 Ah, you've got a fancy scratch project to do, and now you want a fancy scratch thumbnail. Well stick around, because in this Scratch Thumbnail tutorial, I'll share with you my process to help make those thumbs go pop, come in your way in just a moment. Hello world, Surfing Scratcher here, teacher-surfer programmer, and on this channel I make how-to coding videos for curious learners and educators just like yourself. If you're doing this content and you're considering hitting that subscribe button down in the corner to stay in the loop. Also for the educators in the house, if you're interested in getting news and resources sent straight to your inbox, check out the link in the description to join the Surfing Scratcher Maiden List. But hey, let's go design some thumbnails. I'm in a project that I've been working on over the past couple of days, and it's called a speed typing challenge. If you're interested in it, there's a card in the top corner where you can go check out the playlist. Presently, it doesn't have a thumbnail, and that's what this tutorial is all about, how to create a scratch thumbnail. So let's do it. The first thing that we're going to do is to create a new sprite. In this new sprite, we're going to call thumbnail. Ideally, you want your thumbnail to be a vector graphic. So that way when it scales, it's going to still look pretty nice. So what should you put in here as a graphic? Well, I suggest taking one element of your game and increasing its size, a visual element that will look appealing. So I've got a background image here that I'm going to use. I'm going to upload that. You see, I've got this background image now uploaded. It isn't a vector, and even if I convert it to a vector, it's still not going to be a vector, but that's okay for now. Now, the visual element that I'm going to take is this computer screen. So I'm going to click on the background, and I'm just going to blow that up. Make it nice and big. And it's usually quite nice if you just sort of rotate things. I don't know, it just has this visual effect that looks kind of cool. That may be rotated a little bit too much and maybe a little bit too big. So you're just going to play around with it. Cool. I'm happy with that. Next, I'm going to grab the text tool. And I'm just going to type in all caps, because caps are going to be nice and easy to read the name of my game. So speed typing challenge. I'm going to select all of that. I'm going to change the color so you can actually read it, which is much better. Speed typing challenge. And again, I'm going to blow that up. I'm going to rotate that so it's parallel to the screen. You see over here on the stage, it's chopped off a little bit. So I could select both of those elements and just move them across so they're all visible. One other thing that I don't mind doing as a visual effect is just copy and pasting. And that one's behind it just to create a little shadow. And I'll put that white text back on top. And you can see I've created a little drop shadow effect. I think it's good to have big text here and no more than sort of three to five words. You could also delete one of those lines just to give a bit of emphasis in your title. Okay, I'm pretty happy with this thumbnail. So I'm going to jump over into the code tab. There's a few different ways we can make a thumbnail. I'm going to share with you the way that I like the most. I'm going to be using a ghosting effect. The reason we're going to use that is because when the project finishes, the stop sign is clicked, the effects on the sprite are removed. So let me just demonstrate that. I've just got a simple code block here and you can see that sprite. I've just manipulated. I've changed all the effects. If I press the stop sign, it's all cleared and it goes back to the start. So what we're going to do is get our ghosting effect here. I'm going to set the ghosting effect to 100. And when we set the ghosting effect to 100, that means it's going to disappear. So if I click this, you'll see that that thumbnail is now gone. But if I press the stop sign, it reappears. And we can drag out a when the green flag is clicked block. We can also drag out a show block. And we want this thumbnail to go to the front layer because we may have been reordering the sprites. If you've been tinkering with the layers of each of the sprites, I recommend that you put this in a forever loop. So that way this thumbnail will always be at the front. Just be mindful that you don't want too many forever loops scattered throughout your project. So now when I press the green flag, you'll see the thumbnail disappears. And over here, if I grab the stop all block, that's when our thumbnail will appear. You can also just press the stop sign. The thumbnail of the project will always be the last rendered view here. So just make sure that when you've finished and you want your project to go live, that you've either pressed that stop sign so it knows what's going on. These variables that you see on the screen, they will show up on your project page. So you'll have to go in and code some show and some hides for when the project starts. You can see here, those variables don't show on the thumbnails of the projects on the scratch site and in your project folder here. And that's it. That's how you make a scratch thumbnail. It's time for scratchy question. And I want to know, do you have a different process to make your thumbnails on scratch? Share it with us in the comment section down below. Hey, thanks for checking out this scratch thumbnail tutorial. If you found it useful, then smash that like button. If you're educated, who loves this content, then consider joining the surfing scratch and mailing link below in the description. Hey, down there as well, you'll find a link to my funky red bubble tea. If you're into it, go sus it out. But until then, I'm off to go find a wave. I'll catch in the next one.