time Posts

Well, my first month trying to draw a half-page of finished comics every weekday has passed. How did it go?

Drawing a half-page every weekday would have yielded me 11 pages in September; I actually drew 15.25. Not bad! Except I hit 11 pages before the month was half-over because of a procrastination-induced marathon and some fun drawing at SPX, so it wasn’t steady production. In the second half of the month I fell a bit short of the target rate, skipping some days and drawing a little extra on others.

Still, though it didn’t go quite as smoothly as I’d hoped, I drew more often than I had been before. I published the last issue of Square Dance at the end of May, and from the beginning of June through the end of August, I drew 8 finished pages of comics – so I’ve definitely improved. October will have a spike in page count because tomorrow is 24 Hour Comics Day, but beyond that I hope to just keep drawing steadily.

Last blog post I mentioned my desire to draw at least a finished half-page of comics every weekday, which seems like a do-able pace and would produce way more comics than I have been (I count a page as art meant to be printed at 5.5″ x 8.5″). I decided this in August, didn’t do it, then decided I would start at the beginning of September. With half of September over, I’ve sat down to do the math and see where I’m at.

If I’d stuck to my schedule, I would have at least 5.5 finished pages by now.

I didn’t stick to my schedule at all, in part because of procrastination from stress about finishing the new Trees & Hills anthology.

Instead, I drew…
9/7: Daniel Barlow’s comic for TIME (4 pgs)
9/8: My comic for TIME (5 pgs) + a calendar page for TIME (0.5 page)
9/12: part of a jam minicomic (1 pg) + part of another mini (1 pg)

…for a total of 11.5 pages, twice the minimum I should have by now! I guess that sort of makes up for being off-schedule. Erratic bursts don’t help me in the long run, though, so here’s to the slow and steady accumulation of finished comics pages.