Behind the Scenes: Ginger Meggs Sunday strip - Captain Australia!
Some Ginger Meggs readers at comic con were asking what my process was for drawing the strip these days; do I work digitally or in pencil first? Well, the answer is: a little bit of both.
For certain poses and situations sometimes I'll sketch the characters out in pencil and take a photo with my phone using the Evernote 'receipt scan' cam widget, which cleans up the image and uploads it to the cloud. It shows up on my Evernote immediately. (I do this for a lot of prelim sketch work.)
Then I drag and drop the pencils into the strip and resize it to where I want it on the template. I'll draw over it with a 'blue pencil' brush on photoshop and sketch out the panels and where the word balloons need to go in each panel.
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(Remember - always write out your words first for the comic strip; that way you can edit them down, and then you know how much room the word balloons are going to take up in the panels.)
I then take those sketches and make them about 40% opacity on photoshop (using that layer as a 'draft pencils' layer) and add a layer above it for inks. I have specific brushes that I know will reproduce well in print, and will draw in the characters according to the style guide for Ginger Meggs.
For this strip, I turned Meggsie into a "Captain America-style" hero so there was a bit of character re-designing to do. I like drawing these kinds of strips because I get to play around with compositions like it's a comic book.
If you have any process questions, leave me a message in the 'contact' section above.
Cheers!
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