What is the most time consuming part of your art process?

[KSlinger]

Colouring takes so long. And text bubbles. I hate text bubbles.

[Legendofgenii]

Procrastinating.

[TedGravesArt]

My coloring probably takes the longest. Some things like effects or landscapes I don't ink at all, so the burden falls on the painting portion of my process. And I know that flatting isn't actually the most lengthy part of my pipeline but damn it sure does feel like it sometimes.

[TheLemmaLlama]

Ha, I eliminated lineart from my pipeline with extreme prejudice

Still, my drawing process is basically 'work on thing X (e.g. sketching panel 4) until you get stuck, then pick different thing Y (e.g. colouring panel 2) to do instead' so I rarely get all of one 'thing' done in one go. Hence it's kind of hard to measure what takes longer

But if I had to give an answer, I'd probably say 'the beginning'. It's just a slog for me until everything except colouring is done, and then the rest just flies by in comparison XD

[Scarlet_Cryptid]

Coloring. I actually gauge how much time a portion of the process takes by how much of my 'watch later' list on YouTube I watch while I'm working.

Laying out panels and word bubbles? Hour and a half.

Actually drawing the panels? Depends a bit, but usually 2-3 hours.

Inking? Hour and a half.

Coloring? Like... 4-6 hours.

And then I do things like re-inking lines that got faded during the coloring process, scanning, editing, etc... but coloring is the worst chunk by far. Even for easy pages.

[Mallory]

For Engram, it's either sketching/visual design (I make up my settings and characters as I go...) or coloring (as in, picking the final colors and shading/adding effects). Easily 8 hours of a 25-ish hours/page journey.

For my other comic that takes me A LOT less time, it's the storyboards. I letter, storyboard + pick colors all together for like 1.5-2 hrs and then everything afterwards takes 3-4-ish hours per page.

[s.e.kallman]

Hmmm...definitely the sketches cause that's when I bring my thumbnails to life...unless I completely change the paneling then it's just a little painful cause I have to make it flow. When it's casual (ok not really) sketching and I want to color it, sometimes it can take days, though I prefer just using flats for coloring because it's slightly less time consuming.

[Lev404]

@Legendofgenii so true

[AnonymousHouseCat]

For me, it's definitely shading and then in second place, either figuring out new poses I haven't drawn before or drawing detailed backgrounds. Before I got clip studio and a laptop with a touch screen/pen, I had to hand-draw everything, scan it, and then erase messy bits and re-draw lines that didn't scan well with the track pad, so that was a real pain

[BarBarKetrab]

At the moment for my comic, probably sketching. Sometimes I'm not happy with how things turn out and I end up having to redo the sketch from scratch, multiple times. I'm not very fussy about lineart or colouring (for the comic), I guess.

As for more detailed illustrations, definitely colouring, by far.

[RocketAxxonu]

Inking, flats and shading are all hugely time consuming, though I think inking is probably the most so. My sketches are usually kind of bad so I have to spend time adjusting placement of lines and especially faces until they're closer to what I want. (Which I suppose is all right lol, as it helps give me more satisfaction in moving from sketches to inking; I've found when my sketches turn out great it makes inking more intimidating/frustrating.)

In terms of each individual page, storyboarding goes relatively fast (I call it storyboarding as opposed to thumbnailing as I prefer to plan and place my sketches directly into a document already regular page-sized), but it's by far the most mentally demanding part of the process. Admittedly I used to somewhat devalue the storyboarding step and feel like I should be getting it done faster, and try to cram it in during those low energy times I was tired and not up for much, but now I give it prime importance and focus. Framing is such an important part of achieving drama and emotional impact, now I'm willing to put more time and energy into it if I need to. Possibly storyboarding feels the longest of all steps even if it's shorter, because of how much intense focus it takes.

[R.n.P]

definitely inking
spending time on one page trying to inking the parts that need it is so tedious

[SynergyEclipse]

The finishing touches usually are for me. I create my episodes mostly with vectors, so base coloring and line art can be done at the same time and cel shading is easy for me to do. The text and speech bubbles are also done with vectors.

When the episodes are ready to be exported into another program for the extra coloring, lighting and texture effects for the finishing touches, they’re 90-95% done.

Of each individual step it’s that last step, the last 5-10% of the progress that usually takes the longest! In episodes that mostly have panels with sunrises, sunsets or dramatic lighting effects, I can spend 6 hours or more manually adding the lighting effects.

When I need to design complex backgrounds with 3D modeling, which I’ve been doing for my next two episodes in-progress, that took several hours for each background! One of them may have taken more than 12 hours as I also decided on the colors and added textures to the items. I should get more efficient with this through more practice though.

[Fafnir]

Jumping on the line art train
it's where i have to refine any details i hinted at in roughs.. or when your realize that head you drew is squashy and you have to fix it. =p

[AlydaB]

Gonna jump on the bandwagon and say line art 100%, with shading in 2nd place (most of my pages have multiple light sources, with several layers of light and shadow) ;-;

I for some reason chose an artstyle with very detailed hair (and the majority of my comic characters have elaborate curly hairstyles) and tons of ripples and folds in clothing.

Whenever I start the lineart process again, I ask myself WHY I did this to myself, but I'm a perfectionist and I hate the thought of cutting down on the detail in my artstyle. Probably not the best trait for a wannabe comic artist.

[allenT]

For me it's drafting-- the more elaborate the art the more time I have to plan and make several drafts before drawing on my comic papers. (I ink traditionally)

The inking itself is not as time-consuming (with my semi-sketchy inking style), but I'm just stalling until I'm confident enough to ink (I need to mind-map the images/ foresee how I ink mentally), even though I know I can fix mistakes digitally.

[Fafnir]

your comic is fantastic. totally worth the time your putting in to it.

[AlydaB]

Ahh thank you so much! Glad to hear you think so

It's definitely more time-consuming this way, but I love the end-product, so I like to think it's worth the extra sweat, tears, blood, and tea.

[simplykit]

most time consuming activity is me being a lazy ass

and doing finalizations like adding effects and making my chars look pretty

[system]

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