What is your production time?

[PLR]

I'm curious what people's production time is?

I'll define this as: Actual time drawing, letting, and posting their comic.
I'd like to leave the actual conceptualizing/writing time out of the equation for now.

I'd also like to know how often you post your comic (daily, weekly, monthly...)?

Should be interesting...

[Killbert-Robby]

Couple hours tops, my attention span is negligible.

[BionicDance]

Well, I'm in a slightly less-than-standard situation; my comic is entirely 3D CGI...so I don't really have "drawing" time, per se...
But assuming that I have all the 3D models built and ready to go, including sets, I can go from a blank slate to a finished 6-panel page in, oh, call it two to four hours, depending on the needs of the scene.
Posing the characters doesn't usually take all that long, nor does setting up the camera or the lighting, but render times vary based on the size of each panel and how complicated the scene is; I've had shots take 30 seconds and I've had shots take 20 minutes. Lettering time is negligible unless there is a lot of dialogue and not enough space in which to put it with the characters; this doesn't come up very often. Compositing a panel takes almost no time at all in Photoshop.
Upload times are also pretty negligible.

I have my comic update on Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays, and Sundays, the idea being to fill in the gaps left by Monday-Wednesday-Friday comics. Of course, TODAY is the first day I have my comic update with an actual page, so saying what I "usually" do sounds kinna funny, but I've got 33 pages completed and uploaded, waiting for their days to come up, so...

[VeryCuddlyCornpone]

Right now I'm plodding along at one update a week. Usually just a full page but sometimes goes up to one and a half or two pages.

I got mad slow. I remember back in the day I could churn out a page within an hour, text and all. Coloring took a little longer but I was a lot more lax about it so that didn't take very long.

Then one day I actually started trying, now it's like sitting in traffic and you see the building you need to get to but there's no way to speed up the process save for throwing any desire for quality to the wind. Laying out panels and doing a sketch takes between an hour and two hours per page (because I need the sketch to be near exact of what it looks like inked). Then inking will usually take less than an hour unless I decide to be surgical about it. Coloring takes at least twice as long as sketching, backgrounds and their color takes about an hour depending on the level of detail, then lettering and making pretty computer fixups takes another million years.

I think part of the thing is I stopped working in batches. I used to sketch out all the upcoming updates, then ink all of them, etc, only completely finishing one when it was about time for it to be uploaded. But then I boxed myself into a corner when I improved because suddenly I was going to have to color in this crap I drew that didn't look good to me anymore. Cue redrawing and completely overhauling how I do stuff.

[RobboAKAscooby]

About 4-6 hours each page.

It kinda depends on what DVD/CD I'm playing at the time as to how distracted I get.

About 1-2 hours on the sketching, another hour for inking, 1-2 hours for colouring and an hour for editing.
I usually do a week (4 comics) in advance but sometimes life interferes and I have to play catch up.

[Corgan_dane]

I'm trying to get back in the swing of things, so I'm just doing at least one update per week currently. Back when I was furiously making comics and not sleeping, I was doing two Many Tidings Grim strips a week, plus one of the other strips as often as possible.

My very first MTG strip took me 4 days to put together, because I'd never scanned anything, and I did all the digital editing in paint, so you can imagine how fun that was. In my heyday before my long hiatus, I could put together a MTG strip in about 2 hours if I pushed it hard. Scarecrow takes longer, because it takes more thought and the artwork isn't my normal style...maybe 3 hours rushed. All the others were pretty quick to put together, maybe an hour, tops.

Of course I'm rusty now, so it's going to take forever to put together the first new MTG strip, plus I've just gotten a tablet, and I'm having to adapt to working with it. I think it's going to be pretty quickly learned, though, since I sat down last night and did a Stick Butter strip in about 3 hours...which is pretty good, considering how long I've been away from this.

[Bobadventures]

Usually about 8 hours minimum per strip. Unfortunately, as I learn to do things faster, I also get more persnickity about details, so the production time never seems to really go down.

[Perdire]

Well, it gets a little complicated since we're not in the same city. I officially meet with the artist and the writer every other week, we talk about story direction an character development and whatnot, we sketch out a page or two in thumbnails until we all agree on how it should look, this lasts several hours. Pages take anywhere between 2 and 8 hours to draw, action panels go faster and scenic panels take a long time. We all look at it and do revision suggestions until we feel that the page is done. I don't know how long it takes to write each page, but the script usually gets posted 2 or 4 pages at a time, we all read it and check for grammar and continuity and whatnot. Then, usually the night before, I put on the borders, bubbles, text and any sound effects, size it appropriately and post it.

[Randyraven]

About an hour total. Then the 9 hour wait for siteadmin to update all 2 billion comics.

[Pimpette]

It all depends on what I'm drawing, if I love or hate the characters, if I'd rather be reading a book I started, if I work too many days in a row... and how lazy I feel generally
If I actually have the motivation to sit down and draw a page, I'll be done drawing in an hour or two, text in maybe ten minutes, and colour in another couple hours.

Getting that motivation seems to be the tricky part

[McDuffies]

I can make a page in anything from two hours to a week. I usually try to stretch it to a few days, I pipeline my process and prefere to scan and letter in batches, so I can't exactly tell...
From times when I had to put out a few pages with deadline I know that I can put out a page in under two hours from idea to upload, but it's not something that I really like doing.

[Phact0rri]

well if i'm taking my time its usually a combined of eight hours for a full sized comic page. however I can do a page up in half the time if I move faster.

[Wendybird]

I have no idea, since if I'm really into the process I'll lose all sense of the passage of time. Here's what I know: I have been known to finish two pages of LleuGarnock and start on a third in a period of 24 hours. The third page of Dragon's Fall took me an entire month. I am getting faster at drawing Dragon's Fall but because of the quality I've been expecting of myself on that project, I've gotten slower and more careful about each LleuGarnock page.

Theoretically, every week I produce 2 pages of LG and 1/2 a page of DF. I don't have a real job.

[Robin Pierce]

sixteen... seventeen hours? sometimes more. depends on the panel amount.

[NinjaNezumi]

I'm curious what people's production time is?

I'll define this as: Actual time drawing, letting, and posting their comic.
I'd like to leave the actual conceptualizing/writing time out of the equation for now.

I'd also like to know how often you post your comic (daily, weekly, monthly...)?

Should be interesting...

Due to massive migraines I'm sometimes laid up for an entire week, and that's only because I'm on medication. When I go off the headache meds, I can be laid up for two to three weeks -_- That's also why I wasn't able to get puppy rayn up two weeks ago -_-

It took me a total of 2 weeks to complete the entire pandaking script.

So as far as drawing goes: it takes me about 3-4 days to finish a comic - that includes drawing, tracing, scanning-cleaning the scan, recording the voice over/uploading it to youtube, converting the *.jpg to *.swf and updating the website. That's why I only update about once a month.

[Redtech]

Two whole weeks! I spend too much time planning and not enough time doing something useful, like, drawing?

[Lianweijun086]

Great thread! It usually takes me 4-6 hours to draw up a strip. It takes about 30 minutes to draw the outlines, 30 minutes to color, 30 minutes to write and place the dialogue, and then about an hour and a half to 3 hours to do the backgrounds and effects. I'm really terrible with those. I'm also really terrible with dialogue and often rescript as I'm drawing. I really wish I had a writer...

My comic updates Tuesdays and Saturdays, but I'm usually a bit late, ESPECIALLY recently. Looking for a job and worrying about my future seems to make me not want to draw.

[Samuli]

Usually one strip takes about a day to complete – 6 to 10 hours. Some complicated ones take up to 4 days. That's counting sketching and inking. If I'm really on a roll, I can do two dialogue strips a day.

Scanning, titling and posting takes about an hour. I usually process a ton of strips at once so it cuts down the time spent on one single strip.

[Fishies]

I usually do pages in batches (especially since I draw two pages to a sheet of paper). Maybe an hour drawing, half an hour inking and at least an hour colouring. Colour takes forever.

Drawing is usually done over a long period of time, otherwise I tend to just sit in a chair and work until my hand hurts/I get hungry.

[Maker]

I don't know. I exist outwith time while I'm drawing. Also I don't pay attention to the clock. Just today I happen to know it took me two hours to color a page, because I put a frozen chicken dinner in the oven at 20:30 and started coloring and then the smoke detector went off at 22:30 just when I finished.