Over My Shoulder: A peek into drawing Baby Blues

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Over my shoulder...
Rick Kirkman

In the summer of 2006, Jerry and I worked on a Christmas series that lasted a month, running from Thanksgiving until Christmas of '06. One of the aspects of this series was that it included the use of dozens of gifts as props and background. As you can see from this example of one of the gags from that series, the inclusion of those items was but a slight tickling of the keyboard, but translated to at least a couple of hours of extra drawing time (note the key highlighted phrase).

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I'm not discounting the amount of time Jerry has to put in writing. I'm sure he spent a couple of difficult hours staring out the window before he got this idea.

After pencilling in the rough, I decided that I'd videotape the finish of that drawing. It would have been difficult to see much of it if it had been videotaped at the pencilling stage . What you're seeing is really the middle of the drawing process. The first part, the pencil rough, is where the blocking of the scene and the thinking part is done--what the characters' expressions are, body language, etc. The last part, also excluded from the video entails filling in the solid black areas, touching up mistakes, scanning the drawing, setting it up for coloring and the coloring process. You can see the final color version when you scroll down.

We would do an over-the-shoulder video of Jerry writing, too, but there's not much action involved except the occasional tearing off of a sheet of paper, wadding it up and tossing it into a trash can.

P.S. For you techies out there, the drawing was done using Faber-Castell PITT Artist pens and Faber-Castell Polychromos black colored pencil. The video was done with a Canon GL-2 camcorder, edited in Final Cut Express, and the music was created in Apple's (Magic) GarageBand.

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