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[Image: A side-by-side comparison of a comic panel lettered digital by hand vs. lettered with a font.]

I’m trying to make this comic as thoroughly mine as I can.

I’ve been interested in doing my own lettering for The Hues, as opposed to using the font tool, which I did for Garanos.  As a parenthetical, I hand letter Alex’s Guide, but that’s mostly because it’s all natural media, apart from the coloring.  I’ve never properly “learned” lettering in the classical sense, and a majority of searching for a tutorial led to hand lettering with pen and paper.

However, this three part series on Making Comics was really helpful getting me started in digital hand lettering!  Above are my results, compared to the same panel lettered with the type tool and my old technique for making word balloons.  On the left, the balloons are drawn with vectors, and on the right, they’re drawn freehand with the lasso tool.

I may look back at these letters in a year and cringe at how they look, but I’m really happy with how it changes the page, especially with the nicer word bubbles.

Alex Heberling

Alex Heberling here. I own the place.