Thumbnails, Layouts, and Roughs

 Thumbnails, Layouts, and Roughs 

Once a story has developed beyond its basic contours, artists might begin outlining the entirety of the comic. Comics and sequential art are time-based forms: that is, the pace and sequence in which someone reads or engages with the work are essential to understanding and experiencing the story. Elements like panel sizes and reading order (such as the placement of page breaks) are a crucial part of storytelling. By producing quick sketches, or thumbnails, artists can work out details of panel size and arrangement, layout within panels and on the entire page, and story order before committing to more finished drawings. 

Thumbnails are usually rough, sometimes even difficult to read for someone other than the artist. From this stage, artists may produce cleaner layout drawings, or roughs, that clarify details, add text panels, and refine some of the choices made in the thumbnail stage.  

Stories may shift drastically at this stage, but doing this work before completing final, finished drawings can mean saving hours of time (and frustration) and helps the artists maintain a flexible process. In the example of Sylvia Rossi’s Unrest, Rossi develops expressive and unbounded thumbnail sketches into panels with still loose but dynamic drawings that capture character expressions, before creating the final, fully inked and lettered pages.