Improve Productivity: Learn to Sketch Through Thumbnails to Note Ideas and Save Time!

So why do we learn to sketch thumbnails? It's because thumbnails are perhaps one of the most fundamental and powerful sketch drawing skills needed to save time, effort, and increase proeductivity when you are working on a project!

Let's say that you have a client or superior that wants you to come up with an idea for a product, theme, or story. Besides taking notes on what your client wants, you also need to present how the idea is going to be portrayed.

Hence, thumbnail sketches are basically small drawings of multiple ideas to showcase what you think is the best method of representing that idea.

Don't be fooled by the small appearance of these types of sketches. Depending on what kinds of ideas that needs to be addressed, it can be as complicated as a full scale sketch in terms of details!

So with simple pencil and piece of paper, follow along as we learn to sketch thumbnails!

Learn to sketch thumbnails

While there is no one true way of doing thumbnails, there are some important guidelines that most artists use to present their ideas.

The first is being orientation! You want to quickly sketch what type of format that the idea is dealing with.

If it's a portrait, then do the orientation on a tall rectangular shape. If it is a landscape idea, then begin a quick outline of a stretched rectangle. This goes for storyboards too.

In the case of creating a story, create a series of long rectangles similar to a film setting. Leave some room on the bottom for potential text describing the event or highlighting an action sequence.

Perhaps you can even shade in the orientation with gray or black to describe the type of lighting you want to do!

Your orientation is important because you want the illustration to fit in with what the promotional item that you are drawing for.

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Learn to sketch concept art

The first type of thumbnail sketches involve just plotting ideas down of a theme with similar elements. With storyboards, all the thumbnails will have a sequence or scene that is different from one to another.

It can be as long or short as you want as long as it portrays your ideas!

For example, an action scene is part of the same theme that has the same elements (same characters, same clothing, same weapons, etc) but has different poses.

Another type is to do many different sketches of the same theme in general. In this example (shown above), a client wants a sports type theme with their residential mascot.

In the event that the client does not know what sports themes are good, you would do a few thumbnail sketches of potential sporting ideas to get the ball going.

Don't worry about too much details so long as you get your ideas through. The key here is to find ideas that will satisfy what the client requests!

Learn to sketch refined ideas

Once the idea has been chosen or accepted by the client, then the next set of thumbnail sketches involves combining it with your orientation!

This sketch will take a bit longer than just simply doing random sketches of the same theme.

This is due to the added details that may be included as well as duplicating the drawing over many unique orientations as you want to present your idea in the given orientations.

One more thing to note: do not spend too much on these sketches as you will most likely not get paid for your art sketches. Therefore, you need to balance the time you're willing to spend sketching versus presenting your ideas to your client.

Eventually, once all the preliminaries are accepted by the client, you can start working on creating the actual product!

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Learn to sketch your final product

After your client has agreed on the final thumbnail sketches and concept art, the next step would be for you to turn it into a finished product.

At this step, you are happy that you did not waste any time on a large version of the picture first. With thumbnail sketches, you are sure that composition, perspectives, and simple color placement is correct.

Using the thumbnail drawings that are accepted, you go ahead and expand the sketch into a large resolution line art that you can scan into the computer.

And then, with your digital painting tools, you fill in the line drawing with all the details and colors that you need! Of course, if you are working with real media, then you can just sketch it out again on a large canvas and repaint over it.

Though this is a very simplified process, it is one that will help you save time and frustration trying to figure out a finalized illustration for your clients.

Remember, practice and learn to sketch those productive thumbnails to increase your sketching skills as well as putting down lots of ideas! You never know, one or two may be used in the future for a big and profitable project!

For now, keep building up your artistic foundations so thumbnail sketches become quicker to do so you can earn more money in the future with profitable projects!

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