Alex Heizer

December 29, 2011 Comments | 7 notes | Text

Tutorial: Creating Knockout Letters

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.