In the readers' forum, James asked how long it takes me to draw pages. It's actually a difficult question to answer, because it varies so much on each project, but here's some info I figured some of you would like to know:
It takes me two sessions to do a Copper comic. A "session" is usually about 8 to 10 hours of drawing. I can do between 6 to 18 pages of layouts for a graphic novel in a session, depending on how confident I feel. I can do just as many final linework pages in the same amount of time. Coloring takes me a full day to come up with a palette for a scene (one page), and I can do 3 a day of just applying color, light and shade. Writing is where it gets nebulous. Sometimes, it can take minutes, and sometimes it can take weeks for the same amount of work. I try to ingest as much information as I can during the writing periods, for inspiration and reference. I'm about to dive back into that mode of production soon. It's difficult to say how much work that amounts to in terms of pages-a-day, but I do know that I have to do more than a page a day to hit my June 30th deadline.
I try to make my production methods on the graphic novels pretty swift, so that I can focus more on making sure the story works well. Because Copper's story content is so compressed, I can spend some more time on the compositions and artwork. I'm not yet sure if this is a good or bad thing, but I do know that I tend to be a slow, stubborn bastard while working on Copper.
