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Description
I've always wanted to draw comics, and never been very good at it. I've had three separate experiences in attempting to seriously draw compentent comics pages, and though each time I improved as an illustrator, there is so much more to the comics page than illustration skills alone. I've become a fairly good illustrator and animator with a career in the business, but the comics page has continued to elude me.

Only recently have I felt a breakthrough, and in the past two weeks have been creating some of the best comics work of my career as an illustrator. And it was my final grasp of the THUMBNAIL and LAYOUT stages that have made all the difference.

The tutorial presented here is a step-by-step following of the technique used to create the pages of my ongoing comics project "forever blue". I hope that these steps might also help other artists who are struggling to become the best illustrators they can be. While this tutorial focuses on the comics page, the thumbnail and layout stages of illustration can be used for anything, and the ending results are invariably finer works. It does require a bit more work that simply creating the finished piece all in one go, from imagination to final creation, but if we take the time to create significant underlying structure, we have a more solid foundation for excellent illustrations.

Description
I've always wanted to draw comics, and never been very good at it. I've had three separate experiences in attempting to seriously draw compentent comics pages, and though each time I improved as an illustrator, there is so much more to the comics page than illustration skills alone. I've become a fairly good illustrator and animator with a career in the business, but the comics page has continued to elude me.

Only recently have I felt a breakthrough, and in the past two weeks have been creating some of the best comics work of my career as an illustrator. And it was my final grasp of the THUMBNAIL and LAYOUT stages that have made all the difference.

The tutorial presented here is a step-by-step following of the technique used to create the pages of my ongoing comics project "forever blue". I hope that these steps might also help other artists who are struggling to become the best illustrators they can be. While this tutorial focuses on the comics page, the thumbnail and layout stages of illustration can be used for anything, and the ending results are invariably finer works. It does require a bit more work that simply creating the finished piece all in one go, from imagination to final creation, but if we take the time to create significant underlying structure, we have a more solid foundation for excellent illustrations.