Sketching figures in a crowd scene

 This entry comes with a health warning. I am NOT an Art teacher, I’m an English teacher. If that hasn’t sent you running for the hills, then let me add – I have had very little schooling in Art. I haven’t had a lesson since I dropped the subject at school when I was 13 years old.

As I’ve mentioned in recent posts, I am a little wary of going into detail and explaining how I produce my pictures, because I don’t  want anyone picking up my bad habits. The problem is, because I’m pretty much self taught – having received a leaver’s certificate from the school of go your own sweet way until it looks something like what you were trying to sketch. So I don’t really know what good habits are.

Let’s get to the point then. I like to post from time to time on a social media group, and I was asked today by another member of the group if I had any advice for depicting crowds in sketches. This is the gist of what I wrote.

If you’re sketching from life , there’s a whole different level of complexity compared with sketching from a photograph. Apart from anything else, you have to try to work incredibly quickly, because real people don’t stand still for very long. If you’re not used to sketching crowds, my advice would be to practice with photographs for a while before you think about trying to sketch from life.

So if you’re working from a photograph, look at it carefully for a while before you put pen or pencil to paper. Try to get a feel of how the figures work on the page. Look at the closest figures, then the furthest away, look at the different levels they all are. Look where the crowd is thickest and thinnest. See if you can make out distinct groups within the crowd.

I start with some of the figures which are closest to the viewer. These will naturally be larger and more detailed than the other figures.

This was the first pair of figures I sketched in my Piccadilly Circus sketch. They demonstrate some of the things I try to think about when I’m putting figures into a scene. Firstly, the outline. If you take these figures, because the child is sitting on the man’s shoulders, the two of them only have one combined outline. At this stage it’s worth saying that I do really believe that when you’re outlining a figure, obviously you want to do all of it well, but possibly the most important feature is the legs. Seriously. If you get the outline of the legs right, it will look like a figure, and if you don’t, then it won’t.

Once the outline is in, think about the amount of shading you want to do. Shading is really important when you’re sketching figures as part of a scene. Shading adds definition to your figures, so it’s really important to get the main shadows in. They don’t have to be perfect, if you give the general idea the viewer’s eye will do a lot of the work for you.

If you’re including a crowd scene in a picture, then that first figure is probably the most important. If you look at this next stage of my Piccadilly picture, you can see that once I completed the first figure – or figures since one was having a piggy back off the other – I could sketch the two figures alongside and be confident I would get the sizing right. It also meant I could start working on the smaller figures further back . It might be interesting to compare some of these with the previous.

On the left we have some of the figures back on the fountain, blown up to match the size of the first figure. You can see the difference in detail – the figure on the left has hardly any detail at all. It doesn’t need any more – it’s very hard to include more detail on something so small, and it does mimic the way that in a crowd scene, the further back figures are the more blurry and indistinct they are.

I try to sketch groups all together at the same time. They might all be standing on the same level, or, in this case, be figures at different distances from the viewer, but all in the same small area of the scene. It’s worth looking at just how detailed the guy with the backpack is compared with the heads and shoulders above his shoulder. 

That was all that I came up with on my reply to my fellow group member, anyway. Remember - you follow any of my advce at your own risk