Alex Heizer

When creating your own manga, comic or graphic novel, you’ll usually end up adding some text to it. You can do this on the computer once you scan in your artwork (or as part of the process if you do all your drawing and inking digitally), or using a pen directly on your art as you ink. Typically, you’ll create the layout to accommodate black words on a white background or in a word balloon. But what if you have a black panel and want to letter it in white? You can easily do this on a computer, but here’s how to do it using a couple sizes of pens.

You can use technical pens or dip pens. For this tutorial I used 3 sizes of Copic Multiliners. Click each image to enlarge it.

1. Plan the layout of your page. This lets you know how much space you’ll be working with and the overall flow of the action.

2. On a separate sheet, mark out the space you are allotting for the text and draw in your guidelines at the correct size. Then lay out your text to fit and look attractive. This allows you to fiddle with it until it looks right before you start actually working on your page.

3. Map out your guidelines using a non-photo pencil. This makes it easier to scan and clean up.

4. Using a regular pencil, lightly add your text. You will be erasing this once you start inking, so don’t draw too heavily!
 

5. Using an ultra-fine pen, like a Multiliner 0.05, carefully trace around each letter. Often it’s a good idea to draw a sample letter using the correct weight of pen you normally use for lettering. That way you can compare the line widths as you outline the knockout lettering.
 

6. Next, trace around your lettering with a heavier pen. This gives you a buffer zone around the fine outlines when you go to fill in the large background areas. Let your ink dry and erase your original pencil lettering. Since erasing also rubs off a bit of the ink, erasing at this point is less noticeable than after you fill in the solid black areas.
 

7. Then, once you have a block of text outlined, simply fill in around it using a brush or a larger pen and you’re done!
 

Last night I received word via my Twitter friend, Erik, that I was one of the winners of a contest held over the summer by ShonenJUMP magazine. SJ publishes manga (Japanese comics) chapters in a Japanese weekly edition and an international monthly edition, to introduce some of the manga they publish worldwide. The contest was based on creating a 4-page “name” (the manga word for “storyboard”, or rough layout which shows how a manga story will flow) of the summer adventures of a 13-year old who wants to be a movie star in New York City.

Since the magazine didn’t hit the stores until today, you can imagine I was dancing impatiently all night. Even in my dreams once I settled down enough to sleep! So first order of business for the day was a trip to the store to pick up a bunch of copies. I got 6 and left the other 6 so locals could bask in our collective awesomeness.

I know what my brothers and parents are getting for Christmas this year!!

I am very proud of having my story published. I also have to give thanks to my best friend Michelle, an incredibly talented writer, for her help with a point in the plot that really turned it into a winning story, plus some dialog suggestions which made everyone a bit less nerdy!  I am also ecstatic that my story appears nestled between two chapters of Bleach! Total. Win.

There was one grand prize winner and three equal runners-up. Congratulations also go out to Sires B. Black, Ray Negron and Sarah for their great stories! While I was not the grand prize winner, the editor SASAKI Hisashi’s comments were better than I could have hoped for:

“It was a little ambitious to attempt a road movie style story that changes scenes four times in four pages, but the artist succeeded. The storyline was easy to read and understand. This is a very important aspect to manga. It made me think that it would be interesting to read a 40 page one-shot based on this story.”

I also think it will be interesting to see, and am looking forward to all of us, including Sasaki-san, seeing it as a full story.

Below is the comments page, plus all four of my original pages Like traditional manga, it reads mirror image to American comics (top right to bottom left of the page).