Pacing and Thumbnails

Source: Comic Fury

Thumbnailing is a crucial part of the comic making process as it allows you to sort out your pacing and dialogue over the course of a chapter or issue, however, it is often a step that is missed by a lot of creators particularly those learning how to craft a visual narrative (me included).

In case you weren’t sure what I was talking about, thumbnails are a series of very rough sketches of pages that typically take up the space of an A4. The idea is to get the initial composition and panel layout on paper so that you can see how the necessary emotional beats move throughout the chapter and it helps you recognise when you might be repeating the same types of angles.

In the initial stages of creating a story, thumbnails can assist you in work-shopping an idea to see if it really is viable. Once you’ve written out your rough outline, maybe even going so far as to write some dialogue depending on what your process is, sketching it out allows you to see how it will read and where to re-balance parts of your story.

Not only does this stage of comic development help you maintain a consistency in tone and look throughout the rest of the comic, it gives you scope of what you might need to learn to accomplish certain shots or expressions or where you might need to tighten things up. It also gives you a chance to get messy and fluid with your drawings and is a good way to kick the “perfectionist” habit that we all sometimes fall into.

There is no right or wrong way to do thumbnails. It is more about the process itself. The point is not to love your thumbnails but to create a safe space for you to test ideas and see where it is that you might need extra work.

Do you use thumbnails as part of your process? Does it work for you? Let us know in the comments below! And join us on Sunday evening for our Quackchat at 5:30PM(EST) where we’ll be talking about this topic!

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