It's... Big Norman!!

 Well, glory be and ups-a-daisy! February already, and we're all at sea! Our adventures have kept me away from a computer keyboard for a few months, and those pesky carrier pigeons seem to keep getting lost on their way to each of your individual houses - probably caught and cooked by an itinerant Walrus or something, I shouldn't wonder.

In any case, you might like to see how Art Bum, Mister Roger Langridge, cobbled together the cover of our latest adventure, so without further ado...

The first part of the process involves coming up with an idea. Mister Langridge scribbles a couple of doodles on the back of his shirt collar during one of his rare moments of lucidity and waggles them under the nose of Snarked!'s long-suffering editors, Messrs. Carlson and Harburn, who then promptly go to lunch and forget about them. Approximately three weeks later they'll find them beneath a pile of laundry and, forgetting their origins, will commission an entirely different artist to draw one of them. Mister Langridge is then forced to wrest the job from his rival's hands with unseemly force - at which point, the fun begins!

Next  comes the part where the actual cover has to be drawn. By now Mister Langridge's shakes are somewhat advanced, so in order to make his job simpler, he takes his rough drawing and prints it out in a light shade of blue, the steam from his old wooden printer filling his shabby art studio with noxious fumes. Once this is done, Mister Langridge takes the blue-line drawing and, with the aid of a simple graphite pencil of the HB variety, works up his sketchy slashes into something a little more illustrative, while maintaining the integrity of the original composition. 

A word about the size: the original sketched doodles are slightly bigger than a postage stamp. Mister Langridge claims this helps him to think in terms of bold shapes and strong compositions, eliminating the temptation to give the rough drawings any unnecessary details. Personally, I think it's simple laziness. The pencil art, however, is drawn at a larger size - referred to as A4 throughout the world (21 x 29.7 cm), unless you're in America, where you have unique stationery standards unrecognised anywhere else, bless your hearts.

 Once the pencil art is completed, it's really now just a matter of tracing and colouring in. The pencil art is normally scanned once more and blown up to an even larger size - A3 this time, twice A4 (29.7 x 42 cm) - and printed out in blueline again. (We at Snark Towers have spared you this redundant step in our graphic process reconstruction - we do appreciate you lead busy lives.) However, in this particular case, due to the fact that Mister Langridge did not have access to his usual A3 printer (some legal complication, methinks), a compromise was made, and this piece was printed out art the same size as the pencil art. Why he didn't merely ink over the pencil art is one of life's curious little mysteries which you'll just have to forbear.

Thenceforth, the drawing is inked, a process by which Mister Langridge takes a Number 2 sable brush with a bottle of indian ink  and traces the lines, adding a few finer ones here and there with the aid of a Hunt 102 nib. Once this is done, and Mister Langridge has scanned the drawing yet again, at which point, time being of the absolute essence, it is sent in the twinkling of an eye via the power of Her Majesty's Internet to the colourist, Matthew "Pudd'nhead" Wilson, at which point three or four weeks later he will return a version of said drawing which has been coloured by elves.

I trust this little window into the magic of the comic-making process has whiled away a few precious minutes of your lives you might otherwise have spent giving money to a homeless person, or kissing a child. In which case I feel my time has been well spent. Do let us know if you would like to see more of this sort of malarkey in the  future!