Behind The Scenes, pt. 3.0 - Thumbnails

Good afternoon, everyone! First, I'd like to apologize. I meant to post this yesterday, but got carried away working on a commission and completely lost track of time. Sorry!

Secondly, Patreon isn't great about adding multiple photos to a single post, so I think I'll need to split this one up over a few days to go as in-depth as I feel is required for you all to understand exactly what I'm doing.

Finally, before we go any further, I think it's important to get some terminology out of the way. A strip or a page is a complete sequence of images. A panel, on the other hand, is the term used for an individual image in that sequence. For example, in the above image, each of the little squares with doodles inside it is a panel. Those panels then get drawn together onto a single sheet of paper as a page or a strip. (The only difference between a page and a strip is the format of the comic in question. If JL8 were a monthly comic composed of 20 pages, what I refer to as strips would then be more commonly referred to as pages. Likewise, if you released any issue of The Amazing Spider-Man page by page, folks may be inclined to refer to each of those pages as a strip.)

Today we continue my multi-part series exploring the behind-the-scenes process of creating a JL8 strip. So far we've covered plotting and scripting, and today, we'll be discussing thumbnails. Thumbnails are small (hence their name) preliminary drawings that are done to aid in the drawing process, like a blueprint. Before we go any further, I should point out that everyone thumbnails differently: some people--like myself--thumbnail VERY loosely, some people thumbnail very tightly, some people thumbnail everywhere in between, and finally some people don't thumbnail at all. It's certainly not a mandatory step towards creating comics, but most people find it to be quite helpful.

As you can see above, the way I thumbnail is loose in every sense of the word. Really what I'm trying to break down are the images that will be required for the strip, such as what characters will be featured in each panel, what the ratio of that panel will be (square, tall rectangle, long rectangle, circle, etc), and the like. 

You may remember from the "Script" update that most of my scripts are basically just lists of dialogue. In the thumbnail phase, I look at the dialogue and decide how that would break down into "shots" (panels). Sometimes I get it on the first try, other times I notice that shot B doesn't really work with shot C and I have to rework it, but that's the whole point of thumbnails. As mentioned, Patreon makes it difficult to post multiple images into one post, and all that stuff will make way more sense when I can break it all down visually, which I plan on doing tomorrow. Today's just a broad overview of what thumbnails are and why I use them. See you next time!