Pros - How many pictures per day?

[onionface]

Just wondering.
for those that work in the industry on any level,
how many pictures do you complete in a day?
thumbnails, sketches, colored. whatever.
I'm really trying to speed up now, and I'm interested to know what others turn out.

I'm doing 7 days a week now, 9 hours a day.
My hand is killing me.

and damn it I need that hand, I don't have time for a girlfriend.

[DSillustration]

each day?
about 0.15 completed pictures.

seriously.

though, it greatly depends on what your work looks like.
spend as long as you need to make it look perfect.
eventually, that time frame will reduce whatever your style is.

[egerie]

Huh it really depends what field you're in or what you're working on... and who you're working for ;) Illo, concept, realistic, cartoon ? I used to do a legal page worth of sketches at the beginning of a character concept phase (20 drawings) + 4 attitude renderings of the decided prototype all within a day. Model sheets took a whole day ; full turnaround + expressions + notes.

On another production, a single attitude page took 6 hours. It was exceptionaly challenging since it was a fine balance with realistic and stylised. Plus the director was EXTREMELY demanding and harsh but I can take it and never drew as good as this in my entire life.

Anything with high render involved such as illustrations, paintings or advanced concept proposals obviously take a lot more time. It all depends really.

About hand pain : Like all training, muscles that aren't used to so much effort will hurt, even cramp sometimes. The most demanding I've experienced was 9 straight hours of animation cleanup... Oh the pain ! You'll see it will go away as you train more and more ;) Beware tho as it could also be related to your posture or the way you handle your pen/brush/whatever.

[WildSpruceMoose]

Yeah, slow down for now. I was putting in 12-14 hour days of drawing and paint and have kind of injured myself pretty bad. Physiotherapist said a nerve that supplies my thumb and first 2 fingers with feeling is inflamed and it has to do with a) too much work b) poor posture during that work and c) any break I was taking was on my computer typing on msn and browsing this site. No matter what your work pace it will get faster, you don't need to injure yourself to try and force your progression. The last couple weeks of being injured has set me back farther than the 3 glorious weeks of drawing/painting from when I got up to when I went to bed.

If you want to keep drawing 8-9 hours a day take regular breaks, set an alarm f you have to, to shake your arm out and do some exercises every 30-60min.

Ice your hand, and find some exercises asap!

Just thought I'd share my tale to be a warning to those who think poor posture combined with a lot of drawing is a good idea =P

[Blue]

For me, its been critical to do one sketch per day. Inked pieces (for comics) and digital mat paintings, typically get anywhere from 3-5 days of time dedicated to them. With detailed paintings, even more. But even then, one sketch per day in addition.

The most important thing is to keep drawing, and to keep forcing yourself to improve. Its not so much the fact that you finish your work all the time, its the fact that you are advancing your skills and filling all the gaps in your knowledge.

[dfacto]

Something I was actualy curious about is the development cycle in general and how it usually gets broken down.

Say you are working for a studio and your boss says, "Hey, we need a big tittied vixen in armor for our game. Get to work."

What is the general development time for something like that, from scratch to the stage where it can be passed off to modellers? What's the rough percentage breakdown between thumbnails, sketches, beauty shots and orthographics? And how much information do you generally get beforehand, i.e. how complete is the vision of the character prior to you starting on it?

I'm just curious as to the rough workflow and time from on-paper concept to finished 2d concept.

[onionface]

cool, this makes me feel a bit better.

Dillustration
it would take me weeks to produce a picture like yours, maybe a month, full time, no breaks, including weekends.

egerie
I know what you mean. I did clean-up for a year. I started while still at college as a freelancer, then went full time, I was working 10 hour days sometimes, what made it worse was some of the animation was so bad that the clean-up artists couldn't even tell which character it was, we would have to refer to the storyboards. I was put on key clean-up soon after going full time, Key is a lot better job to have.


as for my speed,
I'll normally start off with two pages of thumbnails.
and end up with one or two colored images, no backgrounds.

[Barts]

i do 3000