Thumbnailing, traditional or digital?

[DualDragons]

I wanna start working on my oneshot comic soon. I already established a plot, so I am thinking of doing the thumbnails first to get an idea what panels to draw.

I'm debating on whether to do said thumbnails traditionally or digitally. I'm leaning towards traditional, maybe on a A3 paper so I have a large canvas to doodle the thumbnails on. Digitally I'm afraid I might zoom in too much to add detail, which is not really the purpose of thumbnails.

Anyone have experience with them? If so, could you share some of your advice with me?

[Lensing]

I do thumbnails, storyboard etc. all traditional for many reasons.
I´m very fast with pencil and paper. I´m less distracted and it helps
me not to overthink and get the job done and it feels different.

[DualDragons]

Yeah I can imagine. I'm also considering doing my thumbnails with inking pens instead of pencil, so I'm not constantly worrying about correcting everything.

[lynrogg]

So this is just my opinion so take it with a grain of salt, but I think that the thumbnail should be reflective of the style of the comic so if you're drawing the comic digitally, you should draw the thumbnail digitally. I'm also not personally a fan of comics/manga that have the cover be super realistic/higher level detailed than the art used in the comic either though. If you think you can still make it look more or less the same as your comic art, I don't think it will hurt anything. Even though I'm not a fan of it, it wouldn't stop me from reading a comic that has a different style thumbnail if the comic was good. It would just confuse me.

As for the detail thing, it is annoying to deal with, but the way I handle it is just to make sure to draw the thumbnail on a file with less pixels, that way even if you zoom in, there is a limit to how much detail you can add. With less pixels, it'll just make really fine detail look look like square and super messy so I literally can't get stuck on fine details you won't see so I can focus more on the overall picture. I still make mine a little bit bigger than the thumbnail size required for uploading cuz I'm not great with smaller/pixel art, but I make sure my proportions are the same and just accept that there is some detail that won't show up in the finally image.

[Lensing]

, it wouldn't stop me from reading a comic that has a different style thumbnail if the comic was good.

how would you know what the thumbnails of the comic look like?

[DualDragons]

Are you referring to comic thumbnails as in the ones seen in a webcomic? Or thumbnailing as in loosely doodling panels to get an idea of how you want to draw the story?

[jwabeasley]

I think traditional thumbnails makes the most sense. I use a sketchbook for them, so that I can carry around the thumbnails with me everywhere I go while I'm doing the writing process, because during that week-or-so process where I'm thumbnailing a chapter, it's all I think about and I need to work on it constantly whenever I have a chance.

However I work traditionally, so I don't have a reason to do things digitally.

I always work out the dialog during the thumbnail stage, but everyone has their own processes.

[DualDragons]

Oh yeah a sketchbook may work too.
Keeping dialogue in mind is probably what I will do as well

[jwabeasley]

Thumbnailing is probably the most high-concentration part of the comic creation process for me, I basically don't think about anything else during that time.

[IndigoShirtProd]

I personally thumbnail traditionally. I prefer sketching that way anyway. In my mind, all my concept art and rough drafts are for paper, and final work is digital.

[BoomerZ]

If you are going digitally, thumbnails are literally a waste of time. Thumbnails are quick sketches to save you the time of redrawing a scene at full size until you get what you want.(this could be from dialogue placement to composition.) With digital, "size" is relative. You can just zoom out if you want to work smaller, delete/move/resize as you go, draw directly over your thumbs on a layer over it, move dialogue around to fit, and then just turn off the thumbnail layer to never see it again. I personally draw over my "thumbnail" layer, erasing as I go and replace it with my roughs. And if it all goes wrong, you just delete the thumbs, nothing wasted. Thumbnails is a hold over from not wanting to waste bristol board. Digital means that step is not needed anymore.

[alliascompany]

I prefer doing my thumbnailling traditionally but mostly because I feel more comfortable sketching and drawing with pencil. Usually I'll sketch them in a sketchbook with squares to figure out panel composition or on a large sheet of newsprint where I have room to try out different ideas.
I've seen people who do digital thumbnails blow them up and sketch over them.

Really depends on what's comfortable for you and your workflow. Can always experiment with both and see what you like better. Like do one page traditionally and the other digitally

[jwabeasley]

You don't visually plan out more than one page at a time?

[IndigoShirtProd]

That's what I was about to ask. I thumbnail ahead of making final pages to make sure my layouts aren't to samey-samey. And to make sure things flow well from page to page.

[MrVandrin]

I have done both traditional and digital thumbnailing and a lot of it depends on kinda my mood a bit.
Trad thumbnails do make me go faster and I don't have the distraction of the internet against me. But you can get in the mood of correcting things when you use pencil instead of inks. Luckily, I have no eraser so I have no worry for that xD
Plus I can just thumbnail anywhere I'd want to.

Digital thumbnails help me get them slightly more detailed and I can more easily fix/change stuff. And sometimes, they're so detailed, I can just copy the storyboard and use it as a sketch instead of creating one from scratch. But again, you can get easily distracted by the internet compared to trad. And you can't as easily take this along with you to work outside or on public transport. And like with the eraser, the CTRL+Z is very tempting too.

Trad thumbnail:

Digital thumbnail:

[miuthecat]

I do it on a 300dpi canvas, same page size I usually use for finalized pages, there's not need for much detail, just add the core elements needed to build the scenes. You'll draw it all again anyway.