The confrontation between Charles Waterton and Edward Thornhill Simpson the soap manufacturer is rather wordy. It wasn’t until I printed a paper copy at the final size that I could see that the font was larger than it needed to be.
In this frame I’ve dropped a scan my pen and watercolour into a layout that I’ve set up in the comic strip creation program Manga Studio EX5.
Although in this second version the type looks rather small on screen, it is still a bit larger than is necessary to make it legible in print but it’s small enough to give a bit of breathing space around the speech bubbles.
Waterton in Watercolour
I saved the first image in RGB (red, green, blue) format, the recommended method for viewing on screen, the second in CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, black) which supposedly gives the best results when printing but I prefer the colour cast of RGB, even on the printed version from my colour laser. Neither version manages to capture the transparency of the original watercolour artwork. A professional printer will, I’m sure, make a better job of it.
The typeface is Hannotate SC Regular, set in a italics in the second version. I might hand letter the final version but for the moment this is a useful way of setting up the design of each frame of the comic strip. There might be a few tweaks to script and it will be easier to accommodate those if I don’t commit to hand written text at this stage.