>>7888888

I was curious about this too to keep myself disciplined when there's nobody to crack the whip but myself, so I actually kept track of this for a roughly 6 month period.
For context I was hired to be the main artist for some comic project. I worked from around 9 or 10am to around 6pm with a 1hr break for lunch. I was not very disciplined about starting exactly on time or keeping my lunch breaks perfectly within that 1hr, so I'd often continue working at night after cooking dinner.
On good days I'd manage somewhere between 70-80% of my time spent "at work" actually drawing. On the worst, least productive days it'd go as low as 45%. Overall the average was somewhere around 65ish%. Surprisingly low, I remember thinking, but now it seems about right to me. The days where I worked the least hours were often the worst days for productivity while the days where I just locked my ass in my chair and drew all day and night were often the best days for productivity. Sounds obvious but it was important for dispelling that "I'll work less hours but just get more done!" illusion for myself. Nah, with comics you just gotta work long hours, there's no other way.

>>7888889
maybe 20% of drawing is actually creating new lines. 50% of the time is thinking about what to draw, and the remaining 30% is CTRL Z and cropping and resizing and liquifying and mirroring and other tools.

>>7888889
thinking is like 90% of drawing realistically and anyone who says otherwise is lying or an aphantasiafag

>at first i read op as: ‘how many hours do you work with pen to paper as opposed to working digitally?’ i sketch in my sketchbook for maybe 45 min every morning, then switch to digital.
as to thinking vs mark-making time, pretty much 100% of my work for the past good long while is all active mark-making with the brain anywhere from very lightly to acutely engaged while the pencil is moving, because i think while i draw, build things up, work from imagination, or if i’m doing studies separately, i just pull up what i want instantly from my drive and dive in. drawing, staging and composing feels playfully analytical to me, and i never show anyone anything, so never accidentally trip myself up by thinking my results have to be a certain way, i just keep moving my pencil and having lots of fun.

80% of the impact is the result of meticulous thinking and planning, but 80% of the time spent is mechanical execution.
Inexperienced artists, especially those who work digital tend to neglect the importance of planning. (*)
I tend to say traditional mediums are better for learning because they straight up force you to plan, punishing you severely and immediately if you don't. They're a great place to learn economy, so you don't end up wasting hundreds of hours on a single piece just bumbling around CTRL-Z'ing.
Ideally, for a typical finished piece your time usage should look something like, 60 minutes spent thinking about it, planning, making preparatory sketches and thumbnails, looking up references, preparing grids and stencils if you need them, and so on. Then 4 hours of just mechanical execution.
Multiply these if you need for more complex pieces.

Aphantasia doesn't factor that much into it, I think, I don't suffer from the condition but much of the planning is quite mechanical too and should leave little room for failure, if do it correctly.

The old universal 80-20 "rule". Not really a rule, the real numbers are probably different, but it's useful to explain:

Impact: 80% planning, 20% execution
Time spent: 20% planning, 80% execution

If you neglect spending that 20% of the time on planning, your work will suffer, in terms of quality or just taking too long to finish.
If you neglect the 80% spent on raw execution, the end result may not look finished enough for normies, but if you planned it well it might still look decent (has 80% of the impact).

>(*) I'm talking about those who still have some experience... begs tend to be the opposite, they think the "ideas" they have hatched for years since childhood are the greatest shit ever (Wow... Sonichu...) but think half-assedly doodling something for 15 minutes is enough, not understanding that finished pieces take time and patience)