tab to the path tab (pic 10), right click on the empty area and choose Path from Selection (pic 11). Now you have the speech bubble outline selection saved into a path. Make the path visible by clicking the eye symbol in front of the path name (i.e. clicking before the path name will make the eye visible -- cf. pic 12) and remove the selection by clicking somewhere in the photo (but outside the selection).

[Little Jo]

What you have now is a (closed) bezier curve in the shape of your speech bubble (cf. pic 13). We now will modify this with the typical speech bubble "flag" (pointing to the narrator). For this we select the curve modification tool (cf. pic 13 highlighted in the tools area).

By holding down the Ctrl-key and clicking on the border line at the bottom of the speech bubble (right next to an already existing point) we will add two additional points (cf. pic 14).

Than grab the middle of the three points and pull it near the speaking figure. With the two axiliary (bezier) handles left and right of the point (in the pic pointing to the top right seen from the point itself) you can adjust the shape of the connecting lines: make them curvy like I did or simple straight, just as you like it (cf. pic 15).

[Little Jo]

The result you got is a speech bubble saved in a path. Next we want to fill this white. On the path tab right-click on the path and choose Selection from Path (cf. pic 16). Now go to the layer tab and make sure the (empty) Speech Bubble layer is selected (in case you just did what is described here it should be still selected as depicted in pic 9 ).

Now fill the selection by choosing the Fill Tool and using the background color (because in our case the background color already is white; in other cases just set the foreground color to white and use foreground for filling) - cf. pic 17.

The result should looks like pic 18.

[Little Jo]

For the final touch I outline the speech bubble with a black stroke. For this select a black brush of suitable width; I use the circle fuzzy 03 (pic 19). Then choose from the edit menu the menu item Path Outline (or similiar naming, don't know how it is translated; cf. pic 20) and use the brush tool for outlining.

Voila: a comic-style speech bubble.