Speeding up production!

[insomniascrawl]

@phenomenom9 I try that but I fell off when some unexpected things came up. I hope making it monthly helps with the stress, it sucks when art and writing goes from being something you love to something overwhelming, hopefully the new update schedule will help your health.

[insomniascrawl]

@Dozzer
@aronthemason

I need to do one of these. Why have I not? I really don't know, it's such a good idea.

[shazzbaa]

Audio books are also amazing this way too.

Listening to podcasts while I draw means I stay focused on drawing for at least that long, before it's time to start another episode. It helps! It also blocks out any other distracting noise.

I can't do audio books or podcasts (focusing on audio information for that long just makes me feel tired) but there's some parts of the process where I use Let's Plays for the same thing! I'm really fond of the Game Grumps myself, because on a lot of their longer playthroughs (eg Super Mario 64, Super Mario Galaxy, Bloodborne to some extent) it'll mostly be the two of them just chatting while they play, so you don't have to watch what's going on -- just glance up occasionally -- but it's a lot harder to check twitter/the forums while listening to a Let's Play than it is while listening to music, so I guess it sorta keeps that part of my brain engaged so I can just colour.

[AnnaLandin]

Oooh, LPs are good too! I listen/watch Matt Cummings' LPs of Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door and Super Mario RPG - he's got a voice that's super-soothing to listen to, and he gets adorably excited about cute stuff. <3

[RewindLabs]

Self-discipline and commitment.

[R.n.P]

Yh me too, I think I'll start after some weeks

[shaylafarley5]

What @Joannekwan said. Turn off the WiFi get comfy then put on head phones and jam out to your favorite tunes.
It helps me alot and you draw/color faster too, cause you're drawing with the beats lol

[Kamikaze]

If you're looking for a safe way to burn incense that's encased (less of a fire hazard) check out coffin incense burners. They're easy to use, you can burn cone or stick style incense in them and they're easy to clean - I just clean mine in the kitchen sink by running the ashes down the drain, and wiping with a cloth. The one I have is a wooden one, and it works beautifully, but they come in soapstone varieties too!

Also for incense I really suggest anything by Essential Essences. The Orange Blossom, Amber Flame, Winter Solstice and Buddhist Temple Blend are my faves!

[jordanthelass]

I think it depends on how much practice you have with drawing characters and environments.

For me, things started REALLY slow with Whose World. It took me 8 hours in total from start to finish in the beginning. But when I simplified some of the environments and became more familiar with drawing the backgrounds and characters, my production time has gone down.

Practice, practice, practice! You'll see that things will get easier to draw eventually. ^_^

[insomniascrawl]

@JordanDoodles You're right, now that I think about it, I can finish up drawing my characters fairly quickly, it's the background stuff that takes me forever since, until recently, I never much bothered with them.

[insomniascrawl]

@Kamikaze Thanks so much for the info and the links, I think I'll try it

[Hannes]

Hi there,
Been tackling this problem since forever. It's because I am in a weird mix of being impatient and patient at the same time. When it comes to spending hours and hours drawing per se, I'm not impatient at all. When it comes to getting single pictures, or whole comic pages done, I am every impatient. I want it finished NOW. So here are some things I discovered over the years:

1. Work on a deadline. I'm never working really efficient when I'm not on a deadline. Procrastinate all you want, the world can be moved within a week if necessary. If you have no deadline, try to create one yourself by promising everybody you know that "it's coming out this friday." You don't want to break a promise, do you? Maybe you still start just 2 hours before the deadline, this is all the time you need then. Maybe you're motivated by different things. Find out what really motivates you.
2. Work assembly line style. I'm fastest when I'm in a groove (that's when time seems to fly by too). So first do ALL the storyboards. Then to ALL the pencils. Then do ALL the inks. Then do ALL the coloring. Then do ALL the lettering. Last touches, finished.
3. My style of work is to try to spend as little time on anything as possible, while still achieving the visuals I want. To get what you want out of a picture is the core of visual art. But that's an entirely different mountain to climb. Maybe you can only achieve the visuals you want by spending a minimum of 45 hours on a page. Just try to spend not more than 45 hours then. Revisions can be done much later.
4. Music, podcasts, any listening medium is great to ease the pain (boredom) of doing long sessions. Maybe you have other pains to ease, like smoking or eating. Then do regular breaks and do a fixed amount of what you NEED (stop the time) to reward yourself. NEVER let the reptilian part of your brain go into panic mode. The reptile will do everything in it's power to stop you then. It only wants junk food, drugs, TV and games. But you know that already, right? Everyone does (great trick to overwrite "the reptile" is "the ape", all the ape wants is social acceptance and love - this is where the motivation trick in 1. comes from)
5. This may be a hard one, because it's expensive: Use digital media and a pen display. Nothing beats a pen display when it comes to inking fast. It has to be one good enough to pull off the lines, though. If you have good software you maybe can do some automation-tricks there. But that depends on the software.

---

That's me
Of Stars Profaned
NiGuNeGu

[yvettegustafsson]

That time thing, where does it go?

Well, here's what I do:
Keep it nice and fresh
And by that I mean, I don't sit to long with one thing. I make a thumbnail story board when coming up with the pages - in general I make 12-ish pages at one go (but it depends on the story, it could be more, could be less). For this I often sit somewhere with no Internet around, like a café but it's different for everyone. Making a marathon comic like a 24 hour comic is perfect for coming up with stories and then I don't think much about the panels being all perfect, I just tell the story.

When I've gotten that out of the way, I draw up the pages (and decide if the storyboard thumbnails are good or if anything needs to be changed. Drawn bigger, from a different angle or removed), make the panels on all the pages (this is no matter if I draw by hand or digital). This is to tell myself that I have these pages, these panels to fill out.

If I draw by hand, I draw the panels with a blue pen. No inking! Just drawing. If I work digitally I might just photograph the thumbnails and import them to Clip Studio Paint. That saves a lot of time

When inking, I try to do it fast. By hand I'm limited by the wet ink, but the most important thing is: I do the fun and easy stuff first and just a little bit on the hard stuff. I work maybe 30 minutes/page and then switch to a new page, just to keep it fresh and clean That way I can keep up the pace, because after a while you get tired of the page and slow down.

When all of the pages are inked, I switch to coloring and work basically the same way. 30 minutes or so/page until I'm finished.

Sometimes I keep little paper notes around my desktop screen where I've written down one page number/note. When I've finished a page I get to remove that little note and tear it, crunch it, just throw away or whatever I feel like. It's very liberating!

Good luck!

[Hannes]

And by that I mean, I don't sit to long with one thing. I make a thumbnail story board when coming up with the pages - in general I make 12-ish pages at one go (but it depends on the story, it could be more, could be less). For this I often sit somewhere with no Internet around, like a café

Exactly like me. The storyboard is the most cognitive demanding part of the whole process. I need some cut off space without internet, to get into the zone. Music and noise is okay, but everything that pulls attention is problematic.

[TheVoidchildProject]

Hmmm, I'm not sure if I'm the right person to comment on this since I'm still learning the ropes. But I have actually made a methodical process of improving my production speed, timing myself and splitting up my process into a number of categories. I've found that I've come down two, almost three, hours per page after doing this. I actively try to find ways to produce faster while still developing my art style.

What I think is the most important thing that I do though, is to have a solid foundation. I've written scripts for all my comics. After that, I make storyboards for them, which gives me rough idea for character placement and lettering. This helps me when I start drawing the actual page where I also start with a blueprint on top of which I ink or draw my lines before moving on to tones, shadows, lettering and then finishing the page.

The areas I've divided each page into right now are:

• Blueprint
• Line-work
• Tones/Shadows/depth-work
• panels, lettering and finalizing the page.

Dividing my process into these categories have helped me identify where I need to improve the most. I gues how you'd do it would depend on how much detail you need to go into. I've for instance thought about timing each panel to see how long each little drawing takes me. But I've also found it very valuable to analyze WHY and WHAT I need to improve on in each area.

For instance, tones used to be it's own category for me because it took me over an hour to color one page. I decided to try and minimize the time I spend on coloring so I started researching ways to specifically improving this area. Since I used photoshop I found a number of tricks online to speed up that process. But that only got me so far, I eventually figured out that my line-work needed to connect better and I spent way too much time dotting color here and there. Once I improved and connected the line-work I managed to get my coloring down from a 60+ hour process to a 10 minute process.

That is my most noticeable example, but I have generally improved in all of my desired areas by doing this and feel confident receommending becoming more methodical about your development.

[sauropasquini]

This is a good idea I will copy from you! I always forget the exact colors and loose time by opening previous episode to sample theat colors ...

[mariusthered]

@sauropasquini happy to help