Tales from the Interface

Daily production schedule

I thought some of you might be interested in knowing how I manage my schedule. It is sometimes a struggle when you have to juggle your family, professional and comics life.

I try to take advantage of my transit from home to work in many ways:

• I read and try to answer comments I receive through all social media channels.
• I check out people’s work and give input when relevant.
• I write ideas in my notes app.

When home, I spend time with the family until about 20h30 when my daughter goes to sleep.

I then work mostly on pages until 22h30. My mileage varies but that’s about it.

Weekends are more random. Family time takes a fair share. I sometimes have a little bit of time during the day but I mostly will work on my comic starting around 21h00 and finish between 23h00 and 00h00.

People often think they have no time to pursue their passion. It’s often a question of choices you make. A couple of years I gave up on video games. I rarely watch movies anymore and when I do, it’s with my daughter. I try to show her the classics.

Overall schedule

I wrote down the general direction of my story many years ago. The big lines of each chapter of the first story arch are finished. The first few chapters are fully scripted.

Here’s the general order of how I produce a chapter.

1. Finish scripting
2. Rough layout of the pages
3. While doing the rough layout I will do some research when appropriate. Things I’ve never drawn for example.
4. Cleanup of all the pages.
5. Inking. This often implies a lot of layers that I merge together or not when I’m satisfied with the result.
6. Colour flatting of all pages.
7. Rendering.

It’s important to me that a chapter is finished before beginning to post for two reasons.

1. It guarantees a stable release schedule with no interruption.
2. While the story is live, I start working on the next one and hopefully reduce hiatus time. I was able to avoid a hiatus between chapter 2 & 3 working this way.

My bottomline is, I want my art to be the best I can produce. I had the most interesting talk with François Vigneault about his production approach. Not to put words in his mouth, but here’s how I understood his approach. To him the most important thing is to produce more stories. He felt as though my doing more stories, his ability to quickly create art would follow along. And of course, his ability to tell stories would also improve because of the great number of stories he’ll be able to produce.

It is a good point. As Bradbury said so wisely, write a short story everyday. Most of them will be bad for sure. But at the end of the year, you’ll have 365 short stories and I dare you to try to write 365 short stories.

I took this advice to heart in my own way and this is why along with my longer narrative, I also produce shorter stories.

I don’t know where all this will take me, but I’m enjoying the journey.

I’d love to hear how you manage your schedule. Let’s learn from each other!