Billboard Thumbnails (and a really funny Patreon story) (Patreon)

Remember the two Billboard Videos I've made recently? I've just premiered them on YouTube. Sometimes a video is ready, but I can't put it live because it's lacking a thumbnail - like in this case. In a flash of inspiration I turned to Canva, one of my favourite inspiration tools. It's excellent for making anything from presentations, finding clip art or even full blown graphics - all inside a web browser. 

Partly these thumbnails took so long because I didn't know how to visualise something like "creating a billboard" and condense it into a still image. I had this vague idea of trying to picture a 3D character next to a flat sign by the road, but no real clue how to do it. Today I typed in "billboard" into Canva and up came a bunch of clip art, one of which was a billboard icon I thought might come in handy. It brought up a "magic suggestion" that has the sign standing by a busy road. I used that for the first image, making the road a little less visible. The arrow is also from Canva.

For the next video I wanted to stay with the same idea, but indicating that perhaps a construction worker should do something to the billboard. I didn't find anything suitable, but these guys showed up as another magic recommendation and I thought perhaps they could just stand around the billboard from the first episode, indicating somewhat of a continuation.

And there you have it, that's how I've made the thumbnails (finally).

In other news, I'm finished editing the German R3DS Wrap series today, and it came out rather well. I'm uploading it now and will share it with you tomorrow, before I have another task of creating a series of thumbnails for it. I might just take the purple version of the Tonya render I've shared with you the other day and add a strap on the side (oh wait... while I was typing the word "strap" followed by the preposition "on", the Patreon spell checker just brought up this enticing dialogue:

This whole "bot crap" is seriously getting out of hand... just in case I get kicked off Patreon, this post will have been the reason 😁