Practice Thumbnail Sketches For Creating Ideas!

Thumbnail sketches are perhaps one of the most fundamental ideal creation principal there is. 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 some of the best methods are for displaying 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 how do we start? A simple pencil and piece of paper will do just nicely.

1. Orientation

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.

2. Plotting ideas

For example, a futuristic fight 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. To illustrate this point, a client wants a sports type theme with their residential mascot. However, the client does not know what sports themes are good.

In that case, 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.

3. Refining the sketch

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. You want to show your client how you want to present your idea in the given orientation.

Sometimes, guidelines are already given to you ahead of time. That means all you need to do is fit the sketches to the orientation or theme that the client already has in mind.

Either way, at the end of the day, a thumbnail sketch is a means to get your ideas tangibly on paper. Do not spend too much on these sketches. Remember, you will most likely not get paid for your efforts. 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! For now, keep building up your artistic foundations so thumbnail sketches become quicker to do so you can save time and money in the future!

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