Caleb Cleveland Thumbnailing Interview Hi and welcome to part three, where we're going to be talking about thumbnails with Caleb Cleveland, who worked on two Farscape books with Boom Studios, as well as he's an illustration instructor at the Laguna College of Art and Design. Welcome Caleb. Thank you, it's great to be here. So how important are thumbnails? Thumbnails are surprisingly important. I get asked that question a lot by a lot of my students, some of whom had never come across a thumbnail before in their lives. Thumbnails are just really small drawings. [LAUGH] They're just very, very small, simple drawings that allow the artist to plot and plan what each panel's going to look like and what each page inevitably is going to look like. Just basically allows you to make all the mistakes and explore the composition of each page before you commit to the pages in full. I often feel like, at least when I first started creating comics, that it was a waste of time to create thumbnails. I just wanted to get straight to the pencils. Why not skip the thumbnailing process? I also get that a lot, too A lot of artists tend to be a little impatient. Not just with the art, but with themselves regarding how fast they want to get that story out onto the page. And because, and that's totally understandable. I understand why an artist would want to skip over a step that they feel may be completely superfluous, but it's not. Thumbnailing allows you to figure out a strategy. Strageizing where you want your story beats to be before you commit to the page itself is incredibly important. And thumbnailing allows you to do that. Thumbnails allow you to play with factors such as value, light and dark, texture even. All before you had to commit to the page itself. It allows you to explore, make mistakes and come up with new ideas. It's an incredibly important part. And of course, above all, it allows you to explore what the composition of the page is going to be and what the composition of each panel's going to be. How do you go about composing thumbnails? That's an excellent question. And I've brought in some samples. So hopefully I can illustrate it. Now, this is just one page from a five page little series of drawings that I did for a comic which was based off of two very popular characters. And as you can see, it's fairly dynamic. I tried to make it anyway. Hopefully, you can make it out, but it didn't start out this way. I had to, first, plot out where I wanted the characters to be sitting, what I wanted them to be looking at. This is the very first page right here. And of course, it started off being a fairly intimate shot. I wanted to be able to pull the camera out I wanted to be able to suggest motion. You're basically acting kind of like a cinematographer for a movie. But because your media is static, because it's not moving, you have to do more than that. You have to actually encourage your audience to move their eye across the page itself, just like you would across a movie screen. And you do that with thumbnail. You can figure out exactly where you want them to look, and suggest where you want your audience to look with the use of thumbnails. For example, in this small page here, one of the audience to start upper left, because it's a Western audience, that's where we always start looking at our pages, upper left. And then to sort of start scanning right and down. He suggested that they do that by having the woman looking right. And her gaze suggests to the reader to look right. The person that she's conversing with is looking left and down slightly which is a very basic way of incorporating this little technique, this strategy. Allows your reader to start up at the top left and end down at the bottom right. And to do so with every single page. And, really, this sort of technique is, it works best when you thumbnail it out. When you figure out what you're strategy is going to be before hand. Now, thumbnails only work though if you're patient, not so much with the art itself but with you. And wrestling with that is a lot harder than just doing the pencils or just doing thumbnails. It's something that you have to sort of learn, it's a real discipline and it takes a lot of practice and it takes a lot of patience. I had a question, about your thumbnails. You didn't, I notice you don't have your word bulletins in them, right now. What is your thoughts on whether or not to include them in the thumbnailing process? Interesting that you would bring that up. Because, this comic was designed and written to be completely silent. There was no dialogue. Thus word balloons weren't really a factor. One of the biggest things that you want to concern yourself with when you're making thumbnails, one of the biggest weapons in your arsenal as a comic artist is blank space. You don't want to fill every single panel with a lot of noise. You want to be able to give the eye a place to rest, and you also want to be able to give the writer somewhere to include the story. The dialogue. And that is in comics normally done in word balloons which require space. Now I have the luxury of not having to worry about that, but most comic artists are going to have to do that. And thumbnails are the best place to strategize and sort of predict where word balloons are going to be, to sort of consider how much dialogue is going to be contained in them. If it's a back and forth between multiple characters, then you will need to consider that as well, and that's where thumbnails are incredibly invaluable. My last question is, what is your best advice for, this is their first comic book for some of the people in this course. What's your best advice for where to start? My best advice is just to start, exactly that. Don't wait for somebody's permission to tell you that it's okay to start making comics. Start making comics, regardless. If you have a story to tell, and everybody has a story to tell, start making them. And your first one is going to be, by the time you're done with it, you're not going to like it anymore. Which is the curse of being an artist, because by the time you're done with it, you will have learned something from it. In other words, the product itself will be diminished by the fact that you just did it. So that's the time to turn your eye towards the next project. But that's just sort of a by-product of being a creative individual. Be patient with yourself, and always be sort of planning on that next project. As far as thumbnails go, I would say three things. One, remember that there are two basic compositions. You know places where you can make your eye roam around the page. There's the micro composition of each panel, and there's the big composition of each page. Two, remember that empty space is your best weapon. Always consider that you need to leave a space for your eye. And three, above all, be patient with yourself. Give yourself a break. Remember that thumbnails don't need to be perfect. That's the whole reason they exist. They exist so you can experiment you can make mistakes and explore the medium of comics. Thanks Caleb. My pleasure.