Creating Webcomics: How to Create Dialogue, Balloons & Sound Effects for Your Webcomics | Matthew Dewey | Skillshare
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Creating Webcomics: How to Create Dialogue, Balloons & Sound Effects for Your Webcomics

teacher avatar Matthew Dewey, Writer, Artist

Watch this class and thousands more

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Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Introduction to Dialogue, Balloons & Sound Effects for Your Webcomic

      1:52

    • 2.

      Balloons in Webcomics

      8:02

    • 3.

      Letting and Finding the Ideal Font

      6:24

    • 4.

      Establlishing Character Voice and Personality

      5:46

    • 5.

      How to Add Sound Effects to Your Webcomic

      10:00

    • 6.

      Polishing Your Dialogue and What Next?

      5:55

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About This Class

Hello Webcomic Creator!

Welcome to the course where I show you how to create dialogue, balloons, and sound effects for your webcomics! Don't make the same mistakes that so many novice webcomic artists make and create a webcomic to be proud of!

My name is Matthew Dewey and I am a writer. It is hard to say when my passion for writing began, but if I can recall it all started back in primary school. A small child with not much to say, but plenty to write, or in early cases, scribble across a page. I went on to write my first book at 19 years old, publishing several more and then started teaching other writers through courses, YouTube videos, and coaching.

Enough monologue, it is time to tell you what this course is worth to you. First, this course was created with the express intention of teaching the fundamentals of establishing dialogue, creating clarity, and adding sound effects to your webcomics. After creating my first webcomic, I went on to work with other styles and started another webcomic series, and then a third after that. I dabbled with different styles and genres, learning as I went. After all this time, I learned what I did wrong and what I did right.

In this course, I will show you how to properly set dialogue and develop your own style, saving you time to create more pages!

I will show you:

  • The different balloons used in webcomics
  • How to create clarity in your dialogue
  • An example of ideal comic lettering
  • Establish interesting character personality
  • How to create/draw sound effects
  • AND many tips to help you develop your own style!

Welcome to "How to Create Dialogue, Balloons & Sound Effects for Your Webcomics!" It is this course that will help you create webcomic dialogue and sound effects!

"A comic is a combination of art and story. The two work together to create something amazing!"

Meet Your Teacher

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Matthew Dewey

Writer, Artist

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Level: Beginner

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Transcripts

1. Introduction to Dialogue, Balloons & Sound Effects for Your Webcomic: Hello and welcome to our course on creating dialogue in your web comics. My name is Matty doing, and I'm a web comic creator and instructor. I've created several courses on web comic creation, which you can find on my profile. If you want to check out some more work I'm currently working on to web comics, malice and cryptic ponds, which you can find on web tins. Now the topic of this course is an interesting one because I'm also a writer and I typically work with a lot of dialogue writing as well. That if you are new to welcome integration, you might be wondering to set out your dialogue, how to create the ballooning in your dialogue. How to create sound effects are to show personality. And that's something we'll be covering in this course. Not only will we be covering the basics of setting up the balloons for your dialogue and how to show which character is speaking. But I'll be giving you some special tips and methods to help add to your style as well. So that way you can not only create clarity in your dialogue, but also demonstrate your unique style as a web comic creator. Now, while this course is for beginner web comic creators, as it does cover the fundamentals of dialogue writing. I'll also be giving you those additional tips and methods for more experienced web comic creators. If you are interested in demonstrating more of your personality, instead of just using the basics. The bonus of this course is that I'm also an active instructor. So if you have any questions, be sure to leave them in the comments below. And I'll be able to answer them as soon as I see them, which is normally within a day. If you're looking to show clarity and personality in your dialogue. And this is the web comic cause for you, with that, I hope to see you soon in the very first lesson. Bye for now. 2. Balloons in Webcomics: Hello and welcome to your course on showing dialogue and writing it for your web comics. In this lesson, we're gonna be talking about the ballooning of your characters in order to create clarity. So I'll be going through the different balloon tops that are commonplace and web comics, as well as some techniques I would recommend to help the reader understand what is going on. So to start with the basics, let's have a look at our characters here. Now, this first characters obviously speaking the arrows pointing towards them. So this way the reader will understand that they're speaking. This is the basic bubble that we all use. When it comes to just basic speech. Below it, we have a character that is more agitated. So in order to convey this to the reader, the emotion in the character's voice. We can either alter the text or we can alter the bubble. And we do this by adding a jagged line here. And we can make the entire bubble Jaggard if it is so emotional as well. If the character isn't speaking, we normally convey this through clouds or thought boxes. In this case the characters and speaking, they're thinking something and we place it here in the bubble. And instead of an arrow, we directed with a sequence of smaller clouds. However, these are only the basics when it comes to creating bubbles for your characters. You can have a lot of fun with it, and it helps to show personality as well. E.g. we have a robotic character. So in order to convey this, I create a very square looking bubble for them to use. When NAOH speaking, this conveys the robotic tone a lot better. If the characters nervous, they'll have a nervous speech. And a way to convey this is through a wobbly looking bubble. And below that we have no bubble at all. Sometimes we can convey what is going on through simply text and no bubbles necessary. Most of the time this will be when the character is yelling. However, you can do this if the character is muttering to themselves or anything like that. As long as it's clear that it is that character alone that is speaking in that scene. And you can do this by placing it takes closer to them or assigning it to a certain color, as we'll talk about soon. But now, that's for singular characters speaking. If we have multiple characters talking in a scene, we have to establish the right sequence. So that way the reader understands that there is a back-and-forth and they know which bubble to go to next. Now, most comics work from top to bottom. We have a dialogue between two characters. Will have the first dialogue at the top, the second and third, and so on, always going below the other. You'll notice that the character here on the right is speaking twice. In order to convey this, I could point to arrows to them, and that would work just fine as an arrow from this box and an arrow from this box. But another way I can convey this is simply by connecting these boxes like so. But let's say that the speech bubble over here is a thought, in which case I would disconnect it from this upper bubble over again. And I'll create a simple Cloud at points towards the character that is thinking. This is one way that you can be clear about who is speaking and weigh the readers should be reading next. Typically, this also follows the left-to-right rule when it comes to waste and comics. In other words, if you have two speech bubbles on the exact same level, you will start with a one on the left and then move to the right. However, more Eastern Comics such as Japanese manga, you'll be reading from right to left. Now, this is a great way to separate a character from the other, but making sure it's clear to the reader who is speaking with arrows and bars connecting speech bubbles like I've done here. But there is another way that you can make it clear to the reader who is speaking in a more stylish way. One method I like to use is colors that represent the characters. E.g. if I have a character who has radiate and a character those blue here, then I can separate the dialogue by changing the speech bubble to match their hands. And I find this method is not only great for adding some character to the dialogue, but it also makes it clearer for the reader who wants to understand who's speaking when the characters onto and frame. This is something that I've taken to using MI, web comic, cryptic pons. And the web comic, I like to separate the main character speech bubbles from other characters, giving them different colors. So the main character will have the basic black outline, white background, or their speech bubble. But other characters will have different colors. For this character, I've chosen this one to match the hay, but depending on the personality that I'm writing, folded colors may change. Another important thing to do though, is to remain consistent. So if you have chosen a character who has a blue shirt and given them a blue outline to the speech bubble. If they change their shirt later, you should still leave them with that blue speech bubble because that is what the reader has grown used to. There are many ways you can create clarity in your stories. But consistency is number one. If you start to break things but too much, the reader will have a difficult time trying to understand what is going on. Another way that I like to convey who is speaking is through icons. And I use this specifically in manners because I have a limited color palette. I'm going for a gray scale and red tones when it comes to malice. So I don't have the whole range of colors to choose from when I'm assigning colors to each character. Instead, how our convey who is speaking when the outer frame is through icons by placing a small graphic of their head next to the speech bubble. So that way it's easier for the reader to understand who is speaking. Now, occasionally, when reading web comics, you'll find a square Bible that isn't assigned to any character. Normally that is narration that is simply used speaking to the reader, explain what is happening or setting the scene. E.g. introducing a new chapter or saying that Tom has passed, things like that. However, it also applies to narration from a character. If a character is talking about a certain point in the story, perhaps it's better for them to have a more narrative way of conveying that information rather than through Sort dialog. And this narration bubble isn't a bad idea at all. It helps give some insight into the main character or whoever is speaking. And eventually, the reader will understand who's speaking, whether you tell them explicitly or they learn about that later on from context. But those are the basics when it comes to assigning speech bubbles TO characters. However, there's always room for some creativity. So if you have an interesting idea that you want to apply to speech bubble, feel free to do so. The techniques that I've shown you here are some that I've picked up and just made up as I went along. And they still help to tell the story, as long as it's clear who is speaking, which speech bubbles should be read next, you should have no problem creating speech bubbles for your web comics. Feel free to use any of the ideas that I've shown you here. And of course, if you have new interesting ideas that you want to try out with your speech bubbles, we show to do so. It might become one of the core parts of your web comic style. Now, in the next lesson we'll be talking about the lettering in your webcam x. I'll see you then. Bye for now. 3. Letting and Finding the Ideal Font: Hello and welcome back to your course on creating dialogue and sharing it clearly in your web comics. In this lesson, I'm going to be talking about the lettering that you may use in your web comics. Now when I first started creating a web comic, I had no clue what to do with littering or speech bubbles. This is the very first page in my first web comic series. And there are many problems with it. First of all, there's way too many boxes going on. It can be tough to follow the sequence of events, the speech bubbles, the narration yet isn't good either. I tried to be clever by adding black backgrounds behind text to convey thoughts as an aeration. But that actually just clashed a lot with the image and blocked out a lot of things. So as my art style will get better, this would definitely not work. Now the problem is the font that I'm using here is not only to small, but it's also a font that all the littering is different, whether it's uppercase or lowercase. It's preferable in comics to have a font that will present all the characters as uppercase and perhaps a slightly larger or bolder uppercase, full capitalize letters, but that really isn't necessary. I presented my text and an unattractive manner and the text itself is also far too much like a novel instead of like a comic. Now, as a writer, first of all, this was something I should have realized sooner when I was looking at this and that there will be problems. And when it came to the speech bubbles are with severely limited. The software that I was using didn't allow me to create exact bubbles to fit the text that I was grading. So I kinda had to squish my text a lot, as you can see here with this image and this one here. And that really isn't attractive to look at either. Once more. It's a bad font once modes too small. And another factor is the speech bubbles on Great, Are there were still, is that I'm adjusting the text to fit the speech bubble in such a way that it's not good to read. It might work best for long textboxes like these for narration and everything. But for dialogue, it looks way too confined and strict. And that really doesn't look like an S wave coming to look at. It was only when I moved onto greeter that I started to have a bit of grip on how to present text. And I started to show this more in my other way, plank series cryptic pons here. As you can see here, the text is larger, it's more readable and the speech bubbles, they now look cleaner and they fit the texts that I've written. Another important tip I want to convey is that you can adjust your font size. You don't have to choose a specific one. E.g. in this speech bubble here, I wanted to convey volume so the text is larger as opposed to the dialog here. It takes to smaller because the character is just speaking to themselves. Now, as for the font that I'm using, It's called the Lafayette comic font. It's fairly common when it comes to web comics, and I'll definitely attach it if you're interested in using this font. But you can find a lot of free fonts online that will help you tell your story a lot better than the standard fonts that might come with Krita or other drawing software. As you can see from this font, everything is capitalized. So it makes it easier to read and discern what is going on at a quicker pace. And because it's so clear to read and the text is so much larger, the comic itself is a lot better to look at. Another tip I would like to give is not to have your speech bubble thought bubble. Hug the text too closely. I feel like this one over years doing that. But as I said earlier, when we're talking about speech bubbles, you don't actually need a speech bubble depending on the text. So in this example here, you will see that I don't use any speech bubbles or don't even use a font. I use hand-drawn texts. In this case. I feel that this adds a lot more informal nature to the scene. I do that when this character is muttering to themselves and when they screaming here in the next panel and surprise, as you can see from the hand-drawn texts, it's not exactly clean, but it's enough for the reader to understand what the character is saying. There are so many informal things you can do with speech bubbles, as I said in the last lesson, but you can also do the same with text. What's important is that what needs to be clear, it should be clear. So I recommend if you're new to web comic creation, to try out that font, which I will attach to this course. Or perhaps find a common font that is used in web comics. You can find a lot of those free fonts online is also plenty of tutorials on how to attach the font to use specific OD software. Save yourself from the traps that are fill into when I was starting out. And that's using default fonts or using a program that's fairly limited when it comes to speech bubbles and text. And as with speech bubbles, also use text as a way to convey the personality of your characters. You can have a lot of fun with this. It can help you emphasize the points in the text that you want to emphasize. And we'll make a story a lot more engaging because of that added personality, lead character, and personality is something that we're gonna be talking about a bit more in the next lesson as we discuss them all writing aspect of dialogue. For now, your project is to take the advice that I've given you when it comes to speech bubbles and texts. And test it out with one of your web comic pages. Create your characters, assign them suitable speech bubbles, play around with it. Try to make the web comic fuel a bit more dynamic and alive. Obviously don't get carried away and start creating and inconsistent mess. Because being inconsistent is just as bad as just using the default stuff. Be sure to showcase your work in the project section. And if you have any questions, be sure to let me know. I'll see you in the next lesson. Bye for now. 4. Establlishing Character Voice and Personality: Hello and welcome to your course on creating dialogue and ballooning in your web comic. In this lesson, I'm going to be stepping away from the tablet form moment to talk about specific personalities in your web comics. As we want, our character's personality is just shine through not only in a visual appearance and their actions, but also in a dialogue as well. And seen as this course focuses on dialogue. I'm gonna be talking more about the writing aspect when it comes to dialogue. So when it comes to writing dialogue, one of the first things you need to take into account is the interactions between your characters. Dialog when a character is talking to themselves really isn't much to go on. It's all about conflict in storytelling. So what you're really looking for is the dialogue between two or more characters. So if you have two or more characters conversing, you need to consider their relationship with each other. E.g. a character might not like another character, which case, the dialogue should reflect that not just their expression. So this could mean that they might insult other character, could mean that they use more aggressive language. Or if they like the character, they'll probably have a nickname for them or use the name often. Things like that. One thing I'd also like to advise quickly is when you are writing your dialogue, it helps to read it out loud. If you're writing a screenplay or working if the comic directly, take a moment to read the dialogue to self, trying to embody the personality of your character in doing so. Because sometimes as don't do so well of a job as our ears when it comes to detecting awkward speech. When it comes to the visual aspects of the personality as well, such as the expressions. You need to make sure your dialog fits them. Perhaps you have designed your story in a way that you understand how the characters are going to look in each panel. But you're not sure about the dialogue. And the dialogue will come after. If that's the case, then you need to construct dialogue that fits the visual appearance. If your character is running or jumping, or perhaps they surprised or angry. Dialog needs to match their expression and your movement. And these actions are important while superhero characters may be able to have a complex conversation while running at super speed. When it comes to realistic stories with characters that are a lot more human. You've got to make sure that your dialog fits their actions. So e.g. if they are running or they're in a fight, perhaps they'll have more pauses or broken speech and interruptions than if they were just sitting down conversing. This is why the written aspect of dialogue is so important. It can easily detract from his scene if your characters are speaking so casually while something amazing or shocking is happening. And yes, I do understand that this is exactly what you're looking for in some scenes, but certainly not all of them. E.g. if you have very human characters and they are in a terrible situation, or they've encountered something shocking. They're not going to be speaking so casually or exchanging jokes. Instead, they're going to be taking some time to absorb what they've just seen, or they're busy focusing on perhaps threats that are around them. And most of your scenes will be realistic in the sense if you are writing a more realistic wave coming. So is that a man take note of the writing as well as the visual aspects of your web comic. And this can be a difficult process to work with if you are just one person, which is why normally web comic teams have a designated writer and a designated artist. The artist is able to create the backgrounds and the figures and their expressions and actions. That it's the right to themselves that typically imagines the scenes and rots that dialogue. So they've got to make sure that they have great communication if they want to seem to really work out. But if you are creating a web comic by yourself, it's all resting on your shoulders. So there's no communication gap between you and yourself. It's all about focusing on what you want the reader to experience and how your characters would realistically be reacting scenes and dialogues in your story. As I said in a previous lesson, you can show who's speaking in different ways. We normally use arrows to point to the character speaking. But you can change the color of the speech bubble. Or you can include a little icon in the corner so you know who is speaking. But you can also alter the text to show their personality. Yes, you can have a different font for each character, or you can highlight certain parts of the text and change them in a way to show a certain term. That's something else to try to use in manners. Whenever character is talking about something that's a lot more ominous, scary, or they've been really serious. I changed the color of the font. This way the reader understand that when this font is used, this tone is being used and this is nothing spatial sound terms, web comic artists will italicize certain texts to show that emphasis. But it really depends on what you're going for with your story. Be sure to experiment with these different ideas until you find something that works for you and your web comic. That's your project for this lesson. In the next video, we're gonna be talking about how to convey sound effects in your web comics. I'll see you then. Bye for now. 5. How to Add Sound Effects to Your Webcomic: Hello and welcome back to your course on dialogue creation and ballooning in your web comics. Now, in this lesson we're gonna be talking about sound effects in web comics. And this can be one of the hardest things to perfect when it comes to web colleagues, at least for some creators. It's certainly something that I struggled with in the beginning and are typically avoided using sound effects in order to save myself that added difficulty. Now, there are many ways that one can present a sound effect, and it all depends on the style. Some web comic creators simply like to use the onomatopoeia in basic text, like in this middle example here. This example of crunch, I use the Lafayette text, as I mentioned in a previous lesson. And it works. It simply tells the reader what the sound effect is. But there's more to it than that. One. Kiddos are hand-drawn. One can add some effects to the lettering. One can make it a lot more informal. One can even make it so informal with as many exclamation marks and inconsistencies in the later in as possible. There are so many ways to emphasize a sound when it comes to web comics. And depending on the importance of that sound, the emphasis is also a factor you need to consider. If it's a small, barely noticeable sound, you don't want to put too much emphasis on it. At the same time. If it's something that's truly important, you don't want it to be so quiet either. So you really want to use a sound effect that best fits what you're going for in that scene. Now, I have several examples to show you my own works. And I wish I could show you some from others because I feel that there are a lot of web comic creators which have a better grip on how to convey sound effects than I do. But at the same time I can take their work to use in this course. Now, I'm gonna be showing you examples of how I've used it throughout my wave coming creations and give you some tips and advice and how to use it as well. So in this first example, this is when I was starting out with web comic creation. I wanted to use simple sound effects. So I tried to create some effects around the text itself. As you can see here in the corner, or Russell began graded some wavy lines to also add to that effect. And the second sound effect here, I tried to create a curve to it. So that way it's sort of wraps around this tumbleweed. And this is often done in comics to follow the direction of motion with your sound effect. When a character is firing a gun, you will see a bank typically following the trajectory of the bullet. Same goes for the whistle of the bullet. It follows after. This gives some emphasis to the speed and the vibrations of certain sounds. In this case, I wanted to show with the vibrations with these wobbly lines and the curve of crinkle over here. I also wanted to make sure that the literary and was in formal but not too and foremost, since I was working on a smaller scale and I still wanted it to be readable because this is an informal sound. It's not something that's very straightforward. So e.g. if you want to convey a more robotic machine-like sound, you would have a more straight and formal sound effect in order to emphasize the nature of that sound. Whereas this one is informal or wanted it to be something scrunched. I wanted to be something that didn't really have straight edges to it. So I used very informal literary. Now in this short strip, also used several sounds. I used a small sounds, first of all, to convey what the character is doing. Small sounds to convey them. Knocking on the rockier small text to show them struggling. And then finally, a large sound here to convey the massive difference between the volume of the sound effects. Now the biggest struggle that one might encounter when it comes to sound effects is finding the right sound effect. And the truth of the matter is sometimes you won't get it right. Sometimes you have to make up the sound because it's hard to imagine how you would put that sound into lettering. But there are some well-known ones, e.g. adult object hitting something that is also a Dog object would probably have a thud sound. If it has metallic, it would have a ringing noise. So you would put a ringing sound effect or Clang, things like that. And then they all ones where characters fatty another character and the most popular ones for that or like pow and compile. And then obviously when it comes to firing a gun, it is the bank or the rat attack that those are often used for weaponry. It really does depend on the objects themselves and the nature of the sound effect. One thing I'm trying to do if this sound effect is add a bit more weight to it. So instead of an empty text, I made sure these were solid littering and also gave them a more jagged edge to it. To emphasize the jagged edges here of the rock itself. Here's another simple one. Characters throwing down a metal ball and it makes it clanging sound effect. Now I have all sorts of effects around it to emphasize the sound, not just the lettering. I wanted to really add to the emotion here. So yes, there's the literary and I'll make it all wobbly because that's sort of the ringing tone that comes with a metal object making a loud noise. But it's also the effects around it here. Behind the character and surrounding and emphasizing and the object itself that also add the volume. So just like when it came to the tumbleweed here, I added lines around it. In this one, I added all sorts of graphics around it to add to that motion and emphasize it. And bringing it to a more modern comics. I have, in my latest comic here, I just have a character smashing a log with something and it makes a crunching noise because I want to emphasize that the word is being broken. So I'll just give it a basic crunch this time with a k and a small exclamation mark. Reason I do this is because I want most of this panel to be filled with dialogue and a textbox. And that's something you always need to take note of. This is why I always like to save the dialogue writing and the sound effects, everything like that for last, because you never know where you're going to have space for it. The reason I do this is because I don't want to sound effect here to be emphasized in this panel. But that's not the case all the time. When you're working with sound effects, you probably want at some point, the sound effect to be emphasized. Like in this comic here I want to emphasize it a bit more. But in this panel here, I wanted to emphasize the character screaming. No dialog box, just a basic sound effect of the character yelling and surprise. So I have the lettering like so. And probably the only creative thing around here is not just the literary, but the fact that the lettering goes behind the figures where he doesn't distract from the details that are put into them. Now the final point I'd like to make is sometimes you don't even need to include a sound effect. Sometimes the motion and the emphasis is, returning back to that web comic. Here. I have this bowl being thrown down with all the emphasis around it and the motion itself. It's easy enough for a reader to understand what has happened here. It's kinda like looking at a silent movie. When you see a character in a salad movie throw something down is no sound effect applied to it. You can still imagine what it sounded like from the emotion. So that means that in your web comics they might be points. We don't even want to include the sound effect. I look forward to stick reasons why you feel to distract from the scene. Or quite simply this engineer's style to include a sound effect for every little thing. And that's perfectly fine. You don't have to do that. Sometimes it might be better to not included, sometimes it might be better to include it. But you want to create a comic that is unique to you. And so obviously, you want to make sure that the comic fits your ideals for your comic. And rather than something that might be expected of you as a web comic rate, be that as it may, this is the lesson about sound effects. So your project for this lesson is to continue your web comic. But see if there's an area where you can add a sound effect. And once you do add a sound effect, you can share your work in the project section. But if you have any questions regarding sound effects, be sure to leave it in the discussions below, and I'll try to answer it as soon as possible. If there's an unprofessional piece of advice that I would give. It's simply to have fun with it. You can come up with all sorts of sounds in your own imagination. You don't have to often look for reference or use the ones that are so popular web comics, you don't have to have a sound that perfectly matches what it would sound like. You simply need to create a sound that you feel fits the scene that you're going for. And try to include it in a creative way. And that brings us to the end of this lesson. Now, in the next video, we'll be discussing how to polish your dialogue and way to go from here. So I'll see you then. Bye for now and happy drawing. 6. Polishing Your Dialogue and What Next?: Hello and welcome back to your course on dialogue writing in your web comics. In this lesson, I'm gonna be giving you some additional advice on how to polish your dialogue and discuss what to do next. Now we've covered a lot of the basics when it comes to creating dialogue. And I've given you plenty of ideas on how to add some unique styling to your dialogue as well. You are a web comic artist, which means you need to show some of your personality skills and preferences in your style. And once you have found your style, it's all about developing it over time. You can't exactly perfect everything straight away. And while you can choose a certain format, as the years go on, you'll want to improve. If you are a beginner when it comes to web comics, you'll find that you'll become a better writer and a better artist as the days go on so quickly, Here's some practical advice that I use when I create dialogue in my web comics. First and foremost, I have three separate layers when it comes to the dialogue. And these three layers typically at the top of my layer system, because I want them to sit above all the colors and filters and linework. Now, when it comes to these three layers, the first layer, of course, is the text that'll be at the very top. The text itself will of course not be affected by anything else. And below that layer, I'll have the layer that has the bubble, our plan. Now this could be the bubble outlined for the characters. It could be the narration, it could be whatever. But I like to have an outline established above everything else. And sometimes this means that I'm going to be having the bubble above a figure or a background that I've created and it will be covering some details, but that's just fine. What we are trying to do when we are creating web comics is tell a story. And sometimes we will have to hide details that we might have worked hard on. The third layer is the background for the speech bubble itself. The reason I have this on a separate layer and below the bubble heartlands is because I like to have the background of the speech bubble overlap just under the line of the bubble itself. If I have it above, that can affect alarm work. If I have it on the same layer that can also affect the line work. And that's something I really like to avoid in all of my work. These three layers make it easy to manage my dialogue, and of course the narration, Emma, web comics. And of course, if I want to add a unique feature to this dialog with it before a specific character or for the web comic as a whole, these three layers make it easy. That brings me to another point, which is I personally like to create the panels before I create the dialogue. I rarely often plan out my dialogue with a SketchUp or what that page might look like. Because sometimes the story might change and the figures positioning as well. So what I like to do is anticipate what the dialogue will be and when it will be. As I'm creating the picture, I'll create space for the figures or in an area in that panel to include dialogue. And there's always some aspect of your writing that can be polished. This is something that I have noticed because sometimes when I'm reading over my old work, I see that they are flaws in the dialogue. It doesn't read as naturally as I would like. That's why I like to practice a lot of these new techniques today to avoid the same mistakes. And that brings me to my earlier tube, which is reading your dialogue out loud. Because sometimes you have to hear it and not just read it to understand what is right and what is wrong with that dialogue. And my final piece of advice is to know when to include dialogue and when not to include dialogue. Sometimes you might want to just leave a panel as is. And you want to showcase a figure, all the art that you have created. And that's perfectly fine. There'll be many times in my web comics where I haven't included any dialogue at all because I simply wanted to show a journey or I wanted to show the passage of time. And I didn't need dialogue to do that for me. You certainly don't want any characters speaking for the sake of speaking, we'll including narration whenever you see there's a gap. So give yourself some breathing room when it comes to web comics. If you are a writer, I know it's easy to focus only on the text. But when it comes to web comics, It's the best of both worlds. You have the lateral imagery for the reader and you have compelling dialogue and duration for the reader as well. And just like they're gonna be some panels where you have more dialogue. They're gonna be panels when you have little or no dialogue. Now where to go from here? Well, as I said at the start of this course, we're going to go through the basics of creating dialogue and it's now time for you to put it into practice. Take some of the advice that I've given you, a pinch of salt because you are your own unique creator, which means you will develop your own style as you go along. But if you are new to create a web comics, I hope that these tips and practical methods help you create your dialogue with ease. And if you are currently working on a web comic, want to show off some of your work. You can do so in the project section, you can link some of your work, whether it be to whip, to know, to pass, and just let other creators know that you are developing your style as they are as well. I'd like to remind my students that I'm also an active instructor. Which means if you have any questions for me on web comics or just dialogue specifically, you can let me know in the comments as well. If you're interested in seeing some of my work, I'm currently working on two webcam x. One is called malice and the other is called cryptic ponds. And you could find both on web tunes if you are interested in more courses on web comic creation, I have several more profile for you to check out with that. Thank you for joining me on this course and I wish you the best of luck in your web comic creation. Good day, good not unhappy drawing.