Hi Everyone!
We’re excited to launch Creative Clues, a new monthly feature of Art Starts at Louisville Visual Art. With each new Clue, we’ll provide some pointers to help you succeed and improve. And if Creative Clues gets your imagination revving, remember that LVA’s classes and camps for grades 4-12 can keep that creative momentum going – sometimes right into a professional career. You can learn more about educational offerings here.
CLUE: WINTER
HOW TO: Cool ways to start you thinking about your WINTER Artwork
Today we are going to make thumbnails; fast idea sketches for an artwork you’re planning. Thumbnailing is brainstorming in pictures instead of words. These sketches are called “thumbnails” because they’re small, about the height of your thumb.
You may be excited to get going on your Creative Clues artwork right now, but taking a few minutes to thumbnail first will give you a better idea of what you want to accomplish and how to make it happen. You won’t be stuck wondering, “What am I going to make?”
A 3-inch square is a good size for Creative Clues thumbnails. (A grown-up can help you mark out some squares that size, if you’d like.) Pencil and paper are great thumbnail supplies. Each sketch should take a couple of minutes, at most. Only you will see these, so they don’t need to be perfect finished drawings. Think of them as quick little “maps” showing how you want to arrange the parts of your artwork.
By the way, comic book artists, moviemakers, fashion designers, portrait painters, video game designers, animators, and other professional artists almost always start with thumbnails, so you’re in good company!
Let’s say we want to draw a snowy scene. Often, our first idea for such a drawing will come from an image we’ve seen before – maybe on a greeting card or poster. If our scene looks too much like those, we’ve missed the chance to express our own creativity. Since the mission with Creative Clues is to make unique artworks by using our imaginations, 3 or 4 thumbnails could help our ideas grow from an uninteresting start to a surprising solution. To help move this process along, each thumbnail should be a bit different from the one before.
With our snow scene example, our first thumbnail might be that first snowflakes you see falling from the sky. But what if we started thinking about the individual snowflakes that make up the white blanket on the ground, buildings, and lampposts? Our second and third thumbnails could zoom in closer and closer, soon focusing on individual snowflakes. In order to sketch those, we might look at pictures in a book or online to learn about the structure of snowflakes (each one is unique, as you might know). Maybe we keep zooming in until we’re walking along the angular branches and intersections of a single snowflake. And what if we imagine that space is a world of its own where there has been another, miniature snowstorm that leaves a white blanket on the snowflake itself? A microscopic snow scene on a snowflake! Could you sketch a thumbnail of that?
OR, we could zoom out from our first thumbnail. Sketch two might be a scene of snow covering all of Louisville, seen from an airplane. Then, snow covering all of Kentucky. Then maybe all of the United States. What if our snowy scene could show a blanket of snow covering half of the Earth? Or perhaps a snowstorm has dusted the entire solar system with white frosting. How would you thumbnail that?
These are only two examples. Your imagination is infinite. You could create an endless number of artworks from one clue by allowing your ideas to grow, combine, and change. Thumbnails can help you along and provide a visual record of your progress.
Try to do at least 3 or 4 thumbnails before you start your Creative Clues artwork this month. You might do them all in a few minutes, or your thumbnail process might stretch over a couple of days as your ideas expand or combine. With a bit of thumbnailing behind you, you’ll be ready to make a more unique Creative Clues artwork!
Use your thumbnail sketch, (your rough draft), to now start a new piece of final artwork.
Have fun!
Send in your WINTER artwork
Deadline for artwork submission is January 25, 2021
Content: family friendly (LVA will determine if artwork is appropriate to share online.)
Ages 5 to 105!
Photo Guidelines: here is a nifty link, if you want to learn to take great pictures of your artwork
Consent and Permission for Minors: By filling out the form below, you give LVA permission to display your artwork and information in the Creative Clue Showcase. *NOTE: if you are under 18 years old, please have a parent or guardian complete the form.
Address: email artwork to: artstartshere@louisvillevisualart.org
Social Media: you may share your artwork on Instagram: #artwithinreach, #ArtStartsAtLVA
LVA will notify you if your artwork is in the Creative Clues Showcase at the end of the month.