Quick Post: Day. . .Something-or-other; Thumbs (CC)

Have two seconds (I have no idea how) at work so thought I'd post something up after getting into a debate with a penciler friend of mine, namely over thumbnails.  While I try to keep the blog at a minimal on the 'how-to-draw' style, I wanted to address this 'issue' because of how it deals with time management.

If you've followed the blog for any length of time, you probably are aware that may day job takes up a majority of my time (roughly a minim 12 hour day, that typically is around 14-18, and that's not including the 2 hours a day it takes me to drive from Santa Clarita to Santa Monica), so getting this comic done is almost an exercise in time management and efficiency more so than an artistic endeavor (which brings to mind; once this comic is done I don't think anyone can tell me they can't find time to work on their pet projects, but I digress).

My friend argues that he prefers to not work with thumbnails, because they slow him down, and he can always make changes on the boards as he goes.  He's also a much better artist than I am, so it could be this works for him. I typically like to take the time out to do thumbs, specifically because I'm not the greatest at backgrounds. I have a solid knowledge of perspective, but typically the scenes I create look to artificial, so when I thumb, I try to focus on the backgrounds first, and then put the characters in that perspective shot, instead of vice versa. Again this is my particular method, but I would argue the extra time it takes me to do thumbnail sketches, means less time correcting mistakes, and I can get a better idea of problems I may encounter when dealing with the full page's layout.

As an example here is a scan of some of the thumbs I did for the splash page (i.e. a full page panel) for page 1.  Keep in mind these were done very quickly so I didn't spend much time, but it solved a problem for me; originally I wanted to have the background slightly warped (or wall-eyed) and distorted to increase the sense of quick movement.  After laying it out in a thumbnail I decided to go with a traditional perspective shot (bottow Right hand corner) because it would better once the characters are in the panel.

I apologize for the roughness of the scan, I was using a non photo blue pencil and a 4h so I had to change the scanner settings for it to come through okay.

In any case, my argument is that if you are starting out, or don't have the confidence of a Greek God, Rockstar, or Professional Penciler thumbnails are the way to go, despite the extra time it's adding to your schedule.  Additionally remember to number your thumb pages and panels (my scan cut off how I do it unfortunately) .  The reason I recommend this is helps you avoid doing the same 'shot' more than once in the same comic (and doing it too often in a running series is bad too) and organizing your thumbs always helps if you have to back to it while working on that issue or later on in the series. . .which means I just pretty much said what I said before. >Sigh< Gotta stop updating this thing at work. 

Anyway, who has two thumbs and recommends using thumb(nails). . .this guy.

Later.