Backstage Pass #2 (Patreon)

As a general rule of thumb (you'll see in a minute my clever pun there), I like to thumbnail upcoming pages of On Borrowed Time to figure out where characters are going to stand, what angles to use, etc. Thumbnailing is a technique many comic artists use that serve as a sort of sketch that comes before actually sketching their pages. These are usually very small, bringing down the scale of everything to a more manageable size where you don't have to focus on details and can hash out ideas very quickly. I usually like to put my thumbnails on sticky notes; they're easy to carry around, rearrange, and move around my workspace. When working on thumbnails, I like to work several pages ahead of schedule so I can see exactly how a given scene is gonna go.

With that in mind though, thumbnails become a little trickier to work with when choreographing fight scenes vs. more domestic scenes where characters are discussing things. Namely, for the fight scene between our heroes and the wild pokemon in Drenched Bluff, I didn't script out details and need to rely more on thumbnails to see how the fight will play out. In this case, I only thumbnail 2 or 3 panels at a time (rather than the whole page like I usually do), starting out by thumbing key moments in the fight (such as Rune getting hit by the Lileep, or Malachi being splashed with mud), and then working towards filling the spaces in between these key moments. The sticky notes can then be moved around and rearranged to suit my needs the best.