Tag: pomodoro

Wednesdays child is full of Woe

Car insurance woe. One of the drawbacks of being a proper adult is dealing with insurance. There’s so much insurance admin – car insurance, house insurance, TEETH INSURANCE! I PAY FOR TEETH INSURANCE! (I mean it’s not really teeth insurance it’s a thing called Dentaplan, you pay monthly because the NHS dentists have all decided to quiet quit and now all NI dentists are largely private, and sure private dentists are for rich people, but they’re also for poor people now!)

Car insurance renewal came through, at least it lacked the insulting “great news this year we’ve added even more savings to your car insurance” and then proceeded to quote something twice as expensive as previous years.

My insurance should be going down, been driving without1 accident for nearly 30 years, and yet somehow my quote this year was £860 (up from £550 last year). So no thanks tesco insurance – I went elsewhere.

One of the most blissful fortnights I ever had was when my car packed it in and I couldn’t drive, for two happy weeks I had no responsibilities. I drive because I have to. I do not enjoy it.

Like running.

PJ’s Progress

Running today, we’re back at coach to 5k, week 5 day 3 – 8 minute run, 2 minute walk, 10 minute run. I couldn’t do it. Couple of walks in the middle of the run, for a minute or two. So Friday I might go back to week 4 day 1.

Work – Got Terran Omega Page 23 finished, inks, greens and letters. Took longer than it should have. But it’s a fun looking page with a striking visual. I’ve tried my best to write this with an eye to cool striking visual imagery, I think I’ve largely succeeded. I will forever think someone else could draw this better, but then no one else would and then it wouldn’t exist. And it does now. Because I made it.

Also inked a page of Fargo & McBane for 2000ad. Didn’t get it finished. Backgrounds are my kryponite, but will get it finished today.

That means Tuesday I earned $0. Quak quak.

Today planning on finishing that and getting two more pages inked. They might be fast. They might be slow. I will not know until I give them a go. POMODORO TIME!

Drawing Bits and Pieces

In which I will occasionally post some art. Yesterday one of the (many) things I struggled drawing was man on a chair from a high angle. I knew what I want, but I couldn’t quite get there. So I quickly threw a 3d model together to get it. Look at that models pert little cheeks. The saucy minx.

Yesterday in Social Media

John Allison, the epitome of everything great about the English (honestly, 800 years of oppression aside, the ones I’ve known have all been decent spuds) is serialising one of his many very funny strips on Tapas 

tapas.io/series/solver Solver is now on Tapas! Enjoy it all over again, every Monday, on your telephone screen.

Mark Sweeny over on bluesky is a font of knowledge on Clip Studio Paint

You can also add Drawing Colors to the Quick Access palette in Clip Studio Paint so you can grab frequently used colors without having to have your entire Color Set palette open.#ClipTip#ClipStudioPaint

— Mark Sweeney 🇨🇦 (@marksweeney.bsky.social) 2026-01-27T15:58:42.156Z

I suddenly remembered I did a bunch of fun one pagers that I uploaded to patreon on my birthday.

Hey on my birthday this recently[sic - I'm pretty sure I meant "this year" then edited it because it wasn't this year, but also last year suggests it was a long time ago, any way I'm spiraling - back to the post] I posted a bunch of fun one page comic strips over on my patreon - they're free, you might enjoy them www.pauljholden.com/patreon.php?via=bs&post=one-page-146865644&campaign=onepagers

Look at the things science can do!

Time to post this rather incredible photo again.The largest volcano in the Solar System, Olympus Mons, with one of the Solar System's smallest moons, Phobos, crossing it.Photographed from Mars orbit.Credit: Credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin/Andrea Luck @andrealuck.bsky.social CC BY

— Paul Byrne (@theplanetaryguy.bsky.social) 2026-01-27T20:22:36.411Z

Simon Roy remains a big inspiration for me for his mad science fiction stories

Chapter 4 of "THE ANCHORESS" is now up for your reading pleasure - Junior Scribe Jibrael digs deeper into the mysteries of the Santo Elisabeto Abbey... www.webtoons.com/en/canvas/griz-grobus-and-other-stories/the-anchoress-chapter-4/viewer?title_no=741329&episode_no=96

Via Matt Highton

And I think that’s everything, right? Right. See you tomorrow!

  1. Edited to entirely change the meaning of this, originally I wrote ’with’ and not “without”. I once accidentally ignited a flame war on alt.comics.2000ad when I accidentally omitted the word “not” from the sentance “america should not invade Iraq”. The worst thing though is because of the slightly vague and angry responses I vigorously defended my position even though I hadn’t noticed the typo. Idiot. ↩︎

Schedule

“How long does it take you to do a page?”

Every comic artist has had to answer that one at some point (and more often than not, they have to answer that one over and over again, both to fans at conventions, to family and friends who’ve no idea and to other working professionals, and finally, most hauntingly, to editors…)

For me, the answer is and will always be: a page a day. (it’s also reassuringly definite)

I mean, it’s a lie. Sometimes I can do two (sometimes three!) pages per day (3-4 hours of solid work can get a page done depending on what’s on it) and sometimes a page refuses to cooperate and can take a week or more (I mean, only when the deadline has the slack built in, otherwise you’re shooting yourself in the head doing that).

There’s a good blog post here about schedules and working within deadlines. They talk a lot about 200 page graphic novels (longest I’ve ever done is 174 pages, and it took a year – longer than I’d anticipated owing to family illnesses)

To help me work through deadlines and jobs, I sometimes use my “comics calendar” – it has 25 boxes – representing 25 pages for each month.

If I can get through each month and tick each of those 25 pages then I know I’m on schedule.

Sometimes I’ll adjust that up or down, for me 25 pages is doable (I’ve done 50 page months before… they were pretty good pages, but it is hard work)

I’ll combine this comics calendar with a proper big wall chart calendar, so I can keep track of when I’m doing work and how much. Subscribing to the Seinfeld joke writing method – essentially put an X on every day that you draw a page, and keey going til all the Xs join up.

And if you work full time and a page a day is just an absolute impossibility (and I sympathise, I worked part time for the first decade of my professional comic drawing career)-then divide the page down into chunks you know you can do – half a page, a quarter of a page, the pencils – single panels, then everytime you do a chunk put and X and move on to the next. Even if you imagine you can do a quarter of a page everyday with a full time job, and you do that every day, that’s still 90 full pages of comics per year…

Here’s my comic progress chart – I mark each project with a different highlighter colour and mark it off through the month – if I only do pencils, then I’ll mark half the box in that colour, and then fill the box when the page is completed.

Comic ScheduleDownload

Oh, and one last thing, I’ve blogged about it and talked about it before, but the pomodoro method is an incredible useful tool to get stuff done. It breaks work into 25 minute highly focused chunks with a 5 minute break with every fourth 25 minute break followed by a 25 minute break. Even if you can only get two of those 25 minute chunk in a day and you do it every day (al Seinfeld method) then you’ll be amazed at how much work you can get done.

There’s apps to make it easier, but you can do the same with a kitchen timer – the app I use is called focus keeper and it’s on the iphone or ipad.

Anyway, all said and down the big, horribly obvious advice is, knuckle down, do the work, don’t get distracted by writing a massive blog post, like I just did. Keep drawing!

-pj