Sketch from a photo I took on holiday
Sketching People Confidently
If you stop thinking of people as people, and start looking at them as simple shapes, they become less intimidating to sketch. It’s so easy to get lost in the detail of sketching people, but when you start off by capturing main shapes, this will help you to be more accurate with the proportions and posture.
If you look at all the areas where the weight shift impacts a body, you’ll be able to add life to even the quickest of sketches. For example, how are the shoulders and hips tilting? How is the weight distributed across the legs? When you capture these postures, it’ll help to add a dynamic feel to your subjects without having to worry about adding too much detail.
Let’s take a look at some different ways of sketching figures without being intimidated by perfection.
- Silhouette First then Ink Lines
- Ink Lines then Tonal Values Added
- Contour Lines Only
1. Silhouette First then Ink Lines
For this group of figures I created a silhouette with a brush to capture the main shape, and then added ink lines on top of the silhouette, adjusting the placement of the edges where necessary.
What helps the create that dynamic feel to these sketches is that the ink lines and silhouettes don’t always line up, and this gives them a looser feel. In some areas the silhouette shape is outside of the lines, and sometimes it’s inside of the lines and leaves an area of white.
This style of sketching is good for crowd scenes because there’s not too much detail needed, and that that loose feel gives an impression of movement. It’s a simple approach to capturing shape and line. As long as you’ve managed to capture a feeling of the gesture you don’t need to worry about varying the values, or adding shading to create a 3D form.
2. Ink Lines then Tonal Values Added
When you sketch first with ink you can focus on an outside contour line, or add in some additional detail to define some of the interior edges so that it’s easy to differentiate between different objects – for example, the edges of long hair on top of clothing.
Once you’ve established the edge framework, you can use tone, shading, and negative space to accentuate the form and show the contours of the form. To keep a loose feel it’s best not to colour the contour shape in. Instead, use a largish brush an slap a bit of paint on in areas of shadow, or where you want specific objects like hair or phones etc. to be darker to add some depth to your sketch.
When the contour lines are loose, it’s best to add layers of loose tone to the sketch to support that feeling of looseness. I like to keep these tonal layers to two or three, so that I can achieve some depth.
First I apply a light watery layer of the tonal colour, and then when it’s dry I add a darker tonal layer. This means your figures will have three values: white, light grey, and darker grey.
To keep that feeling of looseness and simplicity, it’s best to use just one colour to add the tonal value. But you can choose whatever colour you like, it doesn’t have to be monochromatic. When you switch to using a different colour, it can help to evoke a specific feeling based on whether it’s a warm or cool colour.
3. Contour Lines Only
I sketched this picture from a photo I took during my recent trip to the Greek Islands. The sketch would have been too confusing or overwhelming to look out if I’d sketched all of the people in the scene with the same level of detail. So I used colour and more detail on the foreground figure and the scooter he was standing beside, and then used a contour line approach for the crowd scene. It’s easy to see this is a crowd of people, without having to get lost in the mire of facial features and what they’re wearing.
You can take an all or nothing approach to contour line drawing, or approach the sketch in a similar way to this one, where I sketched contour lines for the outline of the body, but added a couple of extra lines for the contour lines of some of the clothing, glasses, or hair. I like this hybrid approach because it gives this crowd scene more character. But it’s not essential, beach the real story is about the guy in the foreground taking the photo.
Learning to sketch figures with the minimal amount of detail really helps to add depth to a sketch, and gives you the freedom of adding crowds to your scenes without having them steal attention away from your focal point.
