How much time do you bother spending on making Comics Pages?

[ColeDX]

How much time do you bother putting into making a comic strip? Just make them quickies as rouch sketches or you actaully take the time to ink them or color them?

For Gang Wars, I take my time on drawing everything in neatly, coloring, and inking the characters
On Condemned from Hell, I just quickly sketch everything out, quickly darken the lines, and just color it in without staying in the lines.

[sulfurbunny]

Process is as following:
*script/panel plan in text document
*thumbnail (occasionally skipped, bad sulfurbunny, bad!)
*make panel borders in template document
*rough sketch
*outline cleanly, remove sketch
*color

I find that sometimes the planning (script/thumbnail) takes longer than actually drawing it, especially if it's a complicated page with a lot of info to convey. I guess start to finish with no wasting time browsing 4chan etc, a page of VF would take me 2-3 hours, something like that. That time goes up a LOT if I've got water in the scene because water kicks my ass every time.

[H0lyhandgrenade]

Thumbnail, sketch layout digitally, pencil and ink by hand, scan and add minimal tones. Takes something around 6 hours on average.

[Seven Rain]

Since I do all my stuff digitally and directly in Flash it cuts out any need for sketching and inking, which helps a lot. It also makes coloring much easier.

As for how long I take that depends entirely on the page/panels. Some pages fly by because I tend to re-use certain shots in multiple panels during dialogue-heavy scenes without much happening, and other times it takes hours to draw out a detailed background or constant retries to get a character to look right.

[Sulphur]

I sketch and outline things in the foreground traditionally, and color, shade and draw the backgrounds digitally. I haven't bothered to record the time it took from start to finish, because I've made, like... four so far. Gonna start on the fifth later today, though. I'll try to keep track of how long it takes.
Originally I was actually just going to outline the pages and give them flat colors, and really plain, undetailed backgrounds to save time. Once I actually started making them, I decided to add shading and backgrounds I actually, well, tried on. They looked kinda dull and generally not-good without, and the shading part doesn't take to long anyway. Backgrounds take a while, but ehhh, it's worth it.

[elrotram]

The amount of time I take depends on the genre. I traditionally thumbnail, pencil, and ink (no tones as of yet) all traditionally. For the fantasy/adventure comic I did for class, it took me maybe 3 or 4 hours to complete the pencils. For the horror comic I'm working on now, I estimate that the pencils will take me about 6 to 7 hours a page to complete. (Drats on Victorian settings! *fist-shake*)

[Falconer]

Haha...ha...you don't want to know how long it takes me. Really, it's for the best. I don't even like knowing. It just reminds me how slow I am. ;A;

[Lapsang]

Haha...ha...you don't want to know how long it takes me. Really, it's for the best. I don't even like knowing. It just reminds me how slow I am. ;A;

THIS oh god. Reading people on here saying '2 - 3 hours' makes me want to cry...

[erase]

I'm generally faster than usual but it's hard to poinpoint exaclty how much time a single page takes because I do everything in steps, usually one chapter at a time. Though my current webcomic is done in a strip, gag-a day style so it's slightly different.

An YGL strip rounds about 10-30 minutes for planning and dialogue, a few minutes for a thumbnail if it's not too complicated, 30 minutes for sketching and two hours for inking. If it's color add an hour or two. Of course, it varies on how focused I am so there's an hour or two of variance.

Overall I'd say 2.30 to 4 hours.

[ApaFox]

Lemme see:
I sketch
Ink trace
Scan
Color characters
Backgrounds
Placement
Daiolog

And all of that takes me about half a week or so, a full one if I'm lazy.
Which is a lot.

[eishiya]

Depends on the comic.

The links go directly to page images to save you the trouble of flipping through them.
These times exclude the thumbnailing stage, as I'd rather cover that separately.

I do all my scripting ahead of time and before thumbnailing, but these scripts just have actions and dialogue, they don't split anything into pages or panels (but sometimes I'll describe a particular panel if I have a very strong visual that I don't think I'll think of later).

Senka takes about an hour to an hour and a half for most pages (longer for the really scenery-porny ones). Half an hour for the (loose) pencilling, the rest is inking. Scanning, cleaning, lettering took another 5 minutes per page.
The Side Stories were pretty much neat, toned sketches, so most of those took about an hour per page.

Black Dram had greyscale-painted pages. Most Black Dram pages took between 2 and 4 hours, but the pages with a lot of faces or enviro detail took longer, sometimes up to 6 (not including research time for landmarks and the like). Of that time, drawing speech bubbles and lettering took about 15-20 minutes, about half an hour went into doing the flats, and another half an hour into shading+lighting, the rest was pencilling and inking (obviously, not in that order). I was a bit obsessive about getting the inks smooth and perfect, which was a terrible idea and I've learned my lesson.
Another issue with Black Dram that made pages take so long to do is that my motivation pretty much died once the romance started, haha. I will never draw a romance comic again.

My coloured side-projects had roughly the same technique as Black Dram except with colours, so they took about the same amount of time as BD.

My current project is fully painted in colour, so I want to say it'll take longer, but since there's no inking stage, it might not be that much more time-consuming than BD. I'm guessing it'll take 4-6 hours per page once I get the hang of it, and I plan to put a 10-hour hard limit on the pages to keep myself from over-painting the difficult parts.


I think the most time-consuming stage for me is actually the thumbnailing, which is why I excluded that time from the estimates above. Each page thumbnail takes me anywhere from 2 minutes to an hour, and I often put entire days between them because I'm not feeling the scene or whatever. This is something I'm working on fixing by trying different ways to approach them, but I haven't found a solution yet.
For example, I've been working on the thumbnails for my current project for over a week and a half, but I have only 17 pages thumbnailed. I don't tnink I've done any thumbnails for 3 days now :| Part of that is that my day job drains all my energy, but even on some weekends I end up doing nothing.

[erase]

I do all my scripting ahead of time and before thumbnailing, but these scripts just have actions and dialogue, they don't split anything into pages or panels (but sometimes I'll describe a particular panel if I have a very strong visual that I don't think I'll think of later).

Hey I do that too.

Some of my comic friends thought it was weird

I pretty much do a movie script.

[eishiya]

I do all my scripting ahead of time and before thumbnailing, but these scripts just have actions and dialogue, they don't split anything into pages or panels (but sometimes I'll describe a particular panel if I have a very strong visual that I don't think I'll think of later).

Hey I do that too.

Some of my comic friends thought it was weird :|

I pretty much do a movie script.

My "scripts" are closer to treatments than actual scripts. The scene descriptions, actions, and dialogue are mixed together in paragraphs, a paragraph for each scene (this reminds me to keep each scene brief). I find these easier to edit, since it's less text. I skip a lot of details that are obvious to me, though they might not be obvious to someone else reading the thing. I feel bad for my betas who have to read that crap.

And to stay on topic: Because my scripts are light on detail, yet contain all the important dialogue, they don't take me very long. My current project is about 60 pages, and scripting the whole thing took about 5-6 hours over a day and a half (I got lost on TVTropes), plus a couple of days to get beta feedback and incorporate it. Granted, it took me half a year to come up with a satisfactory plot, but that's neither here not there.

[Lapsang]

(longer for the really scenery-porny ones).

Sorry if this is off topic, but that scenery porny example... oh wow, that's my kind of porn. Seriously, that is beautiful. There is no way I could do anything that detailed in under a couple of hours!

[Wulfmune]

script, thumbnails, pencils, inks, color. Anywhere from 3-6 hours a page depending.

I usually spend about an hour on my line work. some more complicated scenes might be half an hour to hour more.
the color process it what murders my production time. anywhere from 2-4 hours per page ): i'm starting to get a little faster, but as i get faster, i want to add more.