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Confessions of a Manga Letterer
I just spent an hour and a half tweaking six letters to be a crisp 255% of their normal size. You'd think this wouldn't be that big a deal--just click on the type, use the scale function, and there you go. But nope, not this time.
You see, back in spring of '06 or so, half-way through volume 3, Claymore's FX style changed from hand-drawn random and organic FX to using type. I didn't like the change at all, the type was so vanilla, cold, and boring. Besides, my specialty was hand-drawn FX, right? That's why I was hired for Nana, for Skip and Clay. I didn't want to do regular old text FX like 98% of the letterers out there. So I compromised. I drew my own vanilla type-ish FX, and showed them to Clay Editor #1. She thought it was a nice mix of the original and my style, and made sure to get approval from higher up for my kinda-type-but-still-hand-drawn FX. They had no problem, so we were good to go!!!!!
Now, almost two years later, I realize....I should have swallowed my purist pride and just gone to type. Ooog.
If only, if only....
You see, back in spring of '06 or so, half-way through volume 3, Claymore's FX style changed from hand-drawn random and organic FX to using type. I didn't like the change at all, the type was so vanilla, cold, and boring. Besides, my specialty was hand-drawn FX, right? That's why I was hired for Nana, for Skip and Clay. I didn't want to do regular old text FX like 98% of the letterers out there. So I compromised. I drew my own vanilla type-ish FX, and showed them to Clay Editor #1. She thought it was a nice mix of the original and my style, and made sure to get approval from higher up for my kinda-type-but-still-hand-drawn FX. They had no problem, so we were good to go!!!!!
Now, almost two years later, I realize....I should have swallowed my purist pride and just gone to type. Ooog.
Apparently Clay's mangaka, Yagi Norihiro-sensei, decided the type he was using was indeed boring, so he added a new style, one that had the edges of the katakana letters fringed in a concave curve with a white space at either edge of said fringe. I made a 2nd alphabet of letters to reflect this. Not too longer after the "fringe" set came into use, he pulled a third version on me, with convex fringe and a white space in the middle. Enter my third set of alphabet, "convex".
He occasionally still pulls new versions on me, surprising me with speed lines in the middle of letters, odd additions of half-fringed letters, more weird speed lines, that type of thing. These oddities don't appear enough to justify making 4th and 5ths sets of alphabets, so I grit my teeth and tweak my original vanilla set when needed, then save the results for later use.
The problem is that my alphabets are not type, they are hand-drawn with the brush tool, thus they do not re-size well. (Can we say "pixelated"?? Even at 1200 dpi!!) Today, when I had to scale some up to 255%, the fringe did not look good at all. To be blunt, it sucked. So I gritted my teeth and made new versions of the six letters, with very fine and sharp new fringe.
Ohh....If I had only gone to type when I had the chance. I could have used a boring vanilla font, like Arial, then found an FX-y fringed one, and another FX-y convex fringed one. Type is soooo easy to scale thanks to lovely vectors...no extra effort required, just do it and go. Oh sure, it would have been a real hassle and taken a great deal of effort to find those different fronts (not Arial, but the other two I'd have to really hunt to find matches), and then learn how to tweak the type so I could warp their shape for best Japanese coverage while still being readable. But my pride didn't let me, so by hand it was.
The real irony is that I was forced to learn how to FX with type when I began working on Naruto. And it wasn't difficult at all. Grrmph.
Of course, 12 volumes into Clay, it's a little late to suddenly switch FX styles. At least the organic hand-drawn original FX are increasingly appearing again, which makes me a happy letterer because I can much more closely cover the original FX. Thus less retouch for me. And retouch is what makes Clay sostress-inducing mind-glazingly take forever challenging.
But still, when I think about how much time I've invested in my three sets of alphabets, and now in my new fourth set....
He occasionally still pulls new versions on me, surprising me with speed lines in the middle of letters, odd additions of half-fringed letters, more weird speed lines, that type of thing. These oddities don't appear enough to justify making 4th and 5ths sets of alphabets, so I grit my teeth and tweak my original vanilla set when needed, then save the results for later use.
The problem is that my alphabets are not type, they are hand-drawn with the brush tool, thus they do not re-size well. (Can we say "pixelated"?? Even at 1200 dpi!!) Today, when I had to scale some up to 255%, the fringe did not look good at all. To be blunt, it sucked. So I gritted my teeth and made new versions of the six letters, with very fine and sharp new fringe.
Ohh....If I had only gone to type when I had the chance. I could have used a boring vanilla font, like Arial, then found an FX-y fringed one, and another FX-y convex fringed one. Type is soooo easy to scale thanks to lovely vectors...no extra effort required, just do it and go. Oh sure, it would have been a real hassle and taken a great deal of effort to find those different fronts (not Arial, but the other two I'd have to really hunt to find matches), and then learn how to tweak the type so I could warp their shape for best Japanese coverage while still being readable. But my pride didn't let me, so by hand it was.
The real irony is that I was forced to learn how to FX with type when I began working on Naruto. And it wasn't difficult at all. Grrmph.
Of course, 12 volumes into Clay, it's a little late to suddenly switch FX styles. At least the organic hand-drawn original FX are increasingly appearing again, which makes me a happy letterer because I can much more closely cover the original FX. Thus less retouch for me. And retouch is what makes Clay so
But still, when I think about how much time I've invested in my three sets of alphabets, and now in my new fourth set....
If only, if only....