Drawing and form

Member lesson

Thumbnailing

Lesson 8 of 14 in Drawing and form.

How to Draw Tips | What are thumbnail sketches? How to use them · Alphonso Dunn
Lesson

A thumbnail is a compositional sketch drawn deliberately too small to contain detail: a couple of centimetres, a few seconds, no more than three tones. At that size you cannot draw a face or letter a headline, so the only decisions available are the ones that actually determine whether the composition works: where the big masses sit, where the eye enters, how much of the frame is empty, and what the overall value structure is.

An ink drawing of a sketchbook page full of tiny three-tone thumbnails, with a hand circling one near the bottom of the page.
A sheet of tiny thumbnails with the good one found near the bottom.
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  1. Question 1, locked

    Why are thumbnails drawn small?

    • Small forces you to judge the arrangement instead of the detail
    • They are faster to erase
    • They match the final crop
  2. Question 2, locked

    Which of these words means this? “A drawing small enough that detail is physically impossible. Two or three centimetres across.”

    • Tolerance
    • Measurable
    • Subsurface scattering
    • Thumbnail
  3. Question 3, locked

    Which of these words means this? “A thumbnail reduced to three tones: dark, mid, light. What a composition looks like from across a room.”

    • Contrapposto
    • Memory and invention
    • Unit
    • Value block

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