Here’s how I get in to the flow. Sit my arse down and draw. I’m in a pretty great position of not having any other job to do but my job, and I find it a lot easier when I have a big chunk of pages to get through.
That said, here’s how a typical page works – and you’ll see all the steps I take that speed me way up.
Any new project requires a new file, so I create a new document in Clip Studio at exactly the right size for print (actually it’s usually 30% larger than print, because I used to physically print the art out and ink over it – I don’t do that, but habits are habits)
I’ll usually append a few extra pages to the file, a 21 page story gets a 26 page file. On pages 22+ I create thumbnail pages, I have a nice little clip studio action that generate a 3×3 grid on the page. In practice these thumbnails are actually pretty big…
I’ll pencil my thumbs in this page – my thumbs are often crude blocky things, but enough to get a sense of what’s going on and I’ll thumb the entire book in one day. It’s exhausting but necessary.
Once it comes to pencilling, I’ll open the thumbs and select the thumb from the page I’m drawing and copy and paste it into the new page and scale the thumb to fit.
(an unusually detailed set of thumbs)
Then I’ll apply a second action that preps the entire page for me (this will add a few layers that I’ll need to draw on, putting all the pencils into a folder, and adding the frame around the page) reducing a thing that can take 10 minutes into a few seconds.
(this action seems to include a mad amount of “Make Layer above as editing target” I suspect they’re mostly a bit pointless, but when you make an action it records everything you do as you do it, so it was my fault, I probably clicked the same layer a few times, I could tidy it up, but I’ve relied on this action for years now…)
Then I’ll tighten the pencils up a bit, this is an intermediate step, just cleaning up pencils a little and clarifying anything in the thumbs that are too vague.
Next I’ve another action that simply creates a nice clean pencil layer (while making that pencil layer fade in to the background a bit) and then I do a finished pencil on that layer (which is named “finished pencils”)
And then I move on to the next page to pencil. My pencils are rough but detailed enough for me (unless the page is a struggle in which case I’ll usually move on when I’ve done something more detailed)
It can take me 2-4 hours to pencil a page (sometimes a lot less if it’s a big simple splash, sometimes days if it’s a complex crowd scene…)
As long as I’m not interrupted, I’ll break for lunch around 12. Kids get out of school around 3:40 so I’m normally hanging out with them, until after dinner, around 7, then back to work (sometimes don’t get back to work until 9) then bed around 12.
