This is a quick sketch done of my students working on the patio behind the Crealde Urban Sketching classroom. This was a demo to show how to do a thumbnail sketch to plan out the composition of a scene.
I do these sketches with no intention of pushing them to a finish to show the early stages of planning a scene. When I work on location on my own, I tent to just jump in and do a sketch that fills the page. The early stages of one of those large sketches would also look a bit like this, with detail pushed aside to block in the big shapes. This sketch really only has one major shape and that is the students on several benches. The general shape is a backwards letter L.
This thumbnail could be pushed further if I went back in and refined shapes using my fountain pen. Instead, I spent my time working with each student to show each how to analyze and sketch their own thumbnails, based on their chosen view.