Do you ever have one of those days where you’re, like, “Y’know, I’m not sure I know where my lettering guide is. Has it been more than three years since I’ve used it?”
Tag Archive for lettering
Lettering Guide
More on comic book lettering
I’m continuing to practice different things related to constructing comics. As a simple lettering exercise, I decided to re-letter my final assignment from my cartooning programme.
In this case, I’m retaining the original hand-drawn caption boxes, but I’ve whited-out the original uneven hand-lettering and plopped in some new lettering. I’m using a 12pt font — specifically a font called Digital Strip by Blambot. 12pt is closest in height to the original hand lettering. (To be clear: that’s 12pt on the original art size of 11″ x 17″) I’m also using a bit of Engravers MT on page 4. In almost all cases, the computer lettering is more compact than my hand lettering, so the caption boxes are sometimes a bit empty-seeming.
There are things about Illustrator that I find irritating and more complex than necessary. Like, why do I use different tools to add path points and remove path points? Inkscape feels ever so much better at this to me. But whatever. A tool’s a tool.
“all those letters that you wrote to yourself but could not address”
Over the last few days, I’ve been trying to get my head around digital lettering. At one level, this doesn’t seem like a hard topic. I mean, I’ve been dropping words on computer screens for a long, long time. But I’m really interested in figuring out what people in the comics industry are doing: what are typical workflows? Best font sizes?
To get some insights into the topic, I picked up a copy of The DC Comics Guide to Coloring and Lettering by Mike Chiarello and Todd Klein. I must confess that I was pretty disappointed. A big part of what the book has to say about lettering is about the debate between hand-lettering versus digital lettering. And I suspect that that conversation is kinda dead. Ah, well. The book is from mid-2004: it’s interesting how quickly dated it’s become.
