Are you skipping the most important step in your illustration process?

Why thumbnails could be the most important step in building an illustration.

Decades ago I did illustration and showed it to an illustrator friend.

I wasn’t an illustrator then, but I loved to draw. I wasn’t hoping for some minor tweaks, or get feedback on the lighting or rendering. He took on look, then reached for some cheap printer paper.

You need to start with thumbnails.

He scribbled 9 quick sketches in minutes in little rectangle boxes, and we discussed those instead. Each of them had a better use of space and layout, and stronger visual concept, the text didn’t compete for attention, instead it was neatly integrated.

I looked at my illustration and gave it the same look of disdain and learned then that you can save hours and get better results by doing thumbnails.

More recently, I asked

Katie Stack

about the importance of thumbnails as we build towards our next session of Art Gym, and she gave me 5 reasons she thinks thumbnails are important.

6 Reasons thumbnails are important

Exploration: Thumbnails allow you to explore a variety of compositions quickly and efficiently.

Efficiency: Thumbnails save time! Otherwise you might work for hours on a spread just to realize the composition doesn’t work, or that the text won’t fit. Or that the page before or after has a similar composition.

Discussion: Thumbnails can also be shared with clients to begin a discussion about what’s working and what isn’t. This saves times on edits from the client.

Creativity: Getting into the flow of drawing lots of thumbnails can generate creativity and new ideas for compositions.

Visual interest: Thumbnails can make your compositions much more interesting and varied.

Pacing: Thumbnail exploration helps all the pages of the book to flow together.

I agree with all of them, and If I could add one thing, I would say thumbnails are just FUN! But they are also serious business. The thumbnails make up the framework that the whole book is built on. They are like the stroryboards in a Disney film.

And for this reason I feel they are the most important step in illustrating a book.

Katie is putting together a workshop for us, if you’ve never drawn thumbnails before this is going to be eye opening, and if you have, you’re going to level up your thumbnail game, which means you’ll level up your entire illustration game!

We look forward to seeing you there!

RSVP for the Thumbnails Workshop on June 4th And STOP skipping the most important step in the illustration process!