Today is another pre-painted page with a thumbnail grid. The grid is only two spreads wide, but it’s also on one of those painting waste paper scraps. I chose to put it on this page because I had pre-painted the head and tail of the book and the colors on the scrap worked with those colors.
I think when you are using thumbnail sketches the are the perfect time to play with things you normally don’t do on a page—for me that would be landscapes. So I did a landscape in my first thumbnail spread.
The second thumbnail was an opportunity to think about getting a head on the page, across the gutter, but not loosing the hair and chin. (Didn’t make it at thumbnail stage so if I try to do that at actual page spread size I know now where to put the eyes to start, and how small to go.)
With that finished it was time to do a pen and watercolor sketch and play with a different issue—the fun of hair.
And as is typical in my journals, I often write down quotations from books I’m reading.
Things to Notice
If you’re going to do thumbnail sketch grids keep in mind the weight of the line you use for the grid. You’ve seen free-hand boxes and boxes made with templates in previous posts. I used a template for this grid too—but I used a fine point pen.
To my eye this is less useful, because even though I have the gutter line in, all the lines are really too weak for me to get my bearings as I work.
For someone else this might be just the ticket. Don’t give up on thumbnails until you try different tools and materials.
Experiment also with size and scale, but keep the page spreads fairly small to discourage you for getting too detailed.
Get Sketching!
