Chapter 11: Creating Your Own Sound Effects

Making sound effects for manga is an art form in and of itself. It takes a lot of work and skill to turn sound into text! The letters that you choose to represent a sound are important, but so are the font, the colors, and even whether or not you choose to distort those letters for emphasis.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Adding Sound effects in speech balloons and how to group sound effect layers
• Using fonts for sound effects by adding color and lines to fonts
• Hand lettering and Using the Mesh Transform tool to wrap text
• Making eye-grabbing titles

Use your skills of handling fonts, adding color, adding effects, distorting into the shape you desire with the Mesh Transform tool, and hand lettering to create the most dramatic sound effects and titles for your manga.

Let's dive right into these tools!

Technical requirements

To get started, you need Clip Studio Paint already installed on your device, and a new canvas opened with a white paper layer. Any size is fine, but I recommend creating a 300 dpi square canvas to go through the content in this chapter.

Adding sound effects in speech balloons

You can handle some sound effects in a similar way to dialog speech balloons. Just create the balloon shape and it will contain sound effects instead of dialog. You can apply this for popping, beeping, whispering, and shouting sounds. You can find out more about speech balloons in Chapter 7, Using Text and Balloon Tools.

Follow these steps to create a sound effect with a balloon:

1. Open a canvas and sketch your idea of a sound balloon with any drawing tool.
2. Click the Layer color icon in the Layer Property palette to turn the sketch color to blue.
3. Create a new vector layer on top of the pencil drawing layer by clicking the Create new vector layer icon, select the Felt pen sub tool from the Marker tool group, and trace your sound effect text in the vector layer as in the following screenshot:

   Figure 11.1 – Screenshot of the handwritten sound

4. Since it's on a vector layer, you can correct the text to the exact shape...

Using fonts for sound effects

The easiest way to make sound effects is to use fonts, especially when you can't create sound effects exactly how you want yourself – when there should be more expressions and they should be professional-looking. Don't worry, there are tons of great fonts available on the website, and some of them are free to use! Many specialty fonts exist that are perfect for creating the feeling of explosions, cracking, gunfire, and more. Let's see how to add fonts.

Important note

Some great resources for these types of fonts are www.blambot.com and www.1001freefonts.com, but be sure to check the terms of use for any free font that you download! Some free font creators do not allow their fonts to be used in commercial projects, so if you're making a comic to sell, you need to be certain you are not breaking any copyright laws!

After downloading a new font and installing it on your computer, you may need to shut down Clip Studio Paint...

Adding outlines, gradients, and patterns to text

Now you know how to make your font appear in your font list, and you have text on your canvas, we can start manipulating text to make it closer to your visual requirements.

Of course, you can select a color other than black or white for your text while entering it, but what if you want to apply a gradient, a texture, or create an outline for the text to make it pop off the page? In this section, we'll cover those exact topics! All of these are easy effects to accomplish with just a few button clicks and some tricks in the Layer and Layer Property palettes.

Adding an outline

This technique works for anything on a layer that you may want to add an outline to, not just text. Here, we'll use our BOOM! sound effect as an example. It's very easy to create an outline in Clip Studio Paint using the Layer Property palette.

Follow these easy steps to add an outline to the contents of a layer. In this case, we're...

Using the Mesh Transform tool to warp text

Lots of sound effects in manga and comics follow curves or the line of action to emphasize the art on the page. In the following screenshot, the sound effect for the explosion is angled and shaped to emphasize the action:

Figure 11.18 – Screenshot of transformed text

Though you can hand-draw sound effects like this if you want to (and hand-lettering is a great skill to have!), you can also create curved and warped text using the Mesh Transform tool.

Follow these steps to create a warped sound effect:

1. Ensure that your text layer is active by locating it in the Layer palette and clicking on it to highlight it.
2. In the File menu, click on Layer, and then click on Duplicate Layer to create a copy of the text layer. Alternatively, you can also click on the layer in the Layer palette and drag it to the New Layer icon to create a copy of the layer.
3. With the layer copy selected and the original text layer not visible...

Making titles

We are going to look at some possibilities for creating title text by using methods we have just learned in this chapter. The title text is not only for telling what the manga is called but also showing the feeling and tone of the content, such as thriller, horror, romance, comical, fashionable, or tragic. Let's have a look at the potential of title texts.

The following screenshot is a title for a light-hearted manga story. I used a ready-made font, and added a vector cloud drawing, then finally gave them the same color. The cloud shape is placed like a crown on top of the title, to emphasize the theme "sky," hence the use of the color blue too:

Figure 11.23 – Screenshot of title text 1

The following screenshot is the second example, which is a title for a science fiction, horror manga. I used a ready-made font, and then fading, scratching, and dripping textures were added using ink tools. Using the color white only on...

Summary

In this concise chapter, we have explored ways to create sound effects. We have used specialized fonts to make sound effects, and have learned how to punch up those fonts with outlines and gradient effects. We used clipping layers to add a pattern to a sound effect, and learned about mesh transformation to distort and curve our sound effects. Finally, we looked at various title text artworks using some of the techniques we learned, such as downloading fonts, using the Mesh Transform tool, and using clipping masks.

In the next chapter, we will explore the wonderful world of masks. Not masks for costumes, but layer masks! Read on to learn more about this feature of Clip Studio Paint.