Behind the Scenes: Chapter 3 Thumbnails

Greeting Hominerds (I’m playing with what to call my few fans. If you come up with any good ones, let me know)!

Process is an important part of making a comic. I wanted to share where I begin when drawing a new chapter. After I’ve finished my second or third draft of the script, I move onto the thumbnail stage.

I like having all my thumbnails on a single page. That way I can look at the whole story at once and see how it flows. Then it’s just a matter of easy cut and paste edits. You can also look at the design of panels page to page. I ask myself, is there enough variety from page to page or do they all look similar? What pages need to take a minute to breath? Do I need a big panel to really accentuate the drama that is going on?

It’s a really fun stage of the creative process, and can be done in just a few hours.

Thumbnail-Chapter-3

2 Responses

  1. Miw says:

    Neat! Is this process done digitally or with traditional pencil & paper? And how large do you usually work?

    • jordan says:

      This is done digitally. For this stage it needs to go as quickly as possible without tons of thought. This way, once I’m done, I can take a step back and see if the story is flowing well. If not I spend a fair amount of time revising it to a place where I feel like I can move forward.
      To that end, It’s not that big. Usually 8 1/2 by 11. Then I add to that if I have more pages (like I have for Chapter 5).

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