Backstage Pass #10 (Patreon)

On this week’s edition of Backstage Pass, I’ll be talking about…

The speech bubble tool on CSP! I’ll admit that this Backstage Pass is just me gushing about the text bubble tool on CSP, but can you blame me?? It’s super cool!

So backing up a bit, you may know that part of the reason I switched to using CSP for OBT was that it provided many more tools that are much more helpful than my previous art programs for comic-making. One of these features includes the speech bubble tool which for a little while I, for some reason, assumed it meant to work as a sort of stamp tool for text bubbles, which could be resized. Oh, how wrong I was.

One of my favorite stylistic choices for OBT are the rounded square text bubbles. They fit text nicely and, in my opinion, look very nice.


For a while I would just… Try making these speech bubbles by hand, because Autodesk has no options for a semi-square bubble tool. It was awful. I don’t miss those days.

Then, I found I could add an outline to objects using Photoshop's stroke tool! So for a while, I would make a stamp in the shape of the text bubble I wanted, and then add the tail and put an outline around the whole thing. I probably kept this method up until a few weeks ago!

This method worked fine for the purpose it served, but sometimes the stamp wasn’t quite the shape I needed to fit the text, which could lead to awkward readjustments that didn’t quite fit what I wanted.

CSP however, lets me have the liberty of adjusting the squareness of a text bubble. How cool is that?!

That already sold me, because it means I can readjust bubbles however I want without them losing their squareness. 10/10 tool already.

But wait! There’s more!
The text bubble tool can also merge text bubbles together. Automatically. And even better? I can still make adjustments after merging as long as I don’t rasterize (convert layer information to normal pixels) the layer! And there’s a bubble tail tool that also is adjustable and auto merges with text bubbles! It’s a dream come true.

This text bubble that would have normally taken 5 minutes to put together now only takes seconds!