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.

(more…)

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.

(more…)

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.)

(more…)

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.

(more…)

This is the first in a series of tutorials on using the free vector image editing software, Inkscape to make comics. This series of comics will be specifically for use in making a comic out of anime screenshots, but the same information can be applied to photograph comics and hand- or computer-drawn comics.

This series of tutorials expects a very basic understanding of Inkscape, but should be understandable to a patient newcomer to Inkscape who’s ready to explore the software a little to find what’s written about here.

This tutorial is written using Inkscape 0.46.

(more…)