Step 2: Thumbnails

Think of ideas and situations for your characters, and thumbnail like crazy. In fact, as soon as you think of an idea, draw it down in a thumbnail form. It doesn't matter if all you draw is a bunch of squiggly lines at first. Nor does it matter if your drawing is off-model. What matters is that you get your ideas down as fast as possible. If necessary, go over your thumbnails as many times possible. Erase, enhance, do whatever it takes to get your ideas down, and don't just do one thumbnail. Do a whole bunch, do as many as you can come up with.

 

 

Be sure the drawing is clear to you, and eventually, to your audience. You wouldn't want people to think that your character is laughing, when she is actually crying. That is why it is very important that your drawing reads well to your audience. Working small, in thumbnail form, gives you the opportunity to figure all that stuff out beforehand. Focus on the body language of the character (i.e. if the character is tired, show that he is tired by slouching his back, dragging his feet, head dropped forward, etc...) See ways that you can improve on your character's pose. Study the Masters of Gesture Drawing, ( Frazetta, Elvgren, Boris, etc..) Design your drawing to be appealing to the audience. Either by making it sexy, provocative, alluring, innocent, or whatever mood you are trying to portray. When I set out to do a funny drawing, if I am not laughing through the whole experience of drawing it out, then it is not a funny drawing. You have to feel what you draw, or else none of the audience will. Remember, your drawing is forever. Once you've done the whole drawing and sent it out on the Internet, it doesn't belong to you anymore. It will forever live in the realms of cyberspace. So if you see a mistake that you've done on your drawing, there is no way you can fix it and send it out again. If you did, people would say "Hey!, he changed his drawing. I liked it the other way better", or "what an idiot!, changing his drawing, not thinking that we wouldn't notice", So there really isn't any room for mistakes. I've sent out some stuff that I'm particularly not proud of, but hey, what can I do? I could pull a George Lucas and rename all my old drawings “Special Editions” or do what they did on Beauty and the Beast and add a song or two. Ultimately you will have to let go of your baby and let the world judge.

Thumbnailing for comix is something entirely different. I don’t really thumbnail, but rather I make a rough pass as it. I draw out the entire page using a soft 6b pencil. This allows me to layout all my pages so I can later on go back and edit a few and perhaps improve upon them.

Below is an example. This is page 10 of Ay Papi #2

 

So work out any problems you have in your thumbnails, it will only expedite the drawing process when you tackle the finished drawing.