Copying a public Patreon update here about the process involved in creating an Oglaf strip:

Hello, Doug here.

Trudy broke her arm three weeks ago!

She had it operated on this week, so she’s not drawing much ‘cause she’s high on painkillers.

So I thought I’d step you through our working process.

Classic filler content.

We’ve been doing Oglaf for fifteen years or so- we’ve got a bit of a system going.

Writing

We’ve got a big old online doc

I try to write 5 jokes into it every day.

They don’t need to be good jokes.

Because writing a good joke? Way too much pressure.

Writing five shitty ones? I can do that!

Look at that. That’s a genuinely awful joke.

I don’t even care- I’m hitting a quota.

I reckon 20:1 is about the bad-to-good ratio.

So write 20 jokes, there’ll probably be a decent one.

A Random word generator is often useful as a starting point

Trudy puts stuff into the doc too, Round about Thursday, we start saying “do we have a strip for this week?”

Then we trawl through the doc, tagging possibles, chat about what we like.

Here’s the idea that turned into last week’s strip

We looked at that and said- Ooo that could be a list strip- some dumb things to pray for, then the angel shuts it down at the end.

Great.

So we need maybe six jokes- dumb notes you could give God

Can I write six good jokes?

Nope! Way too much pressure.

I can write a hundred bad ones, though, there should be some good ones in there.

I grind out a big ol’ list.

We highlight ones we like

Then it’s time for a rough.

Rough

I copy all the dialogue onto a photoshop document, move it about in search of the layout of the comic.

Often there’s way too much text to fit in a page, so the options are…

• spill out onto two pages (twice as much to draw and colour!)

-Edit out dialogue (usually the best option. You rarely regret cutting words)

-Just have it be over-crowded with words ( not ideal but happens a lot)

I like to have panels with no dialogue- just reaction or pause moments, so I often end up shuffling text into earlier panels to make space.

Trudy looks at the rough, asks “what the fuck were you trying to draw there?”

I recently started to colour-code recurring characters, which helps with clarity

Trudy decides if the strip is…

Yes- good to draw

Maybe- make some changes

No- try another idea

We cycle through that 'til we arrive at a Yes.

Usually it’s about Saturday morning at this point.

The original dog shit joke didn’t make it in!

I like the idea but couldn’t figure how to present it succinctly.

Draw

Trudy turns my weird roughs into something recognisable.

…there are two wolves inside all of us. A good wolf and one that sort of looks like an anteater.

Trudy has to do actual design for characters, locations, costumes, props.

…I assume she does anyway. At this stage I’m off in a coffee shop without a care in the world.

Trudy pencils the page, I give notes, usually pretty minimal.

Trudy re-draws then inks.

It normally takes her a day to draw and ink a page, but that depends on the content- people talking is easy, action scenes and fucking are time-consuming.

Other factors that affect her speed-

how determined is the cat is to sit on her drawing board?

how broken are her bones?

She draws on A4 paper with a mechanical pencil, inks with uni pin fine line pens in assorted sizes.

We colour between us in photoshop- a page usually takes 6-8 hours.

Letters and speech bubbles done in illustrator.

Every Year, Adobe hit me up for a huge slug of money. Every year I promise to start using other software. Never do.

Publish

By this time it’s pretty late on Sunday night, all that’s left is to think of a name, upload it.

Sometimes it’s reeeeeal late on a Sunday and the name makes no sense.

Then we upload, post to social media, get told how may typos we’ve made, fix the typos.

Done!