How do you improve your thumbnails?

[aqua03]

(My apologies if I've already asked this...)

So I've started work on my DRAGONS remake and I realized that I have a bit of a problem with my thumbnails/roughs: They're a bit too complicated for what purpose they serve. Like, they're more the initial rough sketches than the actual just clean plotting stuff out that I've seen in thumbnails before. This ends up making things a lot more complicated and lake longer than I feel it needs to be.

How do you guys do your thumbnails/roughs and can I see them pelase? Also, if you have any good tutorials regarding the subject as well, I'd love to see those as well.

Thanks for the help!

[Iris-Grimoire]

Let go of your expectations of the art during that process. It's a thumbnail, only you'll ever see it if you choose so. Go crazy, draw stick figures with the character's name on them, regret your decision later--I mean improve and replace those with stick figures with the character's most defining features, and always ignore the voice in your brain saying that your sketch should be perfect, because it's not even the sketch yet.

[aqua03]

Ah, okay. I was thinking stick figures with my characters' defining features, but I was worried about laziness and readability. Thanks for the advice! I'll try to give it a shot then!

[joannekwan]

Yeah, my thumbnails are so undetailed. And that's because at that stage I really only need to know, paneling, word placement, and general composition. A more defined sketch usually comes after that.

[Iris-Grimoire]

The only readability you need is where the camera is, a rough idea of the perspective if it's a forced one, and where each character is to fit in the bubbles and maybe some expressions where necessary, as joannekwan showed. Everything else can wait for the sketch - now you just need to get a feel for the panels while you can still make major adjustments.

[aqua03]

Cool, thanks. I'll defiantly start working on that mindset as I progress further with my comic.

[IdiotWithPencil]

Depends really if your doing it solo do them as simple as you want, just make sure YOU understand it, don't even have to place dialogue if you don't want to, just make sure you have a rough idea where the
dialogue will be at the end

if your working with and edit or plan on asking other people to check your work make it almost rough sketch like and make sure the dialogue is in there

personally I'm doing the latter since I want my sister and other people to read it and give their opinions before I put ink on paper

[CloudyMagpie]

For my thumbnails, I fill out a comic page with rectangles on a top layer and do the drawings underneath. I find that working in such a small space limits my own temptation to add too much detail and helps me focus on blocking in characters, word balloons and any important environmental elements. Also, working in batches like this directly out of my script helps me make changes as I need them, whether that means splitting a page in two or splicing two into one for the sake of clarity and pacing.

Hope this helps. Thumbnails can be so much fun once you get the hang of your workflow so I hope you find this helpful

[aqua03]

Ah, neat! I'll try that method and see how it works! Thank you so much for the advice! (It'll probably be easier than drawing out each thumbnail page individually on each of the proper pagesI'm working on.)

[InkRoseArt]

I mainly use thumbnails just to plan out the composition of the page. the drawings themselves are basically glorified stick figures since they're only there to help me figure out what size to make the panels and word bubble placement. I don't even put in the text yet and just scribble in bubbles roughly the size of the amount of dialog I expect to be in the panel.
when I go to make the actual page, the first thing I do is copy and paste the thumbnail, blow it up to the size of the page and put in the panels and text. then I start the more detailed and defined sketch. thumbnails are the planning/trial and error stage, you shouldn't be pouring a lot of time and effort into how they look like they're the final sketch only to have to throw it out because they don't work with the composition of the page.

[silacinnamon]

I draw very quick doodles for the thumbnails, just to figure out the composition, text placement and some basic poses/expressions. Sometimes I don't even draw some details, I just write a quick note to remember what to draw later (and to make sure I'll understand whatever those squiggles are supposed to be ). After that I do the actual sketches over the thumbnails.

For wordless comics I like to do a bunch of small thumbnails in a single page like some people said! And for comics with dialogue I find it easier to do page by page, so I can already add the text with the right size and see how much space it will take. But each person has a method that works better for them :3

[aqua03]

And here is the thumbnails for DRAGOONS Chapter 1 I made today! I'm really glad at how they turned out and thank you all so much for the great advice.

[Iris-Grimoire]

It's looking pretty good and you produced them in very short notice, it's a great start! You might also want to put some text (doesn't even need to be the final font, sometimes I just take a screenshot of the script or I scribble on the traditional sketches) before moving on to the next sketch just so you're sure there isn't dialogue that'll block interesting things entirely. One too many times I got excited, drew the whole thing, then put dialogue and realized it covered the lovingly crafted background.

[aqua03]

Ah, cool. Never thought o it like that! I'll give that as shot while I work on it! Thanks for the advice.

[Iris-Grimoire]

No problem! The first thing that comes to mind is not blocking characters which IS more important, but sometimes you draw a really nice table with food or something and you don't want people to miss out on it.