Have you ever heard anyone talk about thumbnail drawings?

No, they don’t mean that you should draw on your thumbnail, though my daughters have created some beautiful designs with nail polish. Thumbnail drawings are often the first step an artist or illustrator will take in creating a drawing or painting. They are small, quick idea sketches used to capture the subjects and create the composition of your final piece.

At an illustration class I attended one year, the artist showed examples of the thumbnails she drew for each illustration in a picture book she was working on. She said that she had drawn as many as a hundred of them, 1″ x 1″ in size, for just one illustration. With the thumbnails, she could experiment with the subject matter, the perspective, and her own ideas without spending a lot of time on each one. While I’ve never drawn that many thumbnails before starting a piece, I always use them to plan out my illustrations.  

Here are some of the thumbnails I drew when I was illustrating the book Cathy’s Animal Garden. These are the compositions I liked best — I had actually done more for each illustration. I redrew them on one page in order so I could see how the book would flow. (You can see my notes on the pages, too.)

Here’s an example of one of the thumbnails, along with the finished illustration:

My finished pieces didn’t always turn out just like the thumbnails, but the small sketches provided me with a good place to start.