The Art of Comic Book Drawing

Adding Speech

Lettering is often an afterthought in comic book art, but the speech balloons and sound effects are often as important as the drawings themselves. Let’s take a quick look at how to add speech and sound bubbles to your scenes.

Draw the rough balloon and guides in pencil, then add words. Don’t be afraid to erase and rewrite until you have a block of text that looks attractive. If lines of text don’t comfortably fit the space, erase and try again. Avoid breaking words with hyphens and don’t squash words to make them fit under any circumstance!

When you are happy with how the text fits in the balloon, neatly render the letters ...