Quick Capture People Sketching

I thought I’d share a sped-up version of a demo I recorded recently.

One of the most common questions I get asked is: Do you do line first or color/shape first? And the short answer to that one is “I go either way”.

But the longer answer is that for quick, gestural drawings with lots of action and movement, I usually work line-first. Just because I am quickest at capturing gesture with a line-making tool.

But there are times I will go the other way. Here are some of them:
– When capturing people in the distance in a scene. Using a hard outline in the background of a sketch can flatten the illusion of space. I’ll sometimes work directly in shape with no line on figures in the distance, just suggesting their form and action.
– With more stationary poses: with someone standing or sitting, I might use shape drawing first. I enjoy the dance of shape and line together and going shape-first lets me go light on the line, leaving some of the figure “open”, without the hard edge of a line: not quite a “lost edge” but close….

Here is a one-minute video of a 3-minute sketch.
(Click on this link to see it if the video doesn’t play)

If you’re wondering how you will do 20 sketches a day during the #OneWeek100People challenge, this might be something you want to try. In full color, this takes about 3 minutes a sketch. But if you went smaller, dropped the color, or worked just in monochrome then you could shorten the time a good bit and 20 people sketches a day might not be that hard to achieve…

I filmed this little clip as one of many new demos I’m adding to the rerun of my zoom-based workshop, People Alive: Sketches Full of Life, a 4-week, people-drawing workshop starting at the end of this month that I announced just a couple of days ago. There are still a few seats left, so if you’re interested, head over here to read more or register for it:

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/people-alive-sketches-full-of-life-tickets-143399360347