As it says on the tin: I’ve been trying to improve my artwork by studying how other artists plan for success with technique and thumbnails. The author of Tigress Queen (it’s great, it’s my latest fave after Kill Six Billion Demons, you should go read it, heck, go read KSBD too) has a Patreon where she posts thumbnails of upcoming pages. What I love about seeing these is that she explicitly draws not just the panels and characters, but parts of the shading and spaces for the word balloons.
I think part of my artistic problem is that I rush and skip steps. Outlining is difficult since I typically do narrative outlines in my novels, so I skip to thumbnails; but pencil sketches don’t look right to me, so I move too quickly to drawing inks, and thus my thumbnails aren’t at a high enough level themselves to serve as useful thumbnails. Combine that with not enough practice with faces, figures, hands, and feet, and it’s hard to get the needed structure in place to make the art come out as success.
Again, I keep coming back to, the solution is …
… drawing every day.
-the Centaur
