#Drawing simple comic characters full

Select White as your foreground fill color.Select the Polygonal Lasso tool, and hold the Shift key while clicking to create a sharp triangle tail in the selection.Place the cursor in the center of the text, and hold the Alt key while dragging the mouse in order to create an elliptical selection bubble that is evenly placed over the text. Use the Elliptical Marquee tool to create a selection bubble around the text that you wrote. Use the font you created above or select a font appropriate for your visual style. This is the text that will go inside the bubble. Select Stroke and set the following options: The Blending option will create an outline of the speech bubble at the end of the process.

Open the Blending options on the bubble layer.Your text layer should be on top, followed by the bubble layer, followed by the original drawing on the bottom.Both of these layers should be separate from the layer that your drawing is on. Use the layers tool in Photoshop to create a layer for the text and a layer for the speech bubble.

#Drawing simple comic characters full

Creating full pages is typically the result of making a comic book or graphic novel, where you are telling a longer, more cohesive story.Īdd dialogue and speech bubbles in Photoshop. Having the whole page to work with provides more freedom to manipulate frames, but also means you need more content per page.

A comic page is a larger undertaking than a strip.

This is one of the most popular formats for many webcomics and daily funnies, as they allow for narrative development but are still short enough to produce regularly. There is no set length for a strip, though most are usually one or two lines of 2-4 frames each.

A comic strip is a sequence of frames.

Political comics are also typically one or two frames. It can be difficult to form a narrative using single frames, so most can be read in any order. These comics do not require much setup, and rely on visual gags and one or two lines of dialogue.

A single frame comic is typically reserved for comedy.

Experiment with different formats until you find one that suits your story, characters, and setting. There are no set conventions when it comes to format, though comics typically fall into three categories: Single frame, Strip, and Page length (comic book).

Your tone will be expressed through dialogue, narrative text, and visuals.

Write a romance, or a gripping political thriller. Combine comedy with drama, make it dark, or light-hearted. Are you writing a comedy? Is your story more of a drama? Maybe you’re looking at doing political cartoons. If you’re writing a comedy strip, what are the nature of the jokes? If you’re writing a love story, what are the lessons of love learned? Your theme will also dictate your audience. The theme of your comic is what drives the day to day creation. This can be as simple as checking the mail or as complex as saving the universe. This is the basis of the story, the “why” of what your characters are doing. Every story needs a conflict to drive it. Develop your characters over time this is especially important for strips that form longer narratives. Your characters move the action, they speak the dialogue, and they are who the reader connects with. The setting is the backdrop for the actions of your characters, and depending on your story can be an integral part of the narrative. Even if the background is just plain white, that’s still a setting. In that sense, a comic is not really different from any other form of storytelling, and thus follows certain conventions. Even a single-frame comic has to have a sense of forward movement. A comic is, at its most basic level, a narrative told through sequential images, called frames or panels.