Sketch faster. That's all there is to it, just learn to push out block shapes. I can get a figure sketched in about half a minute, another couple of minutes to block in some details and then I'm ready to ink.

That's amazing But.. sketching is maybe.. 20% of the process. The rest goes to coloring and shading.

You think that's bad, my Ink gel pens kept on bleeching my outlines on my art. The Ultra Fwooshed! - Summer Form was the last drawing to have Ink gel on it. You'll be seeing these drawings on DA this weekend.

Aha, I have to destroy every single one of my sketches.

I've gotten my stuff down to about 2 hours or so, all told. A quick sketch on paper, clean it up, ink it, scan, and finish digitally. Flood fill is your friend when it comes to flat colors, then its just a matter of how you choose to shade things n' whatnot.

Hmm, that's one of my persistent problems. The flood fill has never actually filled my work. D: I end up taking an hour or so making ends meet.

Depends on what program you're using I guess. It works well for me in my old assed paint shop pro 7. ^^ Though I need to upgrade, and start using Sai or something.

Hmmm. I remember that. I might of used Paint Shop Pro 8. When I was 7 or something.
Nevermind. The best bet I have is a drawing program that supports smoothed freehand vectors.

I've been told Sai is pretty smooth for the linework.

I'm afraid, as with all crafts, art takes a very long time. But the one consolation is that the more you do it, the faster you become as you gain the muscle memory and the eye for what goes where, and how to use your tools.

Ration your time. Even if one stage isn't the best, if it's an improvement, use it. Do lots and lots of studies and practice paintings. Paint the shading on spheres and cubes, do some figure drawing, practice practice practice. Art isn't something industrial, you can't cut down on the artistry time to churn out more product without sacrificing a lot.

And once you've reached a stage where you can do this kind of thing in your sleep, then you'll notice not only have you gotten better, you've gotten faster, too. My latest painting, albeit just a concept one, took around 45 minutes. It's all about knowing what you want to get out of a picture. You'll stop fumbling around in the painting stage and really get something done once you know what you're doing.

Quality, man, not quantity. We're artists. Our trade is nothing but work. Wonderful, wonderful work.

*Checks it out* Fuck.. I suck.

Going more indepth.. there IS something slowing me down. I used to do whole comics in 5 hours, now it's single pictures in 5~12.
Only once lately have I done a full works in under 5 hours - http://www.furaffinity.net/view/4149043/ - And it's no less liked.

Well, you gotta remember that I'm at university doing this kind of thing. It's not a hobby for me.

But how often do you do art? How many days a week do you crack open your sketchbook and draw? It may seem a little counterintuitive to tell you to do more art if it takes you so long, but trust me - the more you do it the faster you will be. If colouring the drawings slows you down, then colour them more simply. Usually when I colour an image and I don't want to be there forever, I just magic wand select the inside of the lineart (making sure that the inked bits are closed - you don't want colour bleeding) go to a new layer, expand the selection so that there isn't a halo, and flood fill.

THEN, select the "Lock Transparency" button for that layer. A voila, clean filled colours and you can shade without going over the lines. Never fill on the lineart layer. It looks awful.

Yeah.. need more chances to just draw. And ideas to pursue with such.
Wish it was that simple to use the magic wand - End up spending an hour or so making ends meet. 300 DPI, native DPI, pencil, digital, opaque, semi-transparent; nothing works.

I mocked up a quick example to show you how easy it is - the vast majority of the colour is just magic wanded, with just a little bit of touching up with a brush. The lineart was just made that way in like, five minutes. Obviously you want to spend longer on it if you're going for flat colours. But if you have a strong inked layer, it gets rid of all the crap that's on the pencil layer. You can see my sketch isn't high quality, or clean.

http://khato.shaunhargreaves.com/Temp/coonchair.psd

GIMP/Photoshop can open this.

How do you do it? Unless you're inking directly onto the pencil layer, I don't see how it's taxing.

Haha.. stuff like that says I really need a tablet. No mouse can pull off the same perfect pressure effect without hours of line adjustment.
Perhaps it's time to move back to full-opaque lineart again.

Well, no wonder it's taking hours if you have to use a mouse for the digital colouring. It's just so unnatural and kills your hand. Well, unless it's pixel art :P. If you really wanna get into digital art, a tablet is a must have. Without it, you lose all pretense of subtlety. And your sanity.

Yeah, don't remind me. xP Oh well. I'm looking up Photoshop pen pressure simulation for now so maybe I can get pseudo-pressure.

Nah, don't think pseudo-pressure is possible. Can't simulate pressure with a full-on, full-off device.

Argh, I have the same problem.
All my three steps:
1. Handdrawn sketch
2. Inking the scanned sketch
3. Colouring the inked pic
takes me like forever. I'm motivated and have lots of ideas but I just have not enough free time or I can't get to other things as well like writing here with all my dudes*sighs*

The only way to do it faster I think is that I would train to skip the first point and draw via my tablet the outlines in my PC but I still need several hours for one pic and it results to that I have lots of unfinished pics in my PC and I struggle if I should just post a sketch here or not and also if I should finish a pic or do a new one because I have so much things I would like to draw. I'm a silly dile, hahaha.(^.=.^')

Atleast you're motivated, you can do that kinda stuff without forcing yourself

Yeah but I have to admit I did only just two or three sketches including inflation and I'm not very happy with how it turned out. It seems like I'm no good inflation artist at all, hahaha.(^.=.^')

Baaaah, it takes practice though! 3 sketches isn't enough to go to the top or anything.

I know, I know, hahaha. It's just like I lack of talent somehow. I would need a lot of more free time for training my skills in drawin.*sighs*(^.=.^')

Ahh I feel you pain. It takes me forever to get anywhere with my art. You've been doing this far longer that I have so I cant give you any advice artwise but if you want motivation then all the work you've done so far is motivation in my eyes =)

Haha, I've got slower and slower though! Makes sense since I'm bigger, but still!