Do you write web comics? To take some of the effort out of it and save time, here’s an easy way to make speech bubbles that you can use each time you write a new comic.

The Rounded Speech Bubble
Start with an ellipse. In this example I’ve given it a grey outline and blurred it slightly. Click on the shape and go to Path>Object to Path.

Here we’ll add the point to the speech bubble to the bottom-left of the ellipse, so shift-click using the Edit Paths Tool on the bottom and left nodes to select them and Add a Node between them. Now select just the new node and change it to be a Corner Node

Pull the new node in the direction you want for your speech bubble. It’s now taking on a speech-bubble-like shape but it doesn’t look right yet. For that you’ll need to edit your new nodes Bezier handles to form a sharper point. Still using the Edit Paths Tool move the node’s handles so that they are at about a 45° angle and pointing back towards your original ellipse shape.

You can also lengthen the handles on your corner node to make the point thinner. All that remains is to create a text area inside your bubble and fill it with some sample text of your choice. You can flip your bubble horizontally and/or vertically to change the direction and to move the point, simply select the corner node with the Edit Paths Tool and drag it in the direction of your character.

It’s really easy to repeat the process using a square. You’ll probably want to round the corners. You can do this by changing the Rx and Ry values for your square or rectangle:

Check out this post on Playing with Polygons for details on how to make star bursts and other shapes.

Tip: To make a thought bubble start with a softened star burst shape:

Now resize it so that it’s wider than it is long. Add a few circle shapes et voila!

You can download the files for these images and play with them yourself. Check out the License Agreement first.