HI NONNIE!!! thank u sooooso much for checking in and for ur lovely ask! it means a lot to hear that my silly ol scribbles were what introduced u to the glorious landscape that is the tolkien fandom! on tumblr no less!! i hope you stay a real long time, and have a blast while you're at it 💖💖
now onto your question! that's some good food for thought uhhhh i can try to estimate?? its been a while but i shld have some rough ideas abt each that i can share! the time frame each comic/panel takes is highly dependent on WHAT kind of comic it is. i hv two kinds of comics I usually do: 1) full-length, and 2) goofy/4koma.
i have a few full-length comics laying about in my archive, but my most recent one/best example is Ghosts which was around uh.... 7 pages excluding the bonus panels! in terms of the process, i usually divide it into 5 stages:
- Drafting: this is either the fastest stage OR the slowest depending entirely whether i know what im doing LMAO,, if i have a set idea for what i want to happen, i might get drafts done in a few hours, but if i flounder, it can take a few days 🤔
- Lineart: relatively simple enough once i hv the draft down, so id say anything ranging from an hour to half a day if theres nothing else going on irl
- Block colouring (main actors): there are DEFINITELY easier and more professional ways to do this with mass-selection and the lasso fill/bucket tool, but idk how to do that on SAI (my art program) so i colour everything by hand HAHA which makes the process longer.... half a day to a day?
- Shading: THE WORST!!! definintely my least favourite bc i find it tedious due to all the details/prettification of elves that i am legally obliged to pour into this stage 😭😭 as a result, it can take days!!!
- Background + Lighting + Final Rendering: similar to the previous stage haha it just depends on how much effort i wanna put into the final product looking nice. roughly a few days? it kind of meshes with stage 4 anyways haha
just for fun, i hope this process gif for page 6 can illustrate that 👇
these are just rough estimates, bc all in all, the time it takes so finish a page is really dependent on how free I am hahaha. Also, I usually work on full-length comics like Ghost which have more than one page all at once, which means I drafted all 7 pages at once, then did the lineart for all 7 pages at once, coloured at once, shaded rendered bla bla bla 😚 iirc, i think it took me 11 days in total to finish Ghosts before the end of June last year!
For goofy/4-koma, its usually just one page with less detailed/more cartoonish/chibi character styles so it takes a day or two days at most! again, it all boils down to how free i am hehe
YEAH SORRY THIS ENDED UP BEING AN INFO DUMP but thank you so much again for asking and letting me ramble! <3 i ended up having a lot of fun looking back on my drafts n thinking back on my processes.... theres defininitely room for improvement, but thats another worry for another day heheh 😎