Monday, April 20, 2009

Drawing Blondie: Chic Young's Step-by-Step Process




Here is an old magazine ad for US Savings Bonds showing Chic Young's drawing process for a BLONDIE daily comic strip.

My pal Leif Peng came across this while scanning magazines for his terrific Today's Inspiration blog. Here's Leif:
Found this while scanning something for Today's Inspiration. Thought you might like it for your blog...

Supposedly a Chic Young 'step-by-step'... but if it really is, then Young must have been a frigging Zen Master Cartoonist, because there's no sign of any real construction, its just a sort of "coming into focus" process, unlike anything I've ever seen!

More likely, he did the strip the usual way, then, for the sake of this ad concept, did a two stage "deconstruction" to reverse the process down to something that looked like a rough sketch but less messy than the real rough sketch. What do you think?
I agree with Leif. It all looks pretty slicked up and doesn't have the necessary construction lines. It appears like dear ol' Blondie just pops into focus out Mr. Young's amazing cartoonist brain!

1 comment:

Nick Fechter said...

Chic has an interesting technique in making strips, thanks for the post Mike.