Thumbnail Drawings

I took a fantastic workshop today about writing and illustrating micro fiction and I got a lot of things out of it (more on that in a future post.)

One of the key things I learned was that I was conflating the idea of sketches and thumbnails.

Thumbnail drawings are a series of tiny drawings that have little to no detail, just an idea of objects and composition.

Sketches are a draft version of your final drawing that expand on one of your thumbnails.

This may be old news to everyone else but, all along, I was thinking of a sketch as the brainstorming stage, as the earliest visual.

The fact that there is a even more preliminary stage of drawing is marvellously helpful to me.

Here are a few of my thumbnail drawings from today:

A series of small drawings of scenes inspired by the ‘Mother Hubbard’ nursery rhyme.
Image description: thumbnail drawings of the ‘Mother Hubbard’ nursery rhyme. 6 small squares on white paper that depict an empty cupboard, a woman and a dog looking into an empty cupboard, a sad dog holding a bowl, a woman holding a dog in her lap,,a faint drawing of a woman saying ‘oh no’ while a dog lies at her feet and a dog on its hind legs carrying a hobo bundle on a stick.