Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Teaching myself to letter using InkScape

Decided recently that I needed to learn how to letter my own comics.
I've hand-lettered my stuff, but never used a program to do it.

I tried to add text using the image manipulation programs I've been using, Photfiltre and GIMP, but neither really had the functionality needed to do a satisfactory job - not in any kind of timely fashion.

Juan Carlos Quattordio, the artist on my Panthea Obscura, is working on the lettering for our new comic, Everybody Lies. He's not an experienced letterer, but is doing his best. I am very critical, though, and I know he's just barely putting up with my critiques!

As I sent off my latest list of critiques, I realized I had to do it - had to learn lettering. I know how it SHOULD look, and JC's been cool about my feedback... but I didn't have a graphics program that would let me get it looking the way I knew it needed to look.

In the intervening years since I last tried lettering, new graphic freeware had been released. I discovered INKSCAPE! There are several tutorials out there on how to use it. I'm impressed, so far. It's like a free version of Illustrator, they tell me.

Spent today learning the basics I'll need for lettering. I lettered these two pages today. Took me a while! Think the time will be reduced as I learn what I'm doing! Check out the pages, let me know what you think. I'd love to get critiques from working letterers. I've got a long way to go, but it's a start:



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