Here's a project I worked on a few years ago that got shelved and probably would never see print. Everything you see rendered, was originally pencilled in as a solid black. With the exception of the main character, I rendered everything! Hatching, cross hatch, cross contouring, tapering, basketing, stippling, graded tones, just about every pen & ink technique I can put in to it, I did.
Rivera / Wong
What? With all that you did, you decided to leave the foreground section flat, instead of running the grade dark-dark-dark gray and home to black? (I'm not saying it would look better that way - just that, theoretically, it should be humanly possible. Now, we'll never know! - lol)
"Just a few hours of work to do that." Sheesh. I can't put in hours for a whole piece, let alone one part of it. (Maybe that's where I'm going wrong? Need to take more time in the execution? That is what it seems to be with the brush lines, at any rate.)
At the same time, my turnaround time is fast. People think I'm fast at what I do because of my turnaround time. Truth is. I'm just very discipline where I'll sit behind the drawing table to get the work done. Even if it means skipping sleep.
Lucklly, I enjoy doing what I do. So the time spent on the work, doesn't feel like 'time spent'. Hours only feels like moments. And time flies by at a blink of an eye.