This is my process on how I make preliminary thumbnail art for creating my comic story, Incident at the Game Store! If you’re up to having a signed physical book for yourself, you can stop by my Etsy store and grab a copy!
I was struggling to write a new comic after Shirley’s Day. So I decided to adapt an existing story to save writing time. I got the idea to create a collection of the dumb greentext stories from 4chan, Reddit, and Imgur. Many of these dumb internet posts are outlandish, so they’re a great source of visual ideas for me.
This is the original greentext story. Since it’s anonymous, I have no idea who originally wrote it. So, if someone messaged me claiming they’re the original poster, I’d have to take their word for it.
I can picture this exchange in my head and I can see a decent visual of what I want to draw. So I begin making thumbnail drawings. These are scans of small thumbnail drawings I made in my SketchWallet. It contains a 3.5×5.5 inch sketchbook, so it’s tiny.
Likewise, you can also make many 1-inch thumbnails on a sheet of copy paper, as long as you stay small and quick. Don’t spend more than 5 minutes on a page to keep from second guessing yourself.
The point of these thumbnail page sketches is to figure out the broad scope of the story as a whole package. Because it’s so small, you won’t waste time on details that won’t matter yet.
Making thumbnails is a good time to experiment with layouts before the large pages. I put notes to myself to re-adjust the panel layouts, chose dialogue to emphasize, or what pages aren’t working.
Thumbnails are your own reference for the direction you decided for your story. They also can help a writer or editor have an idea of how the story might look visually. It’s also early enough to take suggestions about how to improve the story layout and flow.
Don’t feel sad about the drawings looking bad. As the artist, it’s your choice to show off your thumbnails to the public or not. So you don’t have to show your own sketches if you aren’t comfortable. I’m confident in my skills that I’m showing this process for anyone else’s benefit.
After all this, I decided to do some editing in Photoshop to figure out the story better and put some notes down. This is a larger, edited version of my thumbnails (click for the full size).
Now I have a rough idea of what the story might be, so it’s time to gather references and establish a look! I’ll discuss this process in my next article!