Starting rough

Every piece I'm happy with started as something I wouldn't show anyone.

The temptation is to go straight at the finished image — good paper, careful lines, the version you already have in your head. It produces exactly one idea, and by the time you've spent four hours on it you're committed to it whether it's working or not.

Small, fast, and a lot of them

So I start with thumbnails. Small enough that a whole composition takes a minute, and loose enough that throwing one away costs nothing.

Most of them are bad, and that's the point — you have to spend the obvious ideas before you get to the ones you didn't know you had.

The rough isn't a worse version of the final. It's where the decisions actually happen.

Only when one of them keeps pulling my eye back do I scale it up, and only then does anything get careful.