In my article about translating comic books, I gave an overview on the steps to translate a foreign-language comic book. In this tutorial, we'll take a look at replacing the text on a comic book panel with your newly written translation. Although this can be done in any graphics editor, we'll be using a vector application instead, which creates more precise shapes and provides better text handing than bitmap applications like Adobe Photoshop. As in the previous article, we'll be working on a panel from the Italian comic book, Corto Maltese: Il Segreto di Tristan Bantam (Corto Maltese: The Secret of Tristan Bantam).
1. Preparing your scanned comic book/graphic novel page is a lengthy discussion involving file formats and resolution. This is discussed in many tutorials involving Adobe Photoshop and graphic editing. The important thing to remember is that the comic book will eventually be zipped as a .cbr or .cbz file for viewing on a tablet or portable device. It's for display and not printing so don't worry about 300dpi or color accuracy too much.
2. If you're adding a translation to a comic book page that is compressed in a .cbr or .cbz file, extract the JPGs or PNGs using 7-Zip FIle manager or any archiving utility that supports RAR and ZIP.
2. Open the comic book page in your graphics editor. Any commercial product like Adobe Photoshop Elements or Corel Paint Shop would do. There are also plenty of open source applications like Gimp that can do the job. If you're working with a black and white comic book, use the Levels feature to increase the brightness of the white areas. Using your application's Paintbrush tool, "erase" the text using the white color swatch. You also have the option to "white out" the balloons and thought bubbles depending on how organized the artwork layout is.
I recommend removing just the text for cluttered lettering like those found in manga or recent Marvel comic books. For the purpose of this tutorial, I removed the speech bubble because the art is fairly clean though I really didn't need to. Save the image as .PNG or any lossless format.
3. Create a new document in CorelDRAW X5 using any reasonably sized paper dimension.
4. Import the comic book page or panel by clicking File then Import.
3. If you're translating text (say Italian to English), it's almost always better to create your own thought balloon or callout because you can adjust the shape and size for the length of the text.
Although drawing your own vector thought bubbles and conversation balloons is easy and generally nicer to look at, if you're working on an extremely lengthy comic book (or a dialogue-intensive one), you would work faster using CorelDraw's Callout Shape Tool.
Click the Callout Shape tool and select your Perfect Shape from the list on the Property Bar. Click and drag to create a callout.
2. One of the disadvantages of using the Callout Shape tool instead of drawing the thought balloon is that that the resulting shape is lifeless. Comic books and graphic novels make use of naturally drawn and interesting shapes to hold text.
Panel from Spectacular Spider-Man #27. Art by Frank Miller.
To change the properties of the outline of the Callout, select the callout using the Pick Tool and click the Outline Pen from the Toolbox. On the Calligraphy settings, change the Stretch and Angle values to make the callout look more interesting for the reader.
Lettering Comic Books using CorelDraw Part 2: Finding fonts and adding the text
0 comments:
Post a Comment