Thumbnails: a Glimpse of Things to Come

While I battle away with the coloring and painting of my tiefling sorceress I thought I would share some thumbnails of illustrations I will be working on soon and thumbnails for illustrations that may or may not come to be.

If you are unfamiliar with the term ‘thumbnails’ they are the small often thumbnail size scribbles that many artists use to sketch out their ideas for paintings. These small sketches allow us artists to quickly test out our ideas on a small scale rather than spending a lot of time on a larger version to find out the composition or the design of the image doesn’t work. By being small and quick they also allow us to test out a lot of different ideas for an illustration. By creating many thumbnails for a given idea I often come across concepts and new ideas for an illustration that had not occurred to me before hand. For me it is the first step in my art creation process and it is where I can really push my creativity.

Thumbnails are often never seen by anyone other than the artist. Mine as you will see below are usually very loose, like an artist short hand, but that is because they are meant to quickly capture an idea. They are typically not something I show around. For a client or even other artists whom I need to present an idea for an illustration to I would take the few thumbnails I really like and then go a step further creating more detailed roughs for presentation.

Below are some sample thumbnails from illustrations currently in production and some that I will be working on in the future:

This first set o' thumbs are of possible layouts for the cover to a convention sketchbook I hope to put together for later this year. I know I want a character to be the focal point of the cover, but at the point of creating these thumbs I was unsure of what that character would be, my main concern at the time was the layout of the text in relation to the figure. So, in these thumbs you can see how I focused more on the major shapes of the cover text in relation to the overall cover and the quick gesture of a figure.

Focusing on the larger shapes is important in creating thumbnails. They are so small that details are not important at this stage, what is important is finding solid shapes that work together to form a good composition. Once the composition of an image is solved for the details can be worked out.

As I have talked about and mentioned in my last few posts I am currently working on a series of illustrations centering around fantasy character portraits. This next set of thumbnails is of a possible piece for that series: an arcane scholar. You may notice all the scribbling and note taking around the thumbnails. As I draw thumbnails I often have ideas for the coloring, lighting, or rendering for the image that can't be expressed in a little scribble. So, I make note of these for future reference. Both this and the previous set of thumbnails came out of a small little notebook I keep on me wherever I go. I just never know when an idea will come to me for a new illustration.

There is no telling what will inspire me to create a particular illustration. Most often for me it stems from the desire to create an image of a particular subject matter for personal work or as I am directed by the client for professional work, but sometimes ideas for illustrations have come from the desire to use a particular composition and the actual portrayed elements come later. These thumbnails to the left are an example of this. I had recently been perusing through my comic book collection and took note of a few covers that used triangular compositions often featuring the main character on one point of the triangle fighting against a larger villain or a horde of bad guys that filled in the other two points of the triangle. This created a nice powerful thrusting motion in the composition which placed great emphasis on the action of the villain(s) attacking the hero. The three smaller simple thumbnails with the red dots by them show the basic idea for this composition. Then next to those are the thumbnails with figures using those compositions.

Thumbnailing is one of the favorite parts of my artistic process because it is during this part that I begin to see my ideas take form and they begin to come to life. I hope you enjoyed this look into thumbnailing and I hope you have a great week! As for myself I must return to the digital easel and battle with the unruly colors of my sorceress illustration. Back to the fray!