How many hours do you usually spend on one page/strip of your comic?

[Shouri]

Ow, I spent so much time on hiatus (from drawing and everything, writing my senior thesis was terrible) so I totally lost all my practice =X I used to be able to finish a Springiette strip in less than an hour (and the quality didn't suffer that much I'd like to think, haha). Now it would take me around 3 hours, with distractions in the middle ("I forgot to write an e-mail!", "I'm so tired to stare at PS I need to walk around", "the cat is destroying the couch! quick!"). In this particular style I prefer to sketch the different poses on paper, then lay it out nicely on Photoshop, draw the lineart over those sketches, then tonning (which is not 'real' tonning but it makes it cute I guess). I haven't really timed myself with my other comic styles and I fear to do so... I've been drawing a comic for my boyfriend and it took me like three days to sketch the whole thing (24 pages). I need to draw more. :/

[Alectric]

24 pages in 3 days?!  And you think you need to draw more?!

[Shouri]

24 pages in 3 days?!  And you think you need to draw more?!

It's just the sketches, believe me, it looks terrible! XDD Random limbs flowing everywhere! Total disregard of layouting process! COPY-PASTE-ROTATE =D

[wendyw]

I worked it out once as 6-8 hours. I've gotten faster since, but at the same time the pages have been getting longer, with a 20-something panel page coming up in the next few pages, so it probably still is about 6-8 hours (that page I mentioned will take a bit more than that) because I keep giving myself more work to make up for the fact I'm quicker these days.

[Gar]

A single panel will typicaly take me a little over an hour, so I'd be in the 4-5 hour range depending on the strip (which seems to be about average).  I do my pencils at work during lunch break on an A5 notebook, then ink them at home and colour them on the computer. I also recently got a Cintiq, so it's taking a little longer now. I think that's partially getting used to the cintiq and partially because I'm playing around with the art a little more.

[Gibson]

I come in, generally, between 6-8 hours for pencils, inks, digital touch-ups, colours and letters.

If you add in the writing process, it goes to roughly 8-10 years.

[Travis Surber]

in the beginning 15 minutes(but I was using a paperback for a straight edge and a ballpoint pen for all the "art")Now 1 and a half to 2 hours depending on how much I try to do in each strip.

[JayFantastico]

Writing: 30 minutes.

Art: about an hour and a half. The half is for letting the frames dry from the super heavy inks.

[NZSteve]

It takes me a minimum of 4 hours, and that's assuming that I already had the script done (I'm really trying to spend time out-of-band amassing scripts weeks ahead of time -- a strip can survive an art mistake, not so sure it can survive many scripting mistakes, be they jokes that don't work, continuity problems, or are just plain boring) and I'm doing the normal 4-panel format that I'm doing lately.

Add in new(er) characters or complex sets, and it can easily be longer than that.  I wish I was faster, but 4 hours seems to be a very common ballpark for folks who do full-color, multi-panel strips. 

I plan to try and make pre-drawn backgrounds and sets sometime in the near future to make strips look good without adding significantly more time to draw them every time.

[klingers]

It kind of depends for me. Usually in terms of actual elapsed hours spent, probably between 4 and 8 per strip depending on complexity.

In terms of actual elapsed days to get a strip done, usually three or four. A 9-5 job wrangling with 12 year-old computer code and oracle databases usually somewhat kills my muse.

I usually need about 2 hours just to get sorted around the house and get my brain back on a weeknight, so I can usually only squeeze in an hour or two then.

I love the weekends because I get a chance to work uninterupted with some actual cogent thought processes