Learn the rules, then break them all.
If my memory were better than that of a goldfish I’d remember the genius who said that. Well said, unnamed genius. But I’d just add a couple of words to your awesome quote:
Learn the rules, break them all, but write them down on some post-it and stick them next to your monitor. One day you’ll become overly confident and you’ll break them in the same way as someone who never knew them in the first place.

Drawing thumbnails is one of the first things an artist should focus on, and still a good rule to follow when you’re studying a particular arrangement of shapes, be they shapes composing a character or an environment.
With an image as big as a packet of peanuts there’s no risk of getting distracted by fancy details. There’s only composition, value masses and the few very important things that make an image work.

When you are really really busy (like in a game studio), really really lazy or really really over confident, it might happen that the thumb-nailing step gets skipped in favour of something closer to what a modeller might need in his immediate future.
Some times it doesn’t matter.
Other times, you look at your artwork after a few months to find out you’re not happy with it, and you realize you wouldn’t have made all those bad choices if you’d have spent half an hour on a bunch of bloody thumbnails.

So, I’m forcing myself to think more before jumping to the final steps, to focus more on the basics and, in practice, to make tinier drawings.
I’m doing this first thing in the morning just to warm up: thinking of rules when coffee is still too hot to sip it makes it easier to break them later on during the day.

Here are a few random early-morning sketches.
Most of them are probably clear only to myself, they’re just ideas and practice, no more than two minutes per thumb. Some of them may even be good enough to be developed into something bigger, I think.
Hey, that’s what thumbnails are for!

One Response

1. Sketches | Paolo Puggioni - Concept Art says:

   April 19, 2012 at 13:30

   […] to what I thought I’ve been pretty consistent with it in the last few days, so much so that I’m almost running out of ideas. However, I found out that using textured […]

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