Is anyone currently working as a full time webcomic artist (40-60 panels as required by most companies) while working another job full time?
Just curious to see if this is even possible or it's a stretch... and most importantly how do you do it / manage your time?
Apr '21
Apr '21
Nope 
I have a part time job and can barely reach 25-30 panels a week. If it was my full time job, than possibly I can do more, but no way with a full time job attached to that.
I believe there is one or two people on here who are signed on with Tapas and also have a full-time job. AFAIK they just work it like two full-time jobs. (no time off)
I also know that the woman who writes and draws Ava's Demon started out that way (I think it was 20-30 panels a week to start?). She had a 9-6 at Dreamworks and then drew for another 4 hours every evening after work. So, it's technically humanly possible, but I imagine you have to have a certain level of fitness, genetics, and healthy habits to be able to pull it off in the long term. Most people would just get some kind of horrible soft tissue damage or psychological issues from attempting something like this.
Typically most people who are turning out 40+ fully-colored panels a week are working with teams of artists. So there will be one artist doing the layouts, then another artist drawing it, then another one flatting it, then another one coloring it, then another one lettering it. Each of those individual people may also have a full-time job in addition to contracting with Tapas, but it's very unlikely that a single individual artist is drawing, inking, coloring, and lettering a 40+ panel comic every week alone, let alone while also working a full-time job.
That's.. impossible. Especially if it's fully colored. It takes around an hour per panel more or less, meaning you have to spend at lest 40 hours to make 40 panels in a week. That's the same labor of a full time job.
It honestly depends on the panels, like if they were very, very simplified, yes, this is possible. But--for most paneling (especially the shiny top comics) 40-60 panels a week is your full time job.
Be aware though, 40-60 panels is a LONG episode. You can totally get away with having 15 panel episodes instead, and you don't need to do an update every single week, you can do every other if you do a longer episode. You dictate what your upload limit will be.
I can barely keep up with the schedule by drawing ~8 panels per week (1 page) and having a luxuriously lax main job that doesn't require of me rotting away in a cubicle for 8 hours 5 days a week (Long stretches of "do nothing and await next project", sometimes months).
Whom do I need to sell my soul to in order to be able to draw a month's worth of updates in just one week?
I'm on holidays from teaching for two weeks, and last week, treating my comic as a full-time gig, I barely managed to finish 20 panels. I work slow, and I have pretty high-quality art, but even so... If I were posting 40+ panel episodes weekly, I'd need a monstrously huge buffer, and even then, I'd need to take frequent hiatus's to pull back ahead every time that buffer was worn down.
I also made my wrist hurt, in the scary carpal-tunnel area... so right now I'm on my second day of no-drawing-allowed to give it some rest.
I know I'll speed up in time, as I find the right balance of speed + quality, but right now it's not realistic! Especially not on weeks where I'm also teaching.
I'm glad you're getting some rest! I agree breaks are absolutely necessary... it's hard to even outline something decent when I haven't rested.
That sounds like an insane amount of work and pain for your wrists, body, mind...etc; XD
On a serious note I don't advise anyone to do this unless your working with a team or just want to hurt ur wrists...it's just...not possible...(Also always take breaks 
they help with productivity.)
Maybe if those panels are first-draft sketches then maybe but def not for final product panels XD
I'm currently working as a full-time comic artist on my own accord, not working any other job and barely make 20 fully-coloured panels a month. A MONTH.
Nahhhhh. I work full time, and my current pace is 20-40 panel updates that I can finish every 1-2 months not weeks xD Granted I haven't been at my peak speed in some time, since I have a fair amount of other non-comic stuff going on in my spare time lately. But even at my fastest I think I could only put out like mayyyyybe 10-15 panels a week, and that was if just about every moment of spare time outside of working was spent working on the comic. I (understandably) couldn't maintain that for more than about a month lol
I made a challenge where I had to make 72 panels in 24 hours (from 1pm saturday to 1pm sunday) so I could totally do that if I could not sleep one night per week and accept to only go for minimal quality xD (it's this episode https://www.webtoons.com/fr/challenge/astrocoloc/23hbd-je-laurais-un-jour/viewer?title_no=460348&episode_no=1610 )
Anyway, on a regular basis I only draw 2 days a week fully so I can only draw 20 panels with high quality so no, full time + 60 panels, impossible TnT
