Thumbnail Sketches: How Artists Plan Before Drawing
Most people start a picture by drawing it. That one habit ruins more finished work than any shortage of talent. The antidote: thumbnail sketches.
Thumbnail sketches are small, fast, low-detail drawings made to test a composition before you commit to producing the finished artwork. Each one takes a minute or two, is a few centimeters across, and is judged on structure alone: where the masses are, where the eye focuses, and what the picture is actually about.
I have drawn every stage of my books myself, from script to sketch to ink, and the thumbnail is the one stage I have never skipped. It works the same way whether you paint, illustrate, design, or tell stories in pictures. What follows is what I learned about making thumbnails to make better pictures.
What Are Thumbnail Sketches?
A thumbnail sketch is a small preliminary drawing, roughly the size of a business card, used to plan a composition before any finished work begins. It takes a minute or two, has almost no detail, and exists to answer a single question: does this arrangement work? Artists make them in batches and compare.
Thumbnail sketches are typically 5 to 7 cm (roughly 2 to 3 inches) across. The small size is deliberate, and it has a purpose. At five centimeters across, you physically cannot draw any details, so you are forced to think in masses: dark shapes, light shapes, and empty spaces. At that small size, you see the structure of the picture and almost nothing else, which is what lets you concentrate on the choices that decide whether it works. And if you can “read” an image at that small size, that is a strong indication that the image works.
That also is where people go wrong. A thumbnail is a diagram of a decision rather than a small drawing, so it doesn’t need any details or sophisticated shading. A thumbnail is quick to make (less than 2 minutes) and therefore cheap enough to throw away.
Why Working Small Makes Better Pictures
A compositional mistake costs less than two minutes at thumbnail scale. The same mistake found in a finished piece costs far more, and you will probably be tempted to keep the flawed version rather than start again because by then you have put too much effort into it. That difference in cost is the entire benefit of using the method.
Thumbnailing is where the composition of the picture gets decided. Composition choices can be made more effectively at a small size, where you can see the whole piece at once: the position of the big shapes and how they balance, the value structure, where the eye focuses, the proportion of mass to empty space, the aspect ratio of the image and how it’s cropped.
My eye for value masses came from film rather than from drawing. German expressionist cinema of the 1930s and film noir of the 1940s and 50s are built on a few large dark shapes and one hard light. That is exactly what survives at thumbnail size: shrink a frame from any of those films on your phone and it still reads.
Other choices do not belong here at all: line quality, texture, color nuance, and any details like facial expressions. Spending time on these aspects when sketching a thumbnail is a waste of effort and defeats the purpose. Thumbnails are not about the style you draw in. They are about composition and structure.
How Many Thumbnail Sketches Should You Make?
Make three to five for a single image, and more when the first three look alike. Quantity is not thoroughness for its own sake. It is how you get past your first idea, which is almost always the obvious one. Stop when genuinely different arrangements stop appearing or when you’ve found the best composition.
Your first idea comes fast because it is the obvious choice, what you are more familiar with or the idea that anybody would have had. It is not bad. But it is generic. Past those obvious first attempts is where the picture usually becomes interesting and stops resembling everyone else’s.
The count varies far more than any rule suggests. Drawing The Labyrinth I sometimes had a clear vision of a page and nailed it in the first thumbnail. Other pages took as many as a dozen before one worked.
Timebox making thumbnail sketches. Two minutes each maximum. Taking more time defeats the purpose. The objective is coverage, not polish.
A Step-by-Step Thumbnail Sketch Process
There are six steps.
- Draw the box first. Correct proportions, five or six boxes to a page. Match the aspect ratio of your final piece exactly. A composition tested in a square and executed in a wide rectangle has not been tested.
- Block, do not draw. “Blocking” means establishing the large, basic shapes and masses of the image. Use only two or three values: dark, mid, light. Don’t detail objects. Drawing too carefully is the trap here.
- Change one thing at a time. Pick a single structural question and answer it two or three ways. See later in the article for what to test when making changes between thumbnails.
- Look at all of them together. Comparison is the whole method: a thumbnail judged on its own almost tells you nothing. Look at the sheet of thumbnails from a distance: the distance helps to see what works and what doesn’t.
- Mark the survivor. Trust your judgment and make a choice in the moment. Mark this clearly and don’t look back. Staying attached to discarded thumbnails is ultimately confusing.
- Scale up faithfully. When you lay in the finished piece, refer to the thumbnail rather than to your reference. The thumbnail encodes your decisions and should be your guide.
What to Thumbnail With
Almost anything works: pick materials that make drawing detail inconvenient. If your tools let you render, you will render.
Plenty of people work with sticky notes and a fat marker, which is too thick to draw details. Others use index cards, or a cheap notebook and a soft 4B pencil, or a sheet of empty boxes printed on a page. A digital tablet also works, as long as you have a small canvas and don’t zoom in.
My own kit is an A4 ring-bound sketchbook, a Col-Erase light blue pencil, and a frame-hole I cut into a one-millimeter polypropylene sheet to trace identical boxes in seconds. The ring binding allows tearing out pages for comparison and an A4 page can easily fit around 8 thumbnails. I highly recommend the blue pencil. It is excellent for exploration because it is visually softer, so you see the overall shape and movement rather than focusing too quickly on individual contours.
I work on paper rather than on a screen, because a screen always lets you zoom in, and zooming in is how a thumbnail stops being a thumbnail.
Thumbnailing a Sequence: When One Image Is Not Enough
A single image is judged on its own. An image in a sequence is judged beside its neighbors, and that changes what a thumbnail has to test. A composition that is beautiful alone can be wrong in a sequence.
Three things sequence thumbnails can test:
- Rhythm across images: where the action speeds up and slows down.
- Repetition and variation: how a sequence builds a pattern or breaks it.
- And how the eye moves through the sequence.
In addition, for comics, making thumbnails can test the arrangement of panels on a page. In a storyboard or an animatic the frames are seen one at a time. On a comics page, they also coexist, visible all at once, so the thumbnail helps test how the frames look together and what the page looks like as a single object before reading it as a sequence.
Be careful with blindly following rules here. Pace depends on how much information each image gives the reader to take in, and on how many images you use for a single moment of the story. The empirical work on how readers move through sequential images, gathered at the Visual Language Lab, points at content and structure rather than at fixed formal recipes.
From My Studio
The hardest part of thumbnailing is running out of ideas to frame a scene. That is what Wally Wood’s legendary 22 Panels That Always Work is for, and I have made a free visual guide to it: a menu to reach for when every thumbnail on the page is starting to look the same. It comes with What Is Life All About?, my 15-page philosophical comic. Get both free here.
What Should You Change Between Thumbnails?
Change one structural thing at a time. The key image composition choices are the frame’s shape, how close you are to the main subject, where the edges crop the view, the angle you look from, where you put the main subject, where the darks and lights fall, and the distribution of empty space.
- Frame shape. Portrait, landscape or square? Change the shape and different things will fit inside it.
- Distance. Close-up, medium or wide? Move closer and the viewer gets more of the subject and less of the world around it.
- Crop. Where do the edges cut? Cutting through a figure and cutting around it give you two different pictures from the same drawing.
- Angle. Above, below or at eye level of the subject? Different angles convey different feelings.
- Placement. Where does the main subject go? Center, off to one side, high in the frame, low in it.
- Value. Where is the darkest dark next to the lightest light? The eye tends to go to that contrast first, so put it where you want attention.
- Empty space. How much of the frame is empty, and where? Change how much you leave empty and the rest of the frame looks different.
Use this list of choices as a guide. The point is not to test all possible variations but to test variations of your compositions that are sufficiently different. Several slight redraws of the same idea won’t help you find the best composition.
A Worked Example: Thumbnailing a Comic Page
Sequence thumbnailing is essential in making comics, which makes a comics page a useful example. Comics makers call this stage the breakdown, or découpage: you cut a continuous stretch of story into a fixed number of framed pictures. Three choices get made at the same time:
- Which moments in the story get a frame and which moments are left out.
- How each moment is framed, which is the single-image problem described earlier in this article.
- Where each frame goes on the page because comics panels are read in order and seen all at once, so a panel’s position is part of how it is read and understood.
The three decisions are interconnected and are made all at once when sketching the thumbnail because one cannot decide how to frame a moment without already knowing what that moment is and where it is on the page.
Example: page 9 of The Labyrinth is four panels in a 2 × 2 grid, and the whole page is one continuous zoom. Panels: 1. looks down from above the clouds; 2. comes through them onto an enormous labyrinth below; 3. moves closer, onto the maze walls; 4. is a single rat, trapped between them. All three breakdown choices are apparent in this example. The four moments are four steps of one descent. The framing changes in distance and viewing angle to simulate a zoom in. And the regular grid puts the rat in the bottom right, the last thing seen before the page turn.
This comic page layout method using thumbnails scales past the page. I thumbnailed all 144 pages of The Labyrinth into an A6 notebook before drawing a finished panel, which is why thumbnailing comes so early in my eight steps from idea to published comic.
Common Thumbnail Sketch Mistakes
- Drawing them too large. They become drawings instead of tests. Shrink the box.
- Adding detail. You end up judging the rendering rather than the structure. No details and no more than two to three values.
- Making only one. A single thumbnail is a decision without a comparison. Make three to five at least.
- Varying nothing structural. Six near-identical versions are one thumbnail drawn six times. Introduce a substantial difference each time.
- Treating them as precious. If that happens, it means you are spending too much time on them.
- Skipping the stage entirely. This is the most costly mistake on the list, since thumbnails are an effective way to avoid a weak composition.
Thumbnail Sketches Are the Thinking
Thumbnail sketches look like scribbles. They are the opposite: they encode all the key decisions for making a picture.
So before making your next piece, draw five boxes. Try out different composition options. Two minutes each. Lay them side by side, trust your intuition and pick the best one for making your final piece of art. Those few minutes making thumbnail sketches will be time well spent.
Originally published 1 October 2026
By Ben Argon, philosophy comics creator and author of the Eisner-nominated graphic novel The Labyrinth, exploring the intersection of comics, philosophy, and visual storytelling.
