Neophyte artist

[Big Kahuna]

Hello, all. My name is Big Kahuna. I have been writing for a few years, mostly in the area of mind control, and am becoming interested in adapting some of my work into comics. My exploratory pieces can be found here.

I expect my first few attempts will be fairly pathetic, as I have much to learn. Story and art are of course the most difficult aspects, but in attempting to construct my own work I stumbled over something I hadn't thought about - word balloons. Is there a quick and easy way to make them? I work exclusively in Poser (tight budget), and I suppose I can get a cheap, used copy of Photoshop if need be. I'm a Mac guy. I like the style shown in Finister Foul's work below. I think the shading helps bring it out. Any help anyone wants to give would be greatly appreciated.



I hope it's okay that I used this artwork. It was in the free area.

[Northern Chill]

Any current version of Photoshop Elements has the ability to add word balloons included with it....I think it can be obtained separately from the full blown Photoshop at a much cheaper price. In fact, some new PC's may come with it pre-installed.

Good luck on your adapting plans....I've seen your text stories in the past and enjoy them very much.

Northern Chill

[Big Kahuna]

I will definitely look into Elements. I checked out your page. Excellent, excellent work. I especially like the gray-coated fembots.

[mitru]

Hello!

I use Comic Life 2 for making my comics, it's a cheap solution to add balloons, text caption and sound texts. It's very versatile program too.

I've a kind different style from Finister (even he was one of the artist who brought me to the comic creation world and I still am a great fan of his work) but if you want some help or question, I'll be glad to help.

I suse Poser Pro 2012 for the renders, Photoshop 9 for postwork and Comic Life 2 for the layout.

If you want to see some of my work, I'll land on MC COmix soon, but you can see some of my pictures or covers... clicking below.

[Big Kahuna]

Hello!

I use Comic Life 2 for making my comics, it's a cheap solution to add balloons, text caption and sound texts. It's very versatile program too.

I've a kind different style from Finister (even he was one of the artist who brought me to the comic creation world and I still am a great fan of his work) but if you want some help or question, I'll be glad to help.

I suse Poser Pro 2012 for the renders, Photoshop 9 for postwork and Comic Life 2 for the layout.

If you want to see some of my work, I'll land on MC COmix soon, but you can see some of my pictures or covers... clicking below.

Your work is great. I especially like the cover of Purple Kitty 5/5, but maybe that's just the pose. I use Poser 7, and I just picked up Photoshop Elements 8 for speech balloons, so I'll give that a try. I will also give the 30-day trial of Comic Life 2 a spin. Pity it didn't come bundled on my Mac.

Thanks for the help!

[Big Kahuna]

First attempt with the PSE 8. Not the most intuitive program, but then I'm not all that intuitive either. You can see that I have much to learn. Font is too big and balloons correspondingly too large. Haven't figured out how to gradient color the balloons yet, but that's what learning is all about.

[mitru]

I learnt very much of Photoshop here:

http://psd.tutsplus.com/
http://www.melissaevans.com/

You have some interesting tutorials and tricks on both websites.

[Big Kahuna]

On working with blood. I'm very fond of the image below, except for the blood. The cut across the shirt looks terrible, in part because i didn't do anything to color that section of the shirt red, but also because the shirt isn't sliced, and also because the blood effect may itself be wrong. I'd appreciate a fresh view.