TUTORIALS
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.
Next -> Step 3: Rough Drawing
