Hand Lettering

Outline:

• Hand Lettering Technique
• Letterforms

Hand Lettering Technique

When I hand-letter SFX for manga, I basically use the same technique every time, whether I'm using Photoshop or CSP.

For this example, I'm going to show how I'd subtitle this sound effect with the translation "GAAAH" in Photoshop:

1. Create a reference layer, with the opacity set to 50%. Choose a brush you're comfortable using. For this example, I'm using my "Hard Elliptical" brush.
2. Draw your biggest letter. For this SFX, I want the second letter "A" to be read the loudest, so I want it to be the biggest:
3. Draw the rest of your letters. Don't be too precious about it.
4. Adjust your reference layer with Free Transform (Edit > Free Transform or CMD + T) until you're 100% happy with the placement. It's much easier to adjust the placement in this stage than when you're drawing your final lines, so repeat steps 1 - 4 as many times as needed.
5. On a new layer, play around with brushes until you find the brush that matches the source SFX the best. I like to just draw a couple lines next to the source, mimicking the shape of the artist's lines.
6. Clear out your layer from step 5 or create a new one. Draw your final SFX over the reference. You can see I chose to change the shape of the A's at the last minute, because it matched the source better:
7. Turn off or delete your reference layer, and you're done.

Some notes about this technique:

• Use fonts for your reference layer! Using fonts for reference is totally acceptable, and it's a great alternative if you're new to hand-lettering.
• You can re-use your reference layer as many times as you want. For example, if you have 5 "CHATTER"s on one page, you can re-use the reference layer you made, and just draw your final SFX over it. They'll all look similar but unique.
• Try to keep your brush size the same size as (or slightly smaller than) the brush used in the source SFX, even if the total size of your SFX is smaller. This isn't a hard rule, but it can make your SFX blend in better when zoomed out.
• If you're fully replacing the SFX, just make sure to whitewash the source before drawing your reference layer. See more of this technique here.

Letterforms

The way that you draw letters has an impact on how they sound in the reader's head. Please consider how different this BARK sounds based on the ways the letters are drawn with the same brush:

Every letter has several different ways to draw it. Please consider the different voice that each of these variants have:

If you need more reference for letterforms, fonts are a great resource. For example, if you're trying to convey a certain voice, you can reference the letterforms in a font that has that same voice.