Thumbnail Sketching: Improve Your Art by Thinking Small

1. Introduction: Sketching exercises. Boring, right? Well, usually, I'd agree, but there is one idea, one technique that I always come back to. We could call it an exercise in that it's something that you can repeat, that it helps build your skills. But it is so much more than that. My name is Toby, known as Toby Sketch Loose on YouTube, here on Skillshare. And across the Internet to some extent. If you've seen my style before, if you've seen any of my other classes on Skillshare, you know, I'm all about making sketching fun and accessible whilst also building confidence and skills, which is exactly what we're going to be doing today. In this class, I'm going to show you how the humble art of the thumbnail can, yes, build skills and confidence. It can help you learn ideas about composition, but it can also boost creativity, and it can introduce you to a lot of sketching opportunities that you may not even have known you were missing out on. Oh, and it's actually a pretty awesome art form all in and of itself. By the end of this class, you will have filled a few pages with life, with energy. With drawings. You'll discover and rediscover tools and techniques that you perhaps thought you'd forgotten or lost. And you'll have made some very lovely art. Now, this class is super accessible. What you will need is whatever you normally draw or sketch with. I won't be using anything particularly fancy sort of any old brand sketchbook and some of the sketching suppliers I have at the back of my drawers. In a couple of places, we are specifically using stuff we'd forgotten about. Picking up things we haven't used for a while and getting creative. In other places, we're thinking a little harder, and so we're using our favorite sketching supplies, things we feel comfortable with to take a little bit of the pressure off. There's a number of reference photos to download if you want to use them, but you could use your own photos. You could go outside to a cafe or there's points in this where using your own imagination might be something you want to do. Anyway, this class is packed with ideas. I'm looking forward to showing you the more. So let's get started. 2. Overview of class: Okay, video one. And this one, I just wanted to give you a little overview. And don't worry. Everything from here is sketching and drawing. But this video, I wanted to explain what you'll find underneath to give you a head start. One thing worth thinking about is what is a thumbnail. Now, we probably get the idea of thumbnails maybe from art, maybe from a computer or we have lots of thumbnails as little icons. A thumbnail in art is the same thing as those computer files we're so used to seeing now. It is a small image. Now, traditionally, perhaps, we think of having to draw a frame around it. And I'm going to say that usually that's what we're talking about, a very small image with a frame around it. And the reason for that frame will become very obvious in some of the lessons that we're going to be doing, some of the videos coming up where we'll look at the power of a frame and how a frame can help with composition, for example. However, a thumbnail is really just a small focused drawing. So in the first set of ideas, we're not going to be using frames. We're going to be taking a step back and doing thumbnail drawings which are kind of quick, short doodles. For me, they fit the same idea. They fit the same learning purpose. If you want to get started with a thumbnail straightaway, then a nice warm up that you might do right now before anything else would just be to create a couple of squares on a scrap of paper and fill them with abstract doodle marks, abstract lines. That, for me, is still a thumbnail. Even though we haven't drawn something specific, we haven't picked out a subject. We have done something which is focusing our practice, and we focus our practice in this instance on controlling our line. And again, key thing about thumbnails, they're focused. So we're not trying to draw a perfect image within our thumbnail. We're taking an image, and we're practicing an aspect of it. That might be making it simple. That might be trying different colors. That might be trying different tools. It might be trying different compositions. But each of your thumbnails isn't supposed to be perfect. Together, they're supposed to be a whole load of ideas. Essentially, in each video below this one, we will be looking at a new way, a new idea for drawing from nails or sketching small. In each of these videos, I will demonstrate these ideas to you using in places things in front of me. Or using a photo, which you'll be able to download as a reference from the class resources tab. And, of course, in that class resources projects tab, I'd love you to share your own project as well. Now, accompanying this class, there is also a downloadable handout, which is packed with ideas, little tips, explainers, and more ways that you could use ideas in the videos. For example, in one of the videos, I'm getting creative and picking up a few supplies I haven't used an awful lot and certainly haven't used recently. This is an opportunity for you if you wish to grab stuff that you haven't used for a while, or things that you bought and never really got around to playing with. And through this video, we will experiment and learn a little bit more about each of those supplies. But in the handout, I can give you way more examples, ideas, prompts than I can record. So the handout will give you more ideas to play with so you don't feel excluded just because you don't have the random stuff I picked up today. In another, we will use our thumbnails to break down the composition of a scene, which sounds very intellectual. And to some extent, it does start to use arty ideas and art theory in a very accessible way. Of course, we can break down that same scene or any other scene in numerous ways. So in the handout, I give lots of examples, as well as a little bit of the art theory to back up and explain the composition ideas that we use in this exact class. I guess the sort of TLDR too long didn't read version of this video, is download the handout. It will probably add a bit of value to this class and give you more ideas and things to play with 3. Draw small: Idea one, we are onto the sketching. Now, Ida one is the idea of getting comfortable with sketching small. Now, I didn't want to come in and start with very forceful ideas, where we have to rigidly draw a box because a thumbnail has to have a box around it, right? Now, thumbnailing is about making drawing, painting, sketching, whatever you want to call it, quick and easy because if we can do it quickly and easy, we'll do it a little bit more and probably therefore enjoy ourselves, develop our skills a bit quicker. Out more about what we like. So idea number one is oodles of doodles. In this video, we're going to explore a range of ways, not just one way, but a number of different ways that this idea of doodling can be really powerful in developing various aspects of our artistic skill set. So like that, we can start with our first idea of the first video, tackling something that but isn't. With the idea of doodling being something you can take a step back from, it means we can explore and experiment with things which are traditionally tricky subjects. So one of my favorite things to do is fill up pages of people. And it's only through doodling that I discovered that people can be a couple of simple shapes. So do you see here essentially a circle, a triangle, and a triangle? And if you just keep drawing circles, triangles and triangles, and you start adding little bits of extra shape to your doodles, you will find yourself suddenly able to more confidently draw sort of complex versions of these things as well. So as a starting point, perhaps, just like me, you want to fill up a page with really simple but gradually more complex and kind of live people, just as a simple idea. So as a very first idea, why not try something as simple as this to just get you in the mood for sketching small? Now, some of you will really enjoy the idea of drawing these tiny little people, and it's definitely one of the most enjoyable things I personally find. In the class resources, what I'll do? I'll pop a page full of people like this that you can see, and you can copy and develop from if you would like. Equally, don't feel like these ideas you have to stay at home for. Just like I said in the introduction, you can take this from your imagination from references or you can get outside, draw people in a cafe, pick out little scenes, little thumbnails. All of this is just about learning to tackle those tricky subjects in a really low risk way. And if we can do it small, we can do it a bit bigger. If we can do it a bit bigger, we can do it bigger than that. And eventually, you kind of build up to the point where you're not doing thumbnails. You're sketching these tricky subjects, and they just work. Now, for some people, that might be a bit scary because that is people from our imagination. And I know that imagination is something which isn't necessarily for all of us easy. For some people, super easy for others, including myself, is something we have to work at if we want to be able to do it with confidence. So let's take a step back again and see what can we just doodle in front of us? So I've got things like my big mug. I've got things like or my brushes just sat here waiting to be used or waiting to be used as a subject to draw. So how can we usefully doodle them and gain something from it? You also needn't confine yourself to a single subject in your kind of exploration sessions. One of my favorite things to do is just draw what's in front of me. So here, I've got my ever present mug of coffee. Which is simple, but we can do lead in different ways, try different textures, different things like hatching or even take our little doodles a step forward and add a tiny bit of water, perhaps. By sketching these things quickly and small, we find really interesting and new ways to approach things. And that exploratory nature of sketching small is definitely the starting point of why I think this is so powerful. As an artist, you'll probably also have lots of art stuff in front of you. Another lovely thing to just warm up with. These small sketches of things in front of you. Well, they let us control our lines. They let us practice getting a different weight of line. They let us practice getting hatching or thinking about how we might add a sense of detail, or even in the case of, I might see if I can work out how I get the effect of writing on my little implements. That can be useful for urban sketching when you've got shop signs and things like that. Again, don't feel that you have to push yourself down just one route here. I'm sketching tiny objects in front of me. I'm sketching my mug, which is one of my favorite muses, I must say. But there are tons of things in the house which can create really interesting scenes, whether you just draw whatever's in front of you in the living room. You pile up some books, or you create your own interesting still life. All of these ideas will just get you drawing. They'll get you filling up pages. And remember, the aim with all of these is small. It's easy to suddenly fill the whole page, but then we've lost the kind of purpose of what we're doing. Now, this idea of doling from observation, as well, we can make it a little bit bigger. In the final video of this class, I'm going to be showing you my little sketchbook. But before that, I can actually show you the kind of thing I do with it, which incorporates observation, doodling, thumbnailing. And that is drawing stuff in front of me. One of my favorite things to do is carry around a tiny little sketchbook, and this can come with me anywhere. And this is where we can start turning those doodles into mini scenes, into those thumbnails. All you need is a willing volunteer. Betty, come here, sit, wait there. Now, we're gonna do some thumbnail drawing today, so I need you to stay nice and still for me so that we can get a nice little scene here. No? Still you're moving a lot. There's a lot of movement going on here, Betty. There we go. Good girl. Oh, there's a bit more movement there and a bit more. Not the best sitter today, are you? But luckily, I'm drawing nice and small, so we can get an idea of you on the page without getting too worried that you keep moving your nozzle. What do you think? Right? The sniff of approval. Now, the idea here is that my willing volunteer doesn't sit still for very long. Of course, I'm not going to get something perfect. Of course, if I try to do more than a few minute long sketch, I might get a bit stressed because Betty's gonna be Betty. She's going to wander off and get bored. Yes, I could do it from a photo. That's an option. But there are lots of these environments where we are just sat with people or watching people or watching an animal or with a scene which is rapidly changing where all of these doodling ideas we can use to quickly capture a scene. So there you go. There's another idea for how to use Oodles of doodles. Now for the last one, we're going to dive back into our imagination to some extent. Or perhaps a better way of putting it is our memory. So whenever we are sketching and drawing, to some extent, we are taking shortcuts. We are trying to create something on the page, often very small, even on a bigger piece of art. It's still very small. That resembles something very complex, and trees, for example, are a good example of this. And trees are something people always ask how to sketch, how to draw. And how I draw them is how I like to draw them, but it might not suit you. And the best advice, the biggest advice I can give is just try stuff out. You can create a simple grid on your page or even I'm just gonna fill up the bottom of my page here, as you can see, and just get a photo of a tree up and try it in three or four different ways, or just imagine three or four different trees. What are the shapes within that tree? Where's the light and the dark? What are the textures that you can see? It doesn't matter if you get it wrong, doesn't matter if it looks weird. This is a doodle, but it will inform how you incorporate those ideas into bigger scenes later if you want. So there you are four ways in one video, four different ways to use doodles. Now that we've hopefully warmed up a little bit and got lots of small things that you can do just anytime at home, let's move on to some slightly bigger thumbnails. 4. Be creative: Now we get to the real thumb nailing. Here's a controversial idea. Why not repeat a scene? Now, that I know, sounds incredibly dull, but we all have these piles of unused sketching stuff at home. I have my favorite pens, and I seem to always use these ones. So I sort of see a scene and I go, Right, I know exactly how I'm going to sketch that with this pen, and I can usually quite confidently just go in with my continuous line and capture myself a quick version of it, because that's what I do all the time. Then I'm like, Oh, maybe maybe one day I should try something different. I've got all these things, these pencils, these other pens, hining around at home. But the idea of getting them out and actually learning to use them, experimenting when so comfy with my favorite pens and my favorite colors. Well, it feels like a lot. So one way of getting over this, one way of learning new things and experimenting is, yes. Do your thumbnail. So here, a nice, quick, loose version of the scene, not worrying too much about the specifics and just sort of working it out a little bit, working it out, but also just doing it the way I normally would nice and comforting. But we can then repeat this whole scene three or four times. Sounds boring, but it's not boring if we do it with a bit of purpose, if we change something every time. So why not, for example, use this a beautiful magic pencil. This is something I have used a little bit to capture quick scenes, draw people when I'm out and about. And it's really fun. But I only learned to use it through experimenting, exploring and seeing what it does. So you'll notice drawing this. My line is much bolder. So I'm drawing a bit bigger just naturally. That's something which is happening. It's really interesting to observe. I'm learning something already. I'm seeing if I rotate this a little bit, I can get a different color of line. Look at that blue one direction, green and red and orange and other directions. And all of this is just experimenting and learning new things about my tools. Getting more comfortable with what is not an easy scene in a very low risk way. And from here, I might go right. Well, this actually gives a nice big line. So maybe I can explore the idea of shading, which isn't really something we can do with ink. Normally, with ink, we hatch or we leave it white. Maybe we add some color in a little bit, but we don't tend to come in and provide this kind of soft tone. And in practicing this, well, number one, it's low risk, takes no time at all. I can just do it in a spare few minutes here or there. Number two, I'm learning something. Now, those of us out there thinking, Ah, but what's the point? Well, you know what? If I want to do this scene now as a bigger piece of art. Having practiced it a couple of ways, I'm gonna be so much more confident in achieving that because I've worked this scene now, and it'll probably take me less time, rather than wasting time, I've probably saved myself a bit of time and a bit of heartache by practicing it, by working it out by playing around. And if you're willing to experiment and explore, you might discover new things to do. For example, here, super minimalist version where I'm actually going to just move a lot of pigment around from this water soluble pencil with my brush, rather than drawing everything, I'm sort of half painting, half drawing, and the other half, all three half there. I'm leaving to the imagination. And lastly, something you haven't used for ages, really chunky pigment liner. You probably have things like this lying at home, things with funny nibs, chunky nibs, and you don't know quite what to do with them. Well, you'll find out if you play around, and that is what this is all about. And this is why these thumbnails are, what I would call incredibly powerful. So here I can work out right. When is the bold line too bold? When is the dancing line dancing just enough? Can I hatch with this pen or is it going to create something I don't like on the page? And it doesn't matter in this instance if I get things wrong because it's all taken a couple of minutes. There's no big outlay. It's not like setting up my paints, ruining 100 pound canvas. All I'm doing is playing around in a series of small areas, experimenting, learning all sorts of new things, relaxing as I do it, taking the pressure off and enjoying the art, Just hopefully, a little bit more or maybe more. Than a little bit more. That's a little bit of side from our doodling idea, but let's say you also want to explore some new colors or new color combinations. Well, isn't this the perfect time to do it? You can just see what happens. These are low risk, low intensity thumbnails. And maybe just by splatting a little bit of color in just a couple of places, you might discover new ways, new inventive ways of using your colors, new color combinations and mixes which work well for you. Or you might even discover the sort of simplicity of minimal colors on your minimal thumbnails and how well that can work together. So there we are. I've used a few things there. I had a bit of a play. Don't forget there's loads of other ideas in the downloadable handout. You might, for example, paint first or only paint, just draw with a paint brush. You might use graphite pencil. You might use a really tiny fine liner. There are loads and loads of ideas which are probably at least some of them just sitting in your house waiting to happen. A small thing, which I think is really important, when we do our little bits of art, pop a signature on maybe pop a title or a date, it gives you that sense of closure and ownership, which I think makes the whole experience more powerful. 5. Have a work out: This use of thumbnails is the one I think is the most useful in the sense that it can be the most helpful in working out scenes, in taking something challenging and making it feel achievable. So using one of the pens I experimented with earlier and found or remembered I enjoyed, I have this photo. Now, this photo was sent to me by someone saying, Oh, maybe you want to sketch this. And my immediate thoughts is, No, I don't. There is something very interesting about it, but my word, it is complicated. So if we were to try and draw it in my way of simplifying to find shapes, well, this might be the first thumbnail I did. So I try and find right, got this triangle, little rectangle underneath, another rectangle underneath. Lots of little shapes within that. There's a kind of rectangle here, a triangle with a triangle next to it. And Wow. Already, my head is beginning to hurt. And what we've got in this small photo is an awful lot of complexity of business, of stuff going on. There's a couple of focal points here. We've got one up in the Tower. We've got another below. We've got shapes underneath that. Maybe a third of the photo is this bland roof in the front. Another third of the photo is this large tree cutting through the entire image. And if we kind of take a moment to look at the photo itself, and if we were trying to, let's say, break down the kind of shapes in it, we'd go right. Tiny triangle, tiny triangle, big rectangle, rectangle. There's another rectangle triangle, triangle, triangle. Wow, there's so much going on. And it's going to take us forever to really work out this entire scene, which is fine, if you really like it. Which I don't don't think all of this is necessary. I don't think it's that interesting. If we think about our rules of composition, that kind of rule of thirds, we divide our page into three within our frame, which is about this. Notice, our focal point, we'd expect to be either here or here. We've got one in the middle, one at the very top. It's just not exciting. Along come the thumbnails. So let's ignore this. And let's come over here. So with our thumbnails in a kind of more systematic way rather than just experimenting, this time, we can try using our thumbnails to explore an image. Now, that might be too simplified a lot to find the shapes. We kind of did that in the last idea we were experimenting. Here, it might be to try purposefully different compositions to see how we take a scene from a photo or in reality and make it work on the page. So here we go. Option one, portrait. Now, think of your rule of thirds. You've got a line coming down here, down here, another one across here and across here. We want our interesting point to be on one of those lines. So I'm going to take my tower and I'm going to pop it so it intersects those lines nicely, and so we have room at the top for a sky. I can then find some of the shapes within it. I can find some of the windows. And I can explore the relationships around it, for example, little building underneath, which is made up of a series of triangles and rectangles. We're always doing a bit of that simplifying, but just not the main focus. This time, it's all about composition. We've then got a kind of wall big rectangle. We've got our other tower here, triangle, triangle. We've got some stacked up, little shapes off to the side, which are less important now because they're not our focus. We know we've clearly identified our focus over here. We'll pop in some more windows, maybe a bit of texture, a bit of hatching. We can find our trees here. And there's some important feeling trees off to the side, as well. We also want to just work out what's going on in front, and this has kind of become the foreground. This building just sneaking in the bottom of our composition, maybe with the idea of that tree. Maybe with the idea of one of these other buildings there. And here, if we just restate some of our lines more confidently, now that we've worked it out a bit, we have a much more, I think, much more engaging composition already, through some very simple thought processes, which we can try out on a small thumbnail scale before we dive in and risk it all on a big piece of paper. But let's try something else. Let's not assume our first idea is the best. Here, quite an interesting building, isn't it? So let's try it in our square composition. Again, imagining this idea of the rule of thirds. I'm going to pop it off to the side, get that triangle in, get the next triangle next to it has these areas. The roof coming up. Got this funny shape here. The perspective is a bit awkward, so I'm glad I'm practicing it before diving in because it will give me confidence for the next one. We've got this tree, kind of a little framing object. Then we've got some other little triangles off to the side, which are these buildings here. They're a bit dark. Try some hatching, get the lines with the roofing, big tree in the foreground. And how are we achieving a background this time? That's less obvious. It actually ends up being the same building again for me. A few of the windows in. Pop in a little bit of hatching in, and again, we can restate those lines, having done them gently to start with just to check, is our composition really working? How is it feeling? Is there anything else that we would change about this one? And also, this is where it's personal. I can tell you all the rules in the world. But no rule is better than how you feel about your art, because the rules are there really, I think, only to be broken so that you can start to experiment and understand what it is that you enjoy and what brings you a bit of fun when you are making your own art. Again, though, this composition, it's okay. I probably I'm looking at this area, thinking it's a bit unexplained. So if I'm doing this bigger I'll I'll work that out again with another thumbnail. Probably, overall, I prefer this composition still. Is it great? No, I know that. One more. One more to try, though. So here, we've got a big landscape. What I'm going to do, I'm going to go back to my favorite building, and I'm going to think about my rule of thirds. And it's in the middle here, isn't it? So why do I have to put it to the right? Why not try putting it off to the left? That feels less obvious because Oh, there's lots of stuff here. But there's also lots of stuff on the right. It's just that on the right, it's more about the trees and the foliage. You might even find that you identify a building that you left out before that you just forgot about. There you go. By repeating things, you're exploring and always finding new things. We'll do a little bit of these buildings off to the right or sorry, off to the left, but they are not our main focus now, or they're not our main part of the scene. The main part of the scene, it's going to be finding these interesting shapes for the trees. We've got this building, I think, hiding just behind, so we'll pop an idea of that in. Extend this line down. And now we can actually make use of this big tree. It can form a foreground. So these scenes don't really have a strong, like, really close foreground or, like, framing element that frames off the scene. But here we do have that. Which is great. Something different to play with and see if it adds interest. Find a bit of hatching in the trees. Just treating this. Remember, this is a thumbnail. This is about treating it quickly, getting it on the page. Not about a perfect version at all. So I'm just doing some quick hatching so I can start to understand my scene a little bit more. Maybe even we can try some rogue stuff. So sometimes I might just use thumbnails. To practice, for example, you can hatch your sky. Skies have tone, they're not white, they're rarely white unless your photos very exposed. And that can give us something else about the composition, as well. Maybe you can use ideas like that, not in the sky, in other forms of arcin. And there we go. So now we've explored the composition in a few different ways. And I've discovered, well, not that interested in that one. I find it a bit more challenging and less exciting. So maybe I would do it if I wanted to challenge myself. But if I want to relax and just do something which I think will work and I'll feel good about, I actually think I'd do this one. There's more looseness to play with these trees and things. We can have more fun with the colors. This, if I had a sketchbook which was portrait in orientation, that would be my choice. So thumbnails, exploring a scene with this time, a focus on composition. But you could focus on the textures. You could focus on the light and dark. You could focus on the shapes. You can just take these thumbnails and use them to break down a scene. And that, as I said, at the beginning of this little section, is what I think the most useful use for thumbnails is. Not the best, the most fun, but the most useful and the most maybe confidence boosting for challenging scenes. 6. Make tiny art: Last use of thumbnails, which I'm going to leave you with is the idea of making tiny art because if we can learn to love small things, then suddenly it makes art very possible all the time. This tiny sketchbook is one that I carry around with me, so I can do faces on a Zoom meeting. I can draw people when I'm sat in a cafe. I can draw from memories, but also from observation. And it doesn't take long because it's so small. Now we can take this idea one step further. For this, all you'll need is a new page and a little bit of tape. I've got some washy tape, which is just like low tach masking tape. Important thing when you're using this is just burnish the tape. So popping it on your jumper a few times or rubbing it on the edge of a desk, that just protects your paper for later. And what I'm going to do mark out a little square, a couple of centimeters or an inch or so around. Now, for the sake of argument, I've got a little photo here. And we're going to create what I call micro art, which is one of the most pleasing things that you can do with your time. It is creating a small thumbnail sketching which fills up a tiny sketchbook, and you can even frame them. They look beautiful in middle frames. So what I try and focus on with this is really simplifying. So I might say, right, I'm going to do this whole scene in one line, which is one of my favorite ways of drawing. But here, I'm going to really focus on that idea. Of simplifying it into one very clear line. And that might mean I leave lots of stuff out. It might mean I use my little tape as a barrier to bounce off. But whilst doing that, I'm thinking focus, composition, bit of texture, and also not overdoing it. We have at times restated our lines, haven't we? And that's still an okay thing to do. Yes, we said one line, but one line and then coming back, restating clear lines will get you a little bit more of a sense of that focus within your scene. And you might even like to add things like a bit of hatching. Not much, but a little bit starts to create that clear focus, as well. So we've worked on our composition, we've simplified it. We've made it interesting, and now we're using thumbnails as art, not just as a practice tool, but as art. Now, here is where you might want to bring in some colors. And there are no rules here. So firstly, yes, I will play with some watercolors. I'm going to use my watercolors with little cheap border brush. And pop them in the sky. You might have noticed my paper is kind of toned paper. So the colors are going to be different to what I'm expecting. In that they're going to mix with that underlying tone. We're going to not get a beautiful crispy yellow. We're going to get a mellow yellow from this underneath. We're going to get a slightly toned down red because it's touching that color underneath on the paper. Off to the left, look at that beautiful kind of bluey purple. I've got just the color here. It's called Tundra violet. And that will move in there, that blue, that red, the violet all mixing together, and creating that soft idea of this sky. Now, you're going to do a tiny bit more yellow just to neaten up the edges here. And then I'm going to try something I wouldn't normally. So instead of my watercolors, why don't we get some of these magic pencils I was using earlier? I've got just a couple here. I've got a brown, a yellow, a gray, a blue. And I'm just going to say, what can I see in the foreground? So maybe I see some grays. I don't see much blue at the moment. We might use it, and I see some yellows and brands. So I'm going to instead of going in with colors, my little micro arc can come to life. With some pencils, instead of watercolors, playing in here with some pencils, which gives you this immediate effect. Don't have to wait for it to dry, plunk it down and away we go. And it creates an interesting contrast. And maybe you're looking at this, thinking, Ah, yeah, but it doesn't look that great, does it? Could be more exciting. But what we're trying for here is number one, simplicity. We're not trying for, like, complex overdone art. We're trying for beautifully simple art. And number two, the magic from this comes when you remove the tape and you unveil your framed miniature work of art. So with that in mind, I've let my page pretty much dry. I can gently remove that tape. Oh, there we go. And look at that. Isn't that a bit of fun? If you've done it on a separate piece of paper, literally frame it. You'll be amazed how good it looks. Here, in your sketchbook, maybe crisp up the edge with a bold ink or here I'm gonna make use of my little gray magic pencil again. Pop a signature. And it's a lot of fun. You can take this idea outside. You can take this to cafes. You can keep it inside. You can make fool sketchbooks or trip ticks and dip ticks of your micro art, have an experiment, and start finding way more opportunities to make art because it takes less time, but it still looks great. 7. Final thoughts: So there we are a few uses for sketching small for thumbnails from building confidence, getting warmed up, building skills and knowledge to actually just making quite cool the art. There are loads and more things you could do here. You can do timed sketches. You can do watercolor only sketches. You could focus your sketches on things like light and dark contrast, hatching. You could try different color schemes. So you repeat the same scene four times, and each time, you use a different sort of set of colors. And if you've ever wanted to get outside, these are the perfect tool to get started with that as well. If you've enjoyed this class, please leave a review. Means the world helps other people find it as well. So if you think it's worth finding, you're doing the world a favor. I love seeing people's creations from these classes as well. So please do pop your project up. That might be pages of thumbnails. It might be one that went really well. It might be something where you've got a question for me, and I'll come back and answer that, as well. You've enjoyed this, perhaps follow me here on Skillshare or find me on sketchloo dot Code, you okay? I'm also on YouTube. I'd love to stay connected. Most importantly, keep sketching. Keep enjoying yourself, and I'll see you in the next.