Behind the scenes: Coming up with a Sunday Strip
Reader “Brian Travers” asks the question…
Q: “How do you draw the Sunday strips?
The Sunday strips are the larger 3-deck strips that appear in the weekend paper, as opposed to the ‘daily’ version that appears Mon-Sat in 3 or 4 horizontal panels. These take a bit more time to do, and I get a bit more space to come up with some visual compositions that are different from the regular panels in the daily.
I’ve posted before about my process of drawing a Sunday strip, but not quite the ‘coming up with the idea’ process. Writing the strip can be a challenge, as I wrote here.
Here are some sketches that I noodled around with on my sketchbook (unedited) before arriving at the finished gag below. Sometimes an idea starts as one thing and transforms into another; you just need to draw it out to get the feeling for how it plays out in the final composition.
From here I can tighten up the drawing and figure out where all the moving parts go to tell the story.
This is how the finished Sunday strip ended up looking. I was happy i got to use Dudley again, who isn’t in many strips these days.
Don’t forget! You can read Ginger every day on GoComics.com/gingermeggs
