How to Add Text Bubbles With Comic Life

Skilled text handling is one of the core elements of a good comic. Text both sets the tone of a comic book and reflects a character's personality or speech style. Comic Life, available for both PC and MAC, takes the struggle out of comic creation. Text bubbles and special effects are difficult to create both manually and digitally. The program's drag-and-drop feature makes it easy to create text bubbles in Comic Life. Here's how to do it.

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

1. Open the panel in Comic Life. The Text tool is in the center on the screen bottom. The Text Balloon reflects the character's emotion. Comic Life includes standard, thought, yell and other text balloon styles.

2. Drag the Text Balloon and drop it above the character's head. Left-click on the blue dot and drag it to the character's head. This is the tail of the text balloon and indicates who is speaking.

3. Left-click inside the Text Balloon and enter the dialogue. The Text Bubble automatically resizes as you type. Shape the Text Bubble by adjusting the orange dots that surround the balloon.

4. Select the "Fonts" icon if you want to change the lettering style. The leading comic book style for lettering is all caps. Some of the more innovative artists use uppercase/lowercase fonts to achieve a different tone for their comic. You'll find an overview of the font war and detailed instructions on text in comics in Scott McCloud's book, "Making Comics" (see Resources below).

5. Continue adding text balloons until the comic is finished. Unless a character has a particular speech style, like a robot or an immortal, you should use the same font family for all the comic characters.

Resources

• Order Scott McCloud's book, Making Comics.