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May '22last reply
Jun '22- 26
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Well, I am presently on hiatus at the moment in order to study but afterwards to plot out narrative arcs.
Oh, I love your rendered pages, they're cool 
For me, it's mostly about my style & designs choices.
Let me introduce you to my main character's coat.
Is it time efficient to draw it? hell no.
Is it cool? I thought so back when I designed it
Would a simpler design work just as good? surely yes.
I always swear I'm going to make her lose it somewhere, but let's face it, I'll let her keep it till the end. Especially that now she's going to be more often drawn in a gown which has an even worse design. Why am I doing this to myself.
Honourable mention: characters' dark hair.
Could've been done much easier, but still is way quicker than it looks so I'm keeping it.
I tend to fully complete each panel one at a time. So that means I don't do my pages in batches. I'm a bit of a discovery writer, so oftentimes making my comic into a step by step full process does me a disservice.
It would be more efficient to do everything in batches, yeah, I could probably crank out more pages that way, but I like having time to think about and unpack what the next panel will tell in the story.
Background places like city, town, forest, etc. Drawing it meticulously is the most tedious and it’s not time efficient for me.
Fuck me! It's when I need a new color scheme for a character because they change clothes or dye their hair.
And sketching the panels.
Anything decision making. Because I know I get stuck with the choice a long time.
I do backgrounds by hand (only because I don't know how to do 3d) and setting up perspective grids is such a pain omg
And since I did it for the early pages, I feel like I have to keep doing it by hand for the remaining pages of my chapter for consistency.
These two panels were probably the worst to set up.
I pencil my comic pages twice. It would take me less time if I just did inks over the sketch and tightened up the lines with that, but sometimes I mess up anatomy or the drawing and only notice it if I do tighter pencils over the rougher ones. 
Making thumbnail booklets for a whole chapter.
I don't create more in advance, just the same amount for the chapter. I don't think that 'll take more time than the drafting and inking (it only takes an hour or 2 to make 3 + 1 booklets.) Whenever I cut the papers it feels like I'm starting something new again, It becomes a thing I'm looking forward to do. 
Same here! I do my thumbnails, pose sketch and then the actual sketch before moving onto lineart 
I mean I guess it's better to catch any anatomy issues early- I do so many sketches because if I don't sketch the pose I'll put way too much detail into the face
I commend you, that's really cool! I've never really tried writing a story on the go (I am not a pantser in the slightest) but yeah! It's quite interesting to discover your own story as you go
I still have a general outline for the story, and I will do thumbnails sometimes, but most of the time the thumbnails end up being discarded in some form or another.
Coloring the lineart for the interior lines on my characters. And the amount of lines I add to the hair and background at times. I would draw so many lines in the hair, I would have to go back and erase most of them. But it's better than leaving the hair looking like a formless helmet on the characters' heads.
I like to go back after inking the lines and doing outlines, its an excellent practice in maintaining negative space, since it actually really emphasizes said negatives. The process takes about as much time as inking does, but its a cornerstone to my Charles M. Schulz influence. You know how he had arthritis later in his life? I want to develop a style that doesn't require straight lines--Something I can attune to way later in my life.
I just color my comic, it takes for-freaken-ever because I use color pencils. I can easily go to digital, which would save a ton of time, but I don't wanna. Other than that I take a month hiatus after every chapter so I can get my shit together, hopefully get a small buffer going, stuff like that.
My entire art style is the opposite of time efficiency ;-;
My line art takes a bajillion years each update (about 70% of the time I spend on the episode overall) and the way I chose to draw hair and fabric is especially time-consuming because I feel compelled to draw (and then have to shade) each individual fold and clump of hair. Take this panel:
I'm also a sucker for multiple light sources and several layers of shading. I think it adds a lot of depth and looks great, but this part of the process also takes a bajillion years.
I also used to kill myself trying to get the anatomy perfect in every panel by having an entire new layer of body construction lines over my thumbnail and before final line art, but I ditched that after episode 3, and fortunately, I don't think it hurt the quality of my art.
Last inefficient thing I can think of is having to modify my color palette in every new episode because the setting (and therefore lighting) changes, making some episodes' palette more warm or cool, lighter or darker, than others.
For all this, I think it shows that I'm still a new comic creator in the process of learning.
I can't bring myself to sacrifice some of these things just yet, but I'm hopeful that I'll become faster with time. One comforting example of that growth taking place is that I'm now able to jump straight from thumbnails to line art and still have good anatomy, and as I memorize my characters' appearances I don't have to check my references so much.
Still... panels like these make me want to rip my hair out sometimes. :'D
