Thumbnail Process

How it started vs How it ended

How does one start the process of creating images for a 240 page graphic novel? 
With ideas. Ideas drawn small and quickly to explore the various facets of your storytelling process--- from page layout to panel composition. 
This process is called 'thumbnailing' because the drawings are supposed to be very small.

Lots of comic artists do this in different ways. Some people will draw on their actual script with a thumbnail page layout in the margins. Some people draw on post it notes. I drew my thumbnails digitally which was really easy and had some benefits.

One of the benefits was that I could create a template for the size of the page, then copy and paste that on an entire sheet so I could see the flow of several pages at once.
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Working digitally made it easier to adjust panels and layouts by using the transform tool. If I drew something too small or too big, I could easily make an adjustment to the size of it. If I needed to copy a panel and duplicate it to keep a sequential movement consistent, I could easily copy and paste it.
One thing I had to keep in mind was that the zoom feature could hinder my process of keeping my drawings rough. I have a tendency to zoom in on an image and get too involved in the nitty gritty details. I solved this problem by keeping my dpi to 100 pixels per inch instead of 300 dpi. The low resolution of the image would prevent me from working too detailed because the more I zoomed into the document, the more pixelated it would become. This forced me to work large and rough.

Churning out 240 pages of thumbnails in a short period of time is tough. I am poor at time management skills but am actively working on improving. I can proudly say that I am better at it than I was years ago, but I'm always trying to get better at it.

I realized that I needed to gamify the process for me to make it more fun and less "work". I started to time myself to see how long it took me to complete one page of thumbnails. After doing a few in the beginning, I realized it took me around 10 minutes to complete a page. My goal was to get faster at completing them, so I started writing the start time and stop time for each page. 

8 minutes, 6 minutes, 4 minutes, 11 minutes

Depending on the complexity of the page, some layouts would take longer than others. But at least I was documenting information that helped me to realize how many pages I needed to complete per day in order to meet my deadline.

Seeing the numbers really helped me to visualize the abstract concept of time.

Also, my thumbnails started out REALLY super tight in the beginning. I was still getting accustomed to drawing these characters that I had designed and their shapes weren't yet ingrained in my brain. A few days into the process, I was able to rough them in pretty quickly, but they also started to look like blobs. In the end, I just needed to figure out the 'camera angles' of each shot (storyboard lingo) or the point of view for each panel composition.

When I was done, I sent these to my editor and art director, along with the manuscript, and prayed that they were able to figure out what I drew!