Cartoon speech balloons

December 8, 2005 11:11 AM

Is there a good way to do cartoon speech balloons? I sometimes toss together cheap cartoons in an old version of Paintshop Pro. What's the best way of doing this, aside from hacking up something with an ellipse tool? Are there usable clip art samples out there I can import & paste? I'm sure there's a Photoshop plugin for this kind of thing, but I don't have Photoshop.
posted by rolypolyman to media & arts (9 comments total)

Blambot Dialogue Balloons.
posted by grabbingsand at 11:17 AM on December 8, 2005

Paintshop pro comes with clip art in .psp format. Including speech balloons. Should be in the Objects folder inside the PSP directory.
posted by oxala at 11:20 AM on December 8, 2005

presets for download - all free
posted by Sallysings at 11:21 AM on December 8, 2005

For paint shop pro it's easy....select the Preset Shapes tool, and look at the Callout shapes, they're all the normal cartoon balloons.
posted by patrickje at 12:11 PM on December 8, 2005

prefab speech balloons are the pits!

i comicked for three years and always wondered how people could fit their type comfortably in those horribly-shaped bubbles. my hacking-up-something-with-the-ellipse-tool method: type your text, make a rectangular selection around it, buff out the left and right sides with ellipse selections, add a little hook down to the speaker, then hit delete and stroke the whole thing and WHAM! bubble!
posted by soma lkzx at 12:39 PM on December 8, 2005

I'm pretty sure one of the Wingdings or Webdings fonts has speech bubbles included.
posted by web-goddess at 1:00 PM on December 8, 2005

Grabbingsand, that's a great link... I need to check that out.

Here are my suggestions... try out Comic Book Creator for the PC or Comic Life for the Mac. (And yes, you can use real pictures with these.)

Both have free trial periods... have fun.
posted by jerryg99 at 1:55 PM on December 8, 2005

I'm not sure what the paintshop equivalent would be, but in photoshop I'd draw the balloon with tail as a solid white shape on its own layer and then use layer styles->stroke to trace it with a black line.
posted by mcsweetie at 3:06 PM on December 8, 2005

There is only one real way to do word balloons on the computer. And that's to use illustrator or freehand to create the balloons and then composite the art and balloons in Quark (ugh) or InDesign. Full instructions here. It's how us pros do it...
posted by ninthart at 2:56 AM on December 9, 2005