This timelapse of thumbnail sketches shows part of my process for exploring visual ideas for an illustration. It’s part of a personal project I’ve been working on and I thought it would be fun to share a bit of work in progress.

Once I have a general idea of what the picture will be, I try to sketch out, super quickly, several rough compositions. I’ll generate between 20 and 30 of these small thumbnail sketches, spending no more than a few minutes on each one.

Doing this gives me the opportunity to try a lot of different options rapidly. The idea is to work out the big picture problems, problems like composition, blocking, character poses, etc. and give myself several options to compare against one another. The more time I spend here, the more I can get into a state of flow when I get to work on the final image, and it almost always helps me to a better end result.