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He’s the Zapp Brannigan of dating advice.
As a suggestion, a vignette effect on the panel and/or some sepia on the speech baloons could be good.
Sadly, the art program I’m using doesn’t cover vignette effects. I imagine it’s older than most of the readers here… (1996)
It’d be pretty hard to sepia wash the top speech bubble there, since it bleeds into the gutters. (I do this sometimes when boxing it in cramps the panel, it’s a cheap and dirty trick.)
I have another “sepia flashback” coming later that I think works a little better, because (1) I actually drew the scenery, and washing that is more obvious, and (2) the flow of the narrative sets the reader up to expect a flashback.
While this is a common technique in storytelling, it’s not a technique I use a lot myself - mostly due to the format and layout of my comics being very short - and this is a technique that often demands space to set up and pay off.
Heh, I’m still older than the software, but not by much.
Your original art is colored pencil, then you scan it for editing, right? Some light shading on the flashback bubbles in the original pencil art might be an option, depending on how you do the text. Just going over the bubble gently with a pale brown pencil. Vignetting in colored pencil sounds hard, though, especially for a brief gag.
Oh yeah, any attempt I make to do a shade over the art in the physical media is doomed to failure - the pencils I use are acrylic coloursofts, they have a very vibrant pigment that goes down very fast and in great volume, which is great for comic work, but… they don’t blend at all well. I know which specific pencil to use for each part of each character, and shifting them all to new shades would be a mess - so the simplest thing to do is to just digitally stick a layer on top with a colour shift.
In a related issue, for few of these comics both before and after this, I’ve applied some “glow” lighting in some panels. That’s digital too, for similar blending reasons. Here’s an example of what that looks like in practice:
Shading the bubbles manually would work, but at the time I did this comic, I was hand-lettering all the speech bubbles, and shading the bubble tends to destroy the readability of the text. The previous comic had shaded text boxes, and you’ll see I used a digital font for it, because the hand-lettering I’d used was unreadable.
However, a couple months after this comic, I got fed up of the amount of cleanup I was having to do for text in every comic, and I ditched hand-lettering for making my own handwriting into a font. It’s not perfect (I should really get a professional to make a good one with decent kerning) - so now I could shade bubbles and apply that font, and it’d work.
I’d honestly not considered shading the whitespace bubbles for flashbacks - my priority for text is always legibility first, any impediment to that means effort to read, which is to be avoided in comics at all costs. (I could get into discussing the medium at length here, but the tldr is that “it doesn’t take much effort to read and understand” is the main strength of comics, and you degrade the experience massively if you do anything that gets in the way of that. see Scott McCloud: understanding/making comics for further reading :) )
However, it’s a good idea here, if the whole panel including the bubble was “shaded” then it’d be a stronger visual marker that it’s a sepia panel - and that’d reduce the chance of confusion significantly - which is worth doing.
If you’d be interested, I could do a couple mockups for shading bubbles when I get home. I have an idea for one that wouldn’t impact readability and would be doable with pencil.
Nah, I’m okay, no need to really go to that effort. I’m unlikely to do a flashback for a while, but next time I do it, I’ll shade it - and if I can’t make it work, I can just delete the shading in post.
Most people who do pencil work might find this kind of thing tricky, but because I use pigment liners for linework, my lines are very black, which makes digital cleanup a lot easier.