Illuminating letters: behind the scenes

How long does it take to make a mini comic and zine?

When making my latest comic I recorded how long I spent on each stage of its creation. Even though I’m the one doing the work, it surprised me. 

Someone recently asked me if I write this newsletter in the moment, if they just unfold monthly on a Sunday morning. As much as I would love to have that level of clarity of thought, and speed of creation, that’s not quite how I work.

My visual essays and comics are made across a whole month, which is why there’s only one every 4 weeks or so. The usual process involves planning and researching the story, creating the line illustrations for each page, adding colour to those illustrations, laying out the coloured images and adding text to create full pages, sending a print friendly version of this to the printers, assembling the zines, then finally creating the newsletter post that brings all of that work together. 

I tracked my time against all of those sections of work and these are the three things I learned about how I work:

Each comic takes a long time (about 18 hours to be exact)

I’m sure there are ways that I could be more efficient in how I put these comics together and I know this probably feels like far too much time to have spent making these to some people. But I enjoy the process. I like that I can chip away as I want to and I can put as much time as I like into the sections I’m most excited about. Plus these are mainly things I can do with the TV or a great podcast in the background.

Most of my effort goes into drawing the line illustrations on pages

Creating the line illustrations that make up the pages is 36% of the time I spend making a comic, it’s also the work that’s spread across the longest period. This is less about the amount of time the drawing itself takes, and more about having to make decisions on how a page comes together, because adding colour takes less than half the time. I do some of this decision making when I’m planning, but there’s always an extra step for me when translating an idea onto the page.

My pace increases as the comic comes together

I set myself a, somewhat arbitrary, deadline that I work towards when making a comic and zine. So, I think some of this is the natural process of procrastinating and then actually having to do a thing. But there’s an element of the work just becoming easier the more the story and images take shape. I have a clearer vision of what I want and I just have to execute it. 

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I’d love to know if any of this resonates with other people out there making similar, or even completely different, work. I do wonder if the time I spend on different elements might change as I get better at making narrative work, so perhaps this is something to do again in a year and see how it might have shifted. 

That’s all for now.

Write/draw again soon,

Natalie