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 dont
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