Thumbnail Sketching Template

Thumbnail sketches are one of the top things an artist can do to improve the success of a painting. By sketching out various compositions you work out what you need to keep, what you need to add and what you can leave out. While also deciding the value structure and the overall flow towards a focal point. Spending the time on quick sketches at the beginning pays off in the end.

One of the key elements I see students fumble is the initial size of their thumbnail sketch box. As they work on thumbnails, a box is quickly sketched to represent a certain canvas proportion, then they proceed to create, over multiple sketches, a great composition with a nice flow of values, transitions and variations.

However, when it was time to move to the canvas, that nicely planned idea they had crumbled as they discovered the canvas had different proportions to the thumbnail box sketch. Oops.

To help with this and to easily create a thumbnail box of the correct proportion, the downloadable template below has four different sizes that match the most common canvas proportions available.

Just print it out onto card stock or mount it to some illustration board, cut it out, and tuck it into your sketchbook for easy access to quickly trace your canvas size for thumbnails.