Giancarlo, lots of nice thumbnails. Very legible, nicely drawn!
Remember a few things though: 1) the dimensions are up to you. They don't have to have a particular rectangular ratio. Most of those presented have the same ratio (except for the first page), so to allow maximum creative options, don't settle on a ratio (width to height relationship) until you've got something interesting penciled in. 2) A tip for giving yourself more creative potential: don't draw your thumbnails so close to each other. Each new thumbnail should have enough empty space around it that you can expand your drawing in any direction that seems promising. If you have the edge of the page or the edge of another drawing, you can't draw in that part. 3) I don't know if you heard this or caught it when I expressed it, but since you're working on an environment, we shouldn't have characters in the illustration. As a small bending of that rule, I tell you all that if you absolutely must include a character or more, as a total, those characters shouldn't occupy more than 10% of the picture area.
Now onto your cool thumbnails:
The nearly vertical hillsides, almost cliffs, look great in several thumbnails (#2, #5, #21, #23). However, the thumbnail that looks the most interesting and unusual (and I've seen many for this story!) is #6. Including those vertical trees is very elegant and also suggests something like the bars of a prison cell (an apt metaphor for this man's job, trapped at the bottom of a big hole to watch steal machines going by).
However, #6 doesn't show much about the Signal-Man. It's all about the tunnel, trees, hillside, and tracks. To fix that, you could introduce the house on one side of the tracks and add to that some of the "junk" that borders the railroad tracks (think that this man lives there, therefore there could be tools, debris, trash, etc.). Finally, one more suggestion: since thumbnail #6 doesn't have any foreground, you could put in the foreground the opening of another tunnel (as you have it in thumbnail #24 and #25) and then within that opening, the equivalent of thumbnail #6 (with revisions).
To recap: in the extreme foreground (but not taking too much room, the edges of the tunnel that faces the tunnel on the other side of the image. On the right or on the left of the tracks, the Signal-Man's house, plus some stuff that shows he lives there. Finally preserve the trees and the steep hillside.
Go for it sir! And make variations of that, emphasizing narrative elements and shape language too!
Giancarlo, lots of nice thumbnails. Very legible, nicely drawn!
ReplyDeleteRemember a few things though: 1) the dimensions are up to you. They don't have to have a particular rectangular ratio. Most of those presented have the same ratio (except for the first page), so to allow maximum creative options, don't settle on a ratio (width to height relationship) until you've got something interesting penciled in. 2) A tip for giving yourself more creative potential: don't draw your thumbnails so close to each other. Each new thumbnail should have enough empty space around it that you can expand your drawing in any direction that seems promising. If you have the edge of the page or the edge of another drawing, you can't draw in that part. 3) I don't know if you heard this or caught it when I expressed it, but since you're working on an environment, we shouldn't have characters in the illustration. As a small bending of that rule, I tell you all that if you absolutely must include a character or more, as a total, those characters shouldn't occupy more than 10% of the picture area.
Now onto your cool thumbnails:
The nearly vertical hillsides, almost cliffs, look great in several thumbnails (#2, #5, #21, #23). However, the thumbnail that looks the most interesting and unusual (and I've seen many for this story!) is #6. Including those vertical trees is very elegant and also suggests something like the bars of a prison cell (an apt metaphor for this man's job, trapped at the bottom of a big hole to watch steal machines going by).
However, #6 doesn't show much about the Signal-Man. It's all about the tunnel, trees, hillside, and tracks. To fix that, you could introduce the house on one side of the tracks and add to that some of the "junk" that borders the railroad tracks (think that this man lives there, therefore there could be tools, debris, trash, etc.). Finally, one more suggestion: since thumbnail #6 doesn't have any foreground, you could put in the foreground the opening of another tunnel (as you have it in thumbnail #24 and #25) and then within that opening, the equivalent of thumbnail #6 (with revisions).
To recap: in the extreme foreground (but not taking too much room, the edges of the tunnel that faces the tunnel on the other side of the image. On the right or on the left of the tracks, the Signal-Man's house, plus some stuff that shows he lives there. Finally preserve the trees and the steep hillside.
Go for it sir! And make variations of that, emphasizing narrative elements and shape language too!