August Sketch Page #1 - Thumbnails (Patreon)

Howdy folks!

Hope everyone's month is going well. I haven't had a moment to rest and am still playing catch up.
All of July's Patreon work is finished. The exclusive you've already seen and the YCH is finished up and should be posted later this week so please look forward to that.

I haven't had the opportunity to do a sketch page for you all yet so I'll be going over thumbnailing with some of the client pieces I'm currently working on.

Thumbnailing is a great way to get ideas onto paper and to practice transposing mental images into visual ones.
Whether you have a specific pose in mind or a reference to work off of, use quick small sketches to iron out the most basic details: shapes/silhouettes, gesture, values.

Here I'm only concerned with the pose and making sure I have a strong base to begin constructing a silhouette since this will only be a sketch.

Here you can see how I'm working with a bigger scene. There is a large background element that needs to be considered so we need to make sure our compositional elements are the focus of these thumb sketches. Don't spend a lot of time on these. You can see the details I'm putting in are extremely rudimentary and are more like mental notes than concrete details that will be in the finished piece. A more complete background thumbnail will also lay down a few, usually three, values to give the general impression of how light will be affecting the piece.

This is a more finished sketch made from a thumbnail for this month's exclusive. I did this sketch a few months back and theres far more detail in it than you would want to include in a thumb but this gives you an idea of what laying down rudimentary value will look like.

Hope you enjoyed this quick little foray into my process.

Til next time.