Art tips: Thumbnails and layouts

I recommend that you draw quick small sketch versions of your pages in advance. They are called thumbnail drawings (because they are roughly the size of a thumbnail. They do not need to be drawn on your thumbnail).

The whole team (writers and artists) can work together on layouts with these thumbnail drawings. Writers are recommended to defer to the artists where possible, if something the artist wants to draw fits within the structure of the larger story.

If you have two artists who are working independently on one scene, or on separate scenes with the same characters, it can really help them to lay out everything together in advance to avoid causing trouble for each other.

Remember that the writers have to figure out as group where the scenes go and in what order. They are taking the place of an editor in this project, so the more they can see before there is a final project, the less rework they will need to do.