Ok, I don’t exactly know who my audience is here so I’m going to go about this series like a hardened high school teacher from the old days who doesn’t care about your feelings, will probably throw a chalk eraser at you, and will most definitely not listen to any excuses on why you haven’t done your homework. This sort of starch has helped me in my own work ethic so maybe it will for the students out there.
A crowd is probably ten or more characters. It is a representation of communal life, individuals existing in the same world together. If done well it can interest your audience for a very long time, just like people-watching in our own world. If done right the audience will get the sense that each character they look at has his or her own complete story and life outside of the narrow confines of your main story.
This can be done only by believing it yourself and helps significantly if you are aware and interested in the opinions, personalities, desires, pains, joys, loves, terrors, etc. of other people. Many people think of George Lucas as a filmmaker, but further back and more foundational to his work is anthropology, the science that studies mankind, especially its origin, development, divisions, and customs (Websters New World Dictionary).
When you come to that sketchbook and need to design a bunch of characters it helps to have a visual system, a base language that can be built on in a variety of ways. Think about the lego man, one body system, endless amounts of variation. Joe Death and the Graven Image has three worlds in it, humankind, the beast world, and the bug world. I have a type of base visual language for each but the bugs are the simplest. Big round heads on essentially human bodies, the variety of options like multiple pairs of arms, wings, antenna, and a variety of noses, is added on to that base.
Technically speaking all you have to do to start out is design individuals who could exist in a space full of others, sometimes these are pairs and couples of people whispering together, holding hands, fighting, most of them will be looking to one side or another, looking around checking other people out. What you’re seeing here in the first two images is the first pass of designs in my sketchbook, they are rough and I’m giving most of my thought to the expressions of the characters, once found that should help you out with their pose. A worried face means a tight, closed body language, their hands might be held together holding a suitcase or purse like a safety blanket. A malevolent face may have their hands hidden, implying a secrecy to them.
For the nerds in the class these are the tools I’m using. A large Moleskine sketchbook, a 0.5mm mechanical pencil with 2B lead, and a big pad of marker paper. I’ll draw in my sketchbook for those rough designs, then trace over the ones I like using marker paper. This is a really quick way of working requiring no light table and no other drawing instrument. Once these tracings are scanned into Photoshop I give them a grey background so they’ll be ready to pose together without having to erase any portion of each character. But that’ll be next week! I hope you’ve enjoyed this first little dive into how I go about drawing a crowd, please share around if you did find it helpful. See you next week!