One of the balloon techniques listed on Blambot’s comic grammar page is “breaking borders”. For this type of balloon, Nate Piekos writes,

[Balloons breaking borders] seems to be more prevalent in hand lettering. I suspect this is because doing it digitally generally adds an extra few steps that can take time to do properly and cleanly.

In Inkscape, a lot of things are being done manually already when it comes to making a comic, so a few extra steps here and there isn’t that big of an issue. For balloons breaking borders, it’s actually not too bad. Essentially, “Difference” is your friend. Anyone not familiar with the “Path” menu items for adding and subtracting between objects should play around with them, and get to know them. It’ll help develop ways of doing things, such as with a balloon breaking the panel’s border.

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I’m on my first of six days off from work, and already the lack of four to six hours of daily programming is getting to me. Aaaah! Must program. Need programming to do… Then I saw this post by CCY of Mega Megane Moe. Looking at the code included there, my eye glistened, and I went at it faster than Sayo-pe on a detective case. (Just finished reading book nine of GALS! today… One more to go!)

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Although I’ve already covered a nice method of bordering an image (which can probably use improving), I don’t actually use that method. While it gives a lot of flexability and freedom, it takes a bit of work to set up. Instead, I use a simple method that’s pretty quick to do, but doesn’t give so many options if I want to change it around later.

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One of the reasons I like creating a thought balloon in Inkscape–as opposed to using a comic creator software with pre-designed template balloons–is that each balloon can be tailored to the background behind it and the scene it’s a part of. (This is true also for exclamation balloons, and more complex speech balloons, both of which I’lll cover in a later tutorial.)

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There are a few ways to do borders around comic panels in Inkscape. This tutorial looks at placing a border around a image. More goes into a page of panels, but knowing how to handle a single panel alone will be required before putting a whole page together.

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