Original Work Journey to a Weekly Series

DoctorApollo · Nov 16, 2015

EDIT: as often happens with life, it became impossible for me to keep up the schedule and after losing the consistency, i slacked off and lost track. I am very close to being done with the story's first chapter, though, and will upload everything when I do.

SECOND EDIT: My plan to have a fuckton of free time by delaying my going to college has been thwarted by the fact that I ended up not delaying my going to college, and am now in college. So, like... this is super embarrassing, but it will be a while until I can do what I intended when I first posted this. Sorry.

This thread will be a diary of my attempts to draw manga full-time.

My parasitic lifestyle as a NEET started on November 12th 2015 (courtesy of my army service ending), and will end in October 2016, when I will start university. Rather than finding a job or traveling the world like most people in my country choose to do during the gap between their service and university, I have chosen to use this huge amount of free time to pursue my dream.

The goal is to develop the discipline and skill required to draw a weekly series full time. Real manga artists work all day and barely sleep, so I doubt I will be able to manage that. Still, I'm hoping that due to the fact that I don't write the story and thus don't draw storyboards, that I will be able to draw a full 18 pages a week, even if they are significantly lower quality than professional manga. Right now I have a few big projects that are a bunch of half-done pages, so I won't actually be able to know how many real pages I can complete per day until I finish these projects.

Because of that, my ability to hold a weekly series will still not be measured, I'll have to focus on hours per day rather than how many pages I finish. For now, my goal is to be able to draw 56 hours a week. I will use this thread to track my progress, updating it every day. (or multiple times a day, since I'm always looking for excuses to procrastinate.)

IF YOU WANT TO SEE THE DRAWINGS, THEY'RE IN THE LINKS. THE REST IS MOSTLY JUST ME BLABBERING.
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WEEK 1: November 15th - 21st. GOAL: 56 hours.

DAY 1: Sunday, November 15th, drawn a total of 9 hours. SPECIAL ACHIEVEMENT: The two bottom panels on this page, which came out much better than I expected.

DAY 2: Monday, November 16th, drawn a total of 9 hours. Daily goal: to finish inking and digital work on pages 5~10 on Cops Craze. ACHIEVED. (the quality is hit-and-miss and i'll probably redo a lot of it, but still. I finished it!)

DAY 3: Tuesday, November 17th, drawn a total of 6 hours.

DAY 4: Wednesday, November 18th. Daily goal: Draw 12 hours to heroically make up for yesterday's slacking! Totally failed... Drawn a total of 7 hours.

DAY 5: Thursday, November 19th. Daily goal: no turning on the computer for today, it caused too much distraction yesterday. Goal achieved, but it meant little as I found distraction elsewhere. Drawn a total of 8 hours.

DAY 6: Friday, November 20th. My rate is lowering since I'm now getting to pages that are mostly sketches and I have to redraw a lot of them. For pages 1-10, most of them were 50% done or even 80% done, these are mostly unfinished...But I have pages 11-15 done now! I think I'm getting a lot better at using the screentone in a more natural way. Drawn 6 hours.

DAY 7: Saturday, November 21st. Daily goal: reach the 56 hour mark! That means eleven hours. Achieved! Drawn 11 hours.

DoctorApollo · Nov 21, 2015

FINISHED WEEK 1!

This thread is pretty quiet, but it mostly functions as a diary, so it's fine this way.

Okay, so I achieved my goal and drew 56 hours this week. I think that might actually be more than most people will draw their whole lives. I managed to finish pages 1-18 of my main project (you can view 1-15 in the first post). That's eighteen pages, which would be enough for a weekly series, except for the fact that all of the pages were partly done, and some more fully than others, so it's not even close.

That being said, I still had a lot of drawing to do, a lot more of inking, and many of them only had about ~1 hour of work on them before this week, so... My current estimate is that around 70 hours a week is the amount I would need to draw a weekly series with no assistants. Weirdly enough, that no longer seems like that much work. This week was one of the most fun weeks I had in my life.

I feel like becoming a manga artist has become a possible achievable goal for me after this week.

Until now I thought a weekly series was only possible on two hours of sleep working 18~20 hours every day. Those schedules on the Internet really scared me. Now I understand it's much less complicated than that. I guess manga artists have a lot more work than just making the final draft every week, so for me, 70 hours will be enough!

Mark my words, within two months, I will have a regular weekly release.

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WEEK 2: November 22nd - November 28th. GOAL: 56 hours + at least one day where I work 14 hours.

DAY 1: Sunday, November 22nd. drawn 6 hours. Let myself go and slept in after finishing the first week successfully :x

DAY 2: Monday, November 23rd. Drawn 6 hours. I'm now 4 hours behind schedule, not good.

DAY 3: Tuesday, November 24th. Since the last two days haven't been working out, I will have an exact schedule.

12AM-6AM: Sleep
6AM-7AM: Wake up, brush teeth, eat breakfast, chill.
7AM-12PM: Draw.
12PM-1PM: Lunch, chill.
1PM-4PM: Draw.
4PM-5PM: Free time I will use to practice guitar, I've been neglecting it.
5PM-7PM: Draw.
7PM-8PM: Dinner, chill.
8PM-12AM: Draw.

If I succeed, that will be the elusive 14 hours I am struggling to attain! It will be a day like a true mangaka. I am super excited, to be honest!

Result: didn't succeed. I kept it up until 4PM, then got too caught up with my guitar, and then I just got distracted by various things and couldn't get back to more than 2 hours. I apologize to my friends and family. Will retry this schedule again tomorrow! For now, today's result: drawn 10 hours. I'll keep trying to do it over and over until I succeed. Best case scenario, I develop the ability to follow a 14-hour schedule (which means 70hr weeks with TWO WHOLE rest days, amazing shit), and worst case scenario I end up drawing 10 hours a bunch of days, which is not a bad thing at all.

DAY 4: Wednesday, November 25th. You could call this day a total failure, or a rest day, I guess. I drew 2 hours. Up until now, even my "failed" days were 6+ hours, which is obviously wayyyyyy more than I'd ever drawn before regardless, so they weren't real failures. Today I just woke up late and decided to take it easy, after getting similar advice from my parents and some friends. Obviously, this kind of thing isn't something you could keep a weekly series with, but I have overestimated by ability to jump into a super-mechanical schedule. I will have to accept that I can't just start working 70 hour weeks, I'll try to accomplish the 56hrs this week, but I probably won't. I have not given up on getting good enough for a weekly series and my fire didn't burn out, but I've decided that it's not a crime to accept that some things are too much for me the way I am right now. Hopefully, tomorrow I will be back to business.

DAY 5: Thursday, November 26th. Drawn 6 hours. Of course it's way less than I should, but... it's an improvement over yesterday, so I'm okay with it. And today was a really busy day for me, a bunch of things I had to do, I actually had to stay up until 2am to get the 6 hours in! Anyway, I'm newly motivated because of a series called Kakukaku Shikajika that everyone who cares about manga HAS to read. I will work harder tomorrow! I've gotten to the hardest parts of my story now (fight scenes), so it's taking me a long time to draw them, and I end up drawing other things (I try to draw as much as possible, even if it's not just my main project). This means that even though last week I did 18 pages, this week I'm expecting to only get to page... 25 or 26? maybe 27. We'll see.

DAY 6: Friday, November 27th.

DAY 7: Saturday, November 28th.

allinc · Nov 23, 2015

I kept a watch fot the whole week.Great work man. Keep it up!

Lucy225 · Nov 25, 2015

Nice work dude. Good luck !

DoctorApollo · Nov 30, 2015

I'm visiting my mom's house and I dont have my scanner so I actually couldnt update much in terms of showing stuff. I'm up to page 26 (pages 19-26 arent scanned or digitally edited yet though.) I did some real slacking off last week and I don't even know how many hours I did the last few days. Suffice to say it was a failure, gave myself a break and proceeded to slack off.

This week, though, started out alright! Anyway around Thursday I'll be able to scan everything and show the pages I've done.

GOAL: same as last week, 56 hours + at least one day of 14 hours.

Day 1: Drawn 8 hours.
Day 2: Well, that's today. It's 10AM and I've drawn 3 hours so it seems good so far.
Day 3:
Day 4:
Day 5:
Day 6:
Day 7: