Art Journal 001b: The Thumbnails (Patreon)

Here's a quick look at my thumbnail process both for this page and a couple previous pages. Thumbnails are very basic, just block in my frames and where the figures are positioned visually with maybe a blurb about what the speech in that panel should be about. The sketch phase doesn't always adhere directly with the thumbnail, its more an idea to give me direction in composing a page than a set-in-stone guideline. The current page sticks pretty close to the plan but previous pages have deviated pretty wildly. I keep thumbnails in a big .psd file. I do them in batches, sometimes digitally and sometimes in a tiny sketchbook I bring with me places. I used to do them on the back of data sheets at my old job. I'll just jam out about 10 pages worth of thumbnails ahead, work through them and when I get to the end jam out ten more. Whenever I get close to a 100-mark page I always get extremely careful about thumbnail batches, making sure the action sequence I want actually falls on the correct page without losing any information I want to cover beforehand. I've had plans to make a little .pdf art book of thumbnails for super mega cheap, I'd just need to dig up and scan a couple of the old ones. I'll talk more about thumbnails at a later date, though, there's plenty of fun that goes on in those primordial pages.