Shadoweyes thumbnails

The most boring part.

I used to do detailed thumbnails for every comic until earlier this year; the Ninja Turtles deadline was really tight and I just didn’t have the time for thumbnails, so I decided to try it just going straight to the full-size page and sketching things out there, which ended up working out really well so I’ve since abandoned the thumbnail step entirely. It used to help a lot with the speed of the eventual full page, I could work out perspective (which is much easier to do in small scale) which would be like half the battle by the time I’d reach the full-size page.

But over the years my thumbnails got more and more tedious, I hated doing them, they were so boring and would slow me to a crawl. And now that I do most of my comic work digitally these days, it seemed stupid to keep doing thumbnails, I don’t know why I held onto that process for as long as I did! I think if I ever do a comic in traditional media again, though, that I’d probably do thumbnails again.

Anyway, this sample of Shadoweyes thumbnails is a combination of digital and traditional (you can probably spot the difference). Originally, I’d do all my thumbnails on paper even for digital comics, I’d do them all on printer paper and scan them into the computer (so laborious!). I’ve been chipping away at this book for so long that the thumbnails span across various changes I’ve made to my overall process, all cobbled together.

The blank black pages are intentional, I use a lot of “pause” pages in my comics.

EDIT: I just realized the stuffed animal on page 2 (I used to call it “the Eye Beam Monster”) is really similar to the Shin Eyezon figure I recently designed!!