My first Illustrator brush

For a few years now I have been lettering comics for myself and others on a variety of comic projects. You can see some examples of my work here. Recently a book came out by the incredibly talented letterer Nate Piekos of Blambot where he has distilled his years of lettering experience into an amazing helpful guide.

You can get your hands on the book here https://blambot.com/pages/the-essential-guide-to-comic-book-lettering, however today I am talking about one specific section in the book I used just this week.

'Custom Illustrator Brushes For Balloons'

I am currently working on my first long-form comic called The Gorge with artist Charles Raymond of Not So Tiny comics and I am going to be doing the lettering on the project on top of writing the script. The first few pages of the script involve a lot of dialogue boxes as the main character narrates the introduction.

Charles is a traditional hand-drawn artist so when I got the artwork through I saw that all the panel borders had these amazing textures to them that I wanted to make sure I could recapture in these dialogue boxes. So I opened my now 'lettering bible' and turned to the chapter 'Custom Illustrator Brushes For Balloons' Where it talks you through step by step on how to make a brush from scratch and apply it to your balloons.

Once I had followed the tutorial I was left with the following borders in 3 different sizes and named after Charles himself :) Thanks Charles ❤️

Then finally I could add these brushes to the borders of the dialogue boxes on top of the artwork as you can see below. I am super happy with how this came out and I am now thinking that I will be using a lot more custom brushes in the future to help tie in with the page's artwork even more.

Let me know in the comments below what you think of this brush.

Once again you can get that book here https://blambot.com/pages/the-essential-guide-to-comic-book-lettering I would highly recommend this if you are looking to become or are a letterer.