Time tracking on the comic

It’s been a wild summer with four weddings (two out of state), travel for family shindigs (my niece’s birthday and nephew’s baptism), travel for wedding planning (final venue meeting and hair trial), lots of emails with vendors, and painting projects here and there. I tried to work as much as possible on the comic when I wasn’t printing out menus and making random wedding decor. (I’ll post more about decor after the wedding!)

I used a physical agenda all summer to track my progress day to day, getting down to how long it took to create a single panel, or compose a page, and the optimal break time. My estimate is that a single panel takes an average of 45 minutes to an hour, though of course some are shorter or longer depending on size and level of detail. Panels take much longer if they involve an interior space or architecture of any kind, or if there is a lot of shading. A page takes roughly two days, if we’re including all of the planning/rewriting, and not just executing.

I programmed all the raw data into a spreadsheet to calculate my averages and came up with this: over a 16-weeks of work time, I worked an average of 27.2 hours per week (despite all the other commitments!) and 2.8 final pages per week (which doesn’t factor in weeks where I was working on thumbnails). Overall, I put in 434.5 hours and completed 36 pages.

Considering that I had 81 pages done before the summer—from two years of work, April 2020 – April 2022—and almost doubled that in four months, I’d say it was time well spent!

I haven’t scanned in chapter three yet because I still have a couple pages left to do, unfortunately. This past weeked, I did a watercolor portrait of Chris and I for the wedding, which I’ll share soon. And the next few weeks I need to focus not only on grad school work, but getting a week ahead in school work by October so that I can safely take five days off for our wedding and not miss deadlines (#TypeA). I’ll also be spending a lot of time managing RSVP responses, arranging seating charts, printing day-of stationary, packing up decor (AKA a hundred heavy books), and creating the last few decorations.

So by the looks of it, I don’t think I’ll be able to work on the comic again until maybe October. Though by then, I’ll also need to be getting ahead on school work again; the first weekend of November, I’ll be out of town for five days for a family wedding in Virginia, and the second week we have our honeymoon on Cape Cod! Then Thanksgiving. I wonder if the December holidays will feel less busy this year because everything will be settled by then. I hope so!