MI Stuff- from Thumbs to Dones (Patreon)

Here's that strip of boring scribbles I posted last week next to the inks and finals for last week's pages! Pretty neat huh?

For the anthology I'm working on right now, we're transitioning our artists from their final scripts to the thumbnailing phase. I have a thumbnailing tutorial up here, as well as some other notes on thumbs in the Patreon archive, but I think the takeaway I try to impart on anyone in the thumbing phase is that they don't need to be beautiful. In fact, most of mine are ass ugly. The only thing effective thumbs need are

• an indication of where the text goes (I turned off that layer on the topmost because I had the words baked into it and didn't want to spoil anything)
• an indication of composition/ placement of the major figures OR an indication of action of the major figures
• direction/ flow readabilty

Usually a panel has a certain focus... typically that focus tends to be either talking heads or action, but beat and emotion panels are important too. Whatever the focus is, you should really hone in on that and make sure it's the main thing per panel. And of course, the flow is critical. You can see in the top row I've actually laid out my final panel borders at this stage because I think it's that important to be able to read each page effectively even if the panel contents are blank. In the few instances where I wasn't sure if you'd be able to follow (ie the first two vertical panels on the first page shown here), there are bubbles that sit on top of the page to make the direction absolutely clear. BTW hen people tell you panelling rules like "don't ever stack two verticals on the left side," they are liars and don't listen. It's like playing Yugioh, there's always some trap card you can bust out 

In other news, thumbnailing first and chugging out art through the week is the utmost fastest and best way for me at least, to make comics. Of course this week I'm behind again, but will be posting the next 4 pages of thumbs soon as I've finally gotten through all my emails and can do work for at least an hour or two now :D