crowd scenes

The sketch above is from a book project. It is a big crowd scene. I love to draw crowd scenes. And I do it differently then I used to. As I do all my finished art on the computer it allows me to easily mix sketches and play with a composition at lightning speed. Good for someone like me who suffers from attention deficit issues.

I have a rough layout of where my crowd goes on the page and relative sizes. Of course there is a main piece of action attracting their attention. I have done about 20 pages of sketches, different people, groups, families, all reacting to one another or the main scene. Each, hopefully, telling their own story as well as revealing emotions and attitudes of what is happening on the page. I can pick and choose,  draw more people and combine them until I have my crowd. Then I draw over them in Photoshop and paint. Or in this case, I am choosing a style where the background crowd will be just line art so as not to distract from the main action. In years past I would have worked on a single piece of drawing paper/board and worked the sketches until they were dead and tired on the page. I feel like my work is better the more improvisational it can be. And although there is a lot of planning and layouts to get to this stage, I want the characters to be alive, unique and interesting enough to jump off the page. I want you to recognize them, perhaps guess what they might be eating or if they smell! This is the second rough. I think I will ‘ink’ this and see how I like it.

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