One of the biggest things people who make comics lack – besides money, respect or success – is time. Ideally, we would have all the time in the world to sit down at the drawing board and make a perfect comic, but the realities of the world don’t work that way. We have jobs, relationships and responsibilities to take care of.

We also have a nasty habit of absent-mindedly killing time.

A lot of people think they don’t have the time to do a comic at all, or maybe only update once a week. Some people think they don’t have time to do their strip in color or figure out some tricky website layout issue. It’s something we’ve all dealt with, but if you objectively looked at what you did with your day you might find a useful hour or two that you usually kill.

At Work: If you’re an office worker stuck at a computer all day, there’s no reason you can’t open up Notepad and write down a blog post or two when the ideas hit you (It’s what I’m doing right now!). If you have web access, you can use a service like Google Docs to keep your scripts for upcoming comics easily accessible at your work and home machines. Take a notepad with you to meetings – you look like you’re paying attention but you can be working on that killer punchline.

If you work outside or at a retail job, try sneaking your pad and pen with you to your breaks instead of wasting half an hour making idle gossip with your co-workers. Funny Webcomic is written, lettered and inked during my lunch breaks I would have otherwise spent killing time.

At Home: Take a good look at your daily schedule for any ‘dead’ areas. Are there regular chunks of time that have no real use? Of course I don’t mean you should be locked away in your drawing area while the rest of your family are having dinner together, and certainly it’s important to unwind at the end of the work day. However if making comics is as important to you as you say it is, you need to put in the extra effort to find some time for your art every night and establish it as a habit. I realised that I was spending an hour or so every night doing nothing in particular – half heartedly playing video games, aimlessly browsing the net, watching television shows that I wasn’t really interested in…all the while thinking about what I wanted to do in the next Plant-Man! That hour is better spent actually at the drawing board getting it done instead.

On Breaks: People take books with them to read while sunbathing, why not take your drawing equipment instead? Tell stories of your comic characters at camp instead of ghost stories – bonus points if your comic is about ghosts.

If you have a good example of how to avoid killing time, I’d love to hear it!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 23rd, 2008 at 10:23 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.