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Evaluating our  poll did take some time, and it turned out a lot more work than I had expected. But we finally made it. Here are the results.(click on the pie charts to see them in detail)



Status

We sent out one hundred questionaires and got back fifty. Which is a pretty good turnout, I guess, but probably not enough to be truly representative. Of our sample, 29 artists were working as full-time cartoonists or illustrators while 21 of them had other jobs on the side.

“How many hours per week do you spend drawing cartoons?”

Almost a third of the artists we questioned spend about 10 to 20 hours per week drawing cartoons, followed by another fifth who said they were drawing  between 20 and 40 hours. About 15% each fell into the “working hard” group (>40h), the “less than 10 hours” group, and the somewhat hard to categorize “all the time/I don’t know/what-was-the question-again” group.

Things obviously look a bit different when you look at working hours depending on status. Semi-pros and amateurs provided a much higher percentage of the “below 20 hours” group while professionals were more present in the “20+” category and the vague answers. The latter was mostly due to the fact that we included illustrators into the “pro” section and they often couldn’t say how much of their time was devoted to cartoons.



“What time of the day do you usually draw?”

This one is a bit of a no-brainer. The left chart represents the “pro” category, the right one the “semis”. Turns out a much higher percentage of full time cartoonists answered  “I work from nine to five” (light blue) or “when I feel like it” (grey). The other group tends to draw when they don’t have to work or, as one respondent said, when “my wife and son are sleeping”. If you’re interested in the “all respondents” chart, click here.



“Which drawing tool do you use most frequently?”

The vast majority of artists uses a combination of “analogue” and “digital” tools. In most cases, people use their computer to add color or captions. The “exclusively analogue” people, of course, may use scanners to digitalize their drawings.

Turns out that there isn’t a lot of difference between “pros” and “semi-pros”. There’s only a slightly larger percentage of “semis” using exclusively analogue tools (29% compared to 24%). As a bonus, we compared the number of artists using those expensive “screen tablet” thingies. It’s the same for both “pros” and “semis”.



“Do you listen to music while drawing?”

OK, and now for my favourite question. The first replies I received made me prepare for a surprise – they were mostly “no’s”. In the end, a clear pacman-majority of all respondents answered “yes” or “sometimes”. Note, however, that “pros” more often answered “sometimes” than “yes”.

When it came to naming their favorite kinds of music, things got a little out of hand. The only thing we can say for sure is that a lot of our artists claim to have a “very eclectic taste in music”. 18 people (41% of those listening to music)  explicitly said so. Which made us form a special category for them. For everybody else’s tastes check out the chart. We allowed for multiple answers here.

I am sure that we could get a lot more information out of this poll if we took the time for creative evaluation. There might, for example, be a connection between late working hours and listening to Jazz. But … well …  I am pretty tired now. We found out that most artists still use pens, that their working hours depend on their type of employment and that they tend to have eclectic tastes in music. And that’s something. Thanks to everyone who participated!

Paul Hellmich

Coding: Max Pohlenz & Paul Hellmich

Sampling: Battlestar

© toonpool.com

Tags: pie charts, poll, survey, umfrage

This entry was posted on Monday, March 29th, 2010 at 10:44 pm and is filed under 2010, Community, toonpool.com. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.