Sketching-People

BUILDING A SCENE
As people crowd into public places, they interact with each
other and the setting around them. Crowds aren’t made up
so much of separate individuals as they are of small groups.
In an amusement park, for example, you wouldn’t see
people by themselves but with their friends or families.
There would be clumps of people who interact within their
group more than with surrounding groups. Internally, these
groups contain individuals who play the roles of friend,
lover, rival, authority figure or dependent. Each person has
a role and a different relationship with other members of the
ensemble, which has to be considered in your staging.
Even when strangers gather in temporary groups,
shoved together by circumstances and forced to interact
because of proximity, you find people in clumps and not
evenly spaced. Interactions could be limited to a quick
glance, a rebuffing posture or a friendly wave, but it’s the
relationships between people, no matter how cursory,
that make the drawing interesting.
Whether you’re drawing a single person in a scene,
a small gathering or a large crowd that is constantly changing
with a fluid parade of new characters and reactions,
the approach is the same.
Although the task of capturing a dynamic scene may
seem exponentially more difficult as the number of people
increases, the skills in observational drawing, gesture drawing
and figure construction are all that are needed to depict
what’s going on.
In every scene, no matter how active, the setting doesn’t
change. Walls don’t move, lamps and tables stay put, and
trees, although they may sway in the wind, don’t get up
and leave while you’re drawing them as people often do.
SETTING THE STAGE
In a scene where the location
is the focus, begin by
developing the setting. Use
your observational skills to
plot out the scenery. Once
you have set the stage,
you can then add people
as they come in and out
of the setting.