Urban Sketching - Adding Figures and People to our Scene

1. Introduction: Hi, there. Are you a sketcher or urban sketcher? He wants to get more confident adding people into scenes. Do you find when you get to sketching and those humans as figures, that you're worried everything's going to go wrong with it, you're going to ruin the scene. It just feels like hard work and everything gets overworked. If so, then this is the class for you. My name is Toby, known as Toby urban sketch, an Instagram, YouTube, and of course on Skillshare. I'm an ink and watercolor artist, primarily doing loose and lively urban sketches of the scenes and the people around me. In this class, I want to show you that sort of benefit of my experience and my previous trials and error. I'm just showing you some really simple ways that I love adding people to my scenes. With these techniques, I can sit outside my local cafe and sketch a scene in ten or 15 min and really be happy with it. Enjoy the experience and get that busy-ness that life on the page without the stress. If you'd like to learn more and see the kind of techniques I love using for these quick and simple urban sketches. Then join in with me through these lessons, we'll be covering a few different ways to capture people on your, on your scene. We'll be looking at how to add colors. We'll be looking at as common mistakes and how to avoid them. And of course, we'll be working towards a final project. If you enjoyed the class, please do leave a review, asked me some questions, and of course, upload your class project into the class gallery. Anyway, without further ado, let's get sketching and start with the first lesson. 2. Supplies: The supplies for this class, what we'll be using? Well, the answer is not much and there's no rules. So firstly, I'll be using this one sketch book. It's just an A4 sketchbook from a budget art retailer. And it's got normal cartridge paper in it. You could get away with using pretty much any paper. With the watercolors I'm using at the end, I'll show you these quickly, just my normal palette and I'll let you know all the colors as I use them. There's also a list of all the colors in this palette in the class project description. But because I'm using watercolors, I'm using cartridge paper rather than normal paper. You could even use watercolor paper or something like that if you want to be more finesse with your watercolors. With my colors, I'm just using one brush. This is a small Chinese-style brush for a flexible nib. Good fun to sketch with. Again, this is probably the equivalent of a size eight round brush, which is a nice do it all size for an A4 size piece of paper. In terms of implement, writing implements. Through the lessons, I'll be using a couple of different pens. I've got a couple of fountain pens and a fine liner. Now in the fountain pens, one, I've got some permanent ink, and this is a platinum carbon black ink. That's the same effect as a fine liner, which is also permanent ink. In my other fountain pen that I'll be using is soluble ink. This doesn't matter when we're just doing our linework. I went talk about it in a linewidth lessons when I change pens. But when we come to the color lesson, you'll see that when we add a bit of water to the soluble ink, it changes how we manipulate our colors, add more murkiness or add some more readily available shadow. If I was just using one, I'd probably go for eight permanent. Unless you have experienced with using a soluble pen. In which case you could have a go with that as well. It just makes a little bit more planning needed when it comes to your final project. When you have a whole scene and you're trying to add color on top of soluble ink that's moving. But both are perfectly valid. And that's literally all I'm using. Just a pen, a way of applying color, and a piece of paper. 3. Two Common Mistakes (and how to avoid them!): Hello everyone. In this, the first lesson demonstration, all I wanted to show you is to really simple things, not to do. The things I used to do myself and got really frustrated by or that I see people doing and asking me questions like, why is it too busy? Why is this so hard? And really it's just because of trying too hard over planning and overdrawing. If you just watch the next couple of minutes, we'll talk through exactly what I mean by that. Okay, so this is a really short one. It's all about how not to do it, or at least how I think we shouldn't do it. And the common mistakes I see. And this really just a couple of key points I want to cover here. Now the first thing that I see a lot is that people over plan their figures. What I mean by that is I've spent ages drawing all the figures and what they feel is exactly the right place. I'll get that person here, the person there. And then they will try and draw the rest of the scene around that. And there's nothing wrong with that per se. But people move, they have energy. And if you try and sketch them first as part of a busy scene, what you'll find is that you'll never quite get them right. You will leave the perspective. They won't be quite in the right place. And drawing your scene around them and try not to cross your lines over will take forever. And it just, for me, it's not as satisfying. So e.g. I've got this little doodle. And I would argue that it's fine to now just put my people on top. What I'm trying to get is the idea of a busy scene. I'm not trying to get that this is a series of perfect people. I'm not trying to show the people off for sketch them as portraits were figures. If you want to sketch portrait, you take a whole page and use catch that person and you blur the background. This is a scene with people in it. And the people are that add some character movement life. So actually just popping them on top of lines is okay. In fact, it's great and it shows how busy things are. There's a hybrid. So what you can do is you can get your scene and you can leave some gaps under and in those gaps, you know that you're going to LET with people and that does work if you notice a really busy scene. And so you're not gonna get any of this shop under here anyway, this is all going to be filled people. But either way, just don't overplan, don't overthink it. Be prepared to sketch your scene and then fill in the people later. Because then you'll be able to put them in the right place. You'll get the essence and the busy-ness without the challenge, without the boredom and without this sort of frustration. Now the next point I want to cover, I sort of said already, but I want to make it really clear. I think these people are fine. Death so quick. Yeah, sometimes I put it in a bit more effort and make them a bit clearer or make a bit more feature of them. And we'll look in the next few lessons about exactly how I, I do people. But one of the biggest problems I see people having is they'll have that lovely scene. And then in the background, they'll try and sketch this person. They'll try and draw their nose and their hat. And they'll try and get every detail, get their exact hand placement. In fact, they're holding a phone. And then you might really like that. But now he's too big. He's standing in the road. He's overbearing the whole scene. And imagine if we try and fill up our whole scene with these over sketched figures. And it gets frustrating because now I'm trying to make this figure perfect. But every time I do that, the inks to bold, it's too bold compared to everything else. And again, this guy has gotten too big, is too big for the scene because I'm trying to catch him. I'm trying to draw details. Even if we look at this chap, his nose is enormous. In reality, people's noses are barely visible even if we draw someone in the front and we tried to draw every detail. So let's turn this person to bit more of a detailed person. Bit more sort of realistic. If we try and draw their eyes, we can't memorize it or too small. If I try and draw their nose, again, it is becoming a, it's just a mess. It's a caricature. Ish, mass is not stylized. For me, at least it is just overdone. So point number one, don't overplan and point number two, don't overdraw, except that people in a scene are just people and seeing that their shapes, they're simple, they're easy, they're stylized. Addition. What are you trying to draw? You trying to draw the scene where you're trying to figure, draw people. If you're trying to figure drop people, we've probably done too much of a scene because we need to focus more in on this person. We need to give them more space. So that's my how not to do it. And it also gives you a flavor for how I enjoy sketching. And in the next few lessons we can have a look, a closer look at my processes for sketching people, for simplifying them, keeping it light and quick, and looking at things like perspective in color as well. 4. Simple Perspective Rules: Now, when we capturing loads of people, especially when we're putting them in a scene. Some concept of perspective is really important. Perspective being the idea of getting a 3D object onto a 2D page. And we're always on a 2D pay to my sketching. And perspective can sound really scary, really complicated. But this is the absolute bare bones simple rule to learn and understand, which will get you really far. And most importantly, get your sketches feeling realistic and feeling easy and fun to do. So putting people into perspective, there's just some very simple rules which are really useful to know when we aren't dealing with people in a scene. And this is gonna be really short lesson, but it's just something to think about when you're sketching your scene. So the first thing is there's always a horizon line in your image, not horizon line is a straight line, normally horizontal with the ground and at your eye level. So here's our eyes. What does that mean at our eye level on a flat seen it means every one die level is going to be about there. It doesn't matter how far away, if they're about your height is going to be there. If we do our shape-based people, we can draw all sorts of different sizes of people, all with their hands on this line. And what does that show us? What it shows us that these people are all the same size, but they're at different distances. So their heads are all the same height, but they're on different scales so their bodies are smaller and their feet are higher up or lower down. Where their feet are is telling us how far away they are. Um, which also corresponds to the scale, the size of them. But whether head is telling us how tool there to display that. If we do a really tall person and we keep them the scale of this person. We finished their feet there to see how this person looks like. They're at the same position as this person, despite being big and perhaps this person towards the front as a child. So we give them a child here, perhaps, or even holding hands. Or their feet are that is showing us that they are together, but their heads are showing us the height. So being aware of the horizon line is the really, really keep it for putting people into perspective. Then positioning their feet in the correct place to give her the height and the size of the person, as well as the position of them in our scene. And if you just understand that and if you just start with understanding the horizon line, That's really the major thing which will get you so far with sketching people and popping them into your scenes. 5. The Simplest People - Shapes!: So in these first few lessons, are we gonna be doing, is drawing some really simple people will be trying a few different styles and looking at how they work and why they work. And if you were to do a bit more detail, how can we do that? You could consider this the first part of your class project if you want. Just try falling along and filling a couple of pages of your sketchbook or a couple of pages of paper with some simple people. This first lesson, we're going to break it right the way down. You may have heard me in other places, lessons talking about shapes and how everything is shapes. People are shapes too. And we can really make it simple without losing the idea of an affected person by breaking them down into quick, simple shapes. So let's start by breaking down our people. Now I've got my just normal sketchbook. And then these first few lessons, like I said, we can just fill up a couple of pages. We're going to fill them up with different types of quite simple figures, but figures which work. And hopefully when you put all these figures together and you look at them in your sketch book, what you appreciate is even though they're simple, they work. We're not worried about specific details. Who wrote about capturing the essence of a person. So what is a person? What shapes make up a person? And this is where I think people as shape-based people. So there's a really simple concept that I like using. I like teaching, which is a person can be split into three shapes. So we can start off with a circle, that's their head. Then we can just go, they've got an upper body and that is just a triangle. And then they've got a lower body. And that can be another triangle. Equally, we could change it slightly. So still having a, a circle, we can have a more muscular man by having more of a rectangle. With a triangle underneath. We could give someone a hat by giving their head an extra shape. Suddenly they've got a square with a square. And then we will turn this person again into the normal triangle. But maybe their legs, the square this time. Each of these people, very simple. Put in context in the idea of a scene. Without a doubt, live there people. And we can quickly just fill up a page by joining up our shapes. And once we get a bit looser, we can start playing with the shapes. The shapes no longer have to be circles. You can suggest a little nose. We can suggest an arm going into a pocket. We can just little arm here coming out the side. And then perhaps just a little bit of movement. Just going to change pen because that one has decided to run out. There we go a little bit of movement. Just by putting the foot forward equally, we can taper off the legs if we do another person. The top nice and simple again, the legs didn't have to finish. The legs can, can float. B. B sort of suggested and we're leaving these people is very simple. So there's no reason we have to totally bring out all of these shapes. Another couple of ideas when people are next to each other. So we can work out their interaction. We don't have to draw the lines, but we could split them up so we could do a line here. Then we can overlap the lines. We can create that confusion that we see when you see two people in the distance next to each other. Often the following similar colors they blend together. And what we're trying to get is the idea of a few people next to each other. If you want to extend this idea of drawing a bit further, you can give people a dog. So what's a dog? It's a series of shapes. So what we've got, we've got a circle, we got a rectangle or an oval. Let me just suggest some legs and a tail suit. All of these figures, all of these ideas of things moving humans, animals. We can just break them down into really simple concepts. And we just think of them as three-step figure. And before you know it, you've got something which is a perfectly good, interesting, stylized triggered to put a new scene. Now, the last bit I want to cover in this is adding a tiny bit of character. And what do I mean by that? Well, simple things like we gave this person I hat, we can give her. So again, really simplifying it. Perhaps a punk hairstyle. That's all you need. Perhaps someone's got some glasses. You're just trying to pick out a hand in the pocket, which we did here. Perhaps the reason this person's hand in is in their pocket is because they've got a bag leapt over them. So just find simple shapes, simple, simple shapes. And you can add them like a walking stick. You can add shoes as a real key part of this person's look. Start with the simple three shapes. I'd suggest the starting point is a circle into triangles. But then build on that, keeping it really simple. Working up to dogs and cats and other animals. Then adding in a tiny touches which really suggest these people have got a little bit more going on. They've got some kind of character and an interest as well. 6. Loopy People - Quick and Sketchy: Now, if shape-based people aren't simple and quick enough for you, then these next ones certainly will be loopy people because they're really quick, short expression, all forms of getting people on a page. This is probably actually more, most common way of sketching people, especially if I'm out and about. But what I want to do is show you that this is a busy scene without spending hours trying to capture every individual detail. So just another really simple idea, a simple way of getting people from your image, from your world onto your page. So we've done our sort of shape-based people, broken them down. What I want to show you next to the slightly quicker, if it's possible to be quicker than this, But even quicker, more abstract and loose way of displaying people. And this is one of my favorites and I call it loopy based people. And the reason is similar to this. We just breaking them down into real essence of a person. So what do I do? Well, I literally just find a person with a series of loops. So we've got circles. And that is all it is. And you can create different sizes. And it's just caricaturing are people. But they're very effective, especially in a scene which isn't about the people, it's about the business. So if we just sketch in a little street here, we can sketch in a sort of one-point perspective sketch where we're going off down into the distance. Maybe a shopping streets. Let's pop in these kind of shop fronts. And what it can be tempting to do is draw every little detail and you end up with overcrowding the image and not getting the idea of business. But instead of just getting these warped, scary-looking people, well, instead, why not just try it with a nice thin line? Just adding these loops. And loops can overlap each other. They can be in the wrong size, it can be the right size. It doesn't matter. What we're trying to do is get the idea that it's busy. And if you actually take the time to look at it, a reference photo, find a photo, or you can just go to your local High Street and see how busy it is. And see. Can you look and count the people? Can you look immediately and actually work out exactly how many people going on or is what you're really seeing. More like this. You're just seeing that it's busy. You're seeing there's a number of people in an arrange of different places. And I would argue this very simple way of displaying figures. It's a really wonderful way of sketching them really quick. You could do this. Well, what's this taking me a minute. So I could spend a bit longer and I can make my buildings a bit more important. Maybe that's what this scene is really about is this street I love. And I want to show how loved it is by getting lots of people in. But I don't need to spend ages and ages drawing them. I can just create these little quick stylized people. This is really quick method, but it's one of my favorites. And you will see many artists, especially urban sketches, doing simple figures like this because it's a quick, effective and stylized but interesting way of capturing our people. 7. Gestural People - Energy and Detail: So sometimes you want a little bit more detail, e.g. if someone's just walking across our scene or right at the front, we don't want just a big loop because it just feels too empty in like we haven't really tried to capture that person. So when I want to add a bit more detail, this is the technique I use a bit more of a gestural technique, but also looking at capturing those important details. Remember this class is not about portrait drawing or drawing the human figure. This is about, I've been sketching, but also getting effective people into urban sketches. As such, we still want to be loose and light. We want to be able to use our techniques in any situation, including when we sat outside and people are literally walking across in front of us and we have 20 s to get them on our page and to capture the bit which made them interesting to us. So hopefully this little technique will help to just that. This class isn't about capturing every little detail, but I do want to show you how I would quickly find a bit more detail, a bit of extra detail whilst keeping it loose. And the way I do that is normally by doing a continuous line. The idea here is maybe I'm sketching for reference, but maybe I'm sketching as someone who is walking past. If we move over to here. And let's say that we're just trying to capture people as they come across us. And that's why continuous line just getting a gestural feel of that person. But also picking out details which are why they caught our eye. We could do that for reference photos as well. But it's a technique which is great for being out and about and just capturing the looseness of, of that moment. So what do I do? I normally start with the head. So let's say we've got someone walking past, got some big headphones on and a beanie hat. So we can capture the head first with it. Just a gestural line which really first finds those big shapes. And now we found them. We can just solidify them, keep it as a continuous line or you can come off and added a bit more detail. Then we can keep that gestural idea going. So we finished their head. Maybe we keep it as a continuous line. Maybe we, again, we come off and take another look. And then we're going to be finding the movement and the movement, the energy. So again, that's a big line coming down and just capturing where, where are their limbs, where their major lines. And we can then start building up a bit more detail. So maybe he's got this down here outside is trousers. I'm just doing lots of tiny little movements and none of these movements has to be right. And especially like I say, if we sketching outside, well, we have a split second. It's not going to stay here for more than half a second unless we are capturing someone sat down or not moving. So we're just trying to pick out these little details. They kind of shapes the movement that I think is enough, enough to suggest a details. So what have we done? What have we really done here? We focused on the bit which was important with built-in energy, that movement. Then we've probably, well, this is from imagination anyway, but in reality we've probably picked out the gene pockets and the shoe and the exact position of the foot from memory or from the imagination. Because we can't just catch someone walking past us without doing a bit from the imagination. If, if we want to capture still pose, we could do the same thing with, let's do an elderly gentlemen, say this time is going to be a bit stooped, so we actually use our first strokes to really capture that steep. There might be another key bit. There might be something like he's got a weed mentioned walking stick over on our other page. Maybe he's got a walking stick and that's a really key part of why we found this person an interesting subject. Having got that key energy that flow, that shape, and we can come back and start just suggesting a little bit more detail. So maybe we want to get just the positioning of the hand. There. We want to get maybe he's got a nice tie on and we want to get that as part of our sketch. The other hand here. But now he's, he's moved past us and we don't want to invent too much. So we can, again, we can leave it as that. And the idea for these figures, these are going to be people in the foreground. If we try too hard in a scene like this to capture people with detail, even as this has got some detail, it's not hugely detailed, but even as much detail as this in a scene like this. Well, what's going to happen is nothing is gonna make sense. You can't have this much detail, this many lines when you buildings are only this big on your page. So these sketches are great if people who are in the foreground. So perhaps someone is walking across the front of your scene and you just want to capture, perhaps even you just wanted to capture their, their head is it crops in. And so it's sort of going for the nose, the mouth, for a low-lying hat. And that's what you're trying to get at the idea of this person as they walked past. And they just, you can imagine this is a scene where you've actually got a building back here. Someone's just stepped in a cross u. And so the head is in the very front of your field of vision. So that's my sort of simple ways of catching, capturing people, shapes, loops. I love doing these. And then just occasionally building more detail with these kind of gestures and continuous lines and just picking out a few key details. In the next couple of lessons, we're going to look at how we understand perspective, how we understand color. Before moving on to our final scene. 8. Easy Colour Ideas: Now, loads of us will love sketching with just a pen and inks. And to be honest, I love doing that as well, but I also love adding a punch of color. Again, this isn't a lesson about how to sketch and paint people who are super realistic way. This is about getting effective people and making them autistic and careful and not paid. And that's the approach I take with color as well. Now, in this lesson, we're gonna be looking at how to add a bit of color, a bit of tone to our people in a few different ways. I'm using watercolors. I'm also some of the sketches I've been doing. I've been with soluble ink. So in this lesson you'll see how color can just add. An interested people, will see how abstract colors or keeping unified colors can be different ways of making people stand out. And I've seen, but we'll also look at, in a couple of the sketches I've used, soluble ink will see how applying water to soluble ink can itself provide that little punch of shape would tone or even color. So this is a really quick lesson on color. And all I'm going to be using as a small Chinese-style brush. I've got my normal set of watercolor paints here. And if you see my style before, or even just listened and watched and drawn on when the previous lessons, you'll know that I'm not too fast about being super accurate. And for me it's catching people in the scene. The same rules apply. So I would argue, especially if we take these really loose people, that actually just picking a warm or interesting color is plenty enough of an accent for your people. So what do I mean, e.g. if I take some, this is quinacridone, deep gold. I could just add these kind of loose flecks of color, which are kinda keeping that loopy feel. Now that is highlighting our people, it's making them interesting. Without throwing away from the rest of the scene. I could do the same with a nice red. So I've got here scarlet lake. We could just touch in little bits of red, highlighting the movement, highlighting the figures could splash around them, bringing life energy that will even work in this scene. So this is using just here is soluble. So I know that if I wash it, I'm going to get a nice shadow in the background. Now we've got this shadowed background and we've got the people standing out. So one concept actually is we could, we could leave that without soluble ink. What we could do is we could take a nice bit of moon glow or another dark color, Payne's gray. You see how this creates a nice shadow. We can use that shadow color and instead of washing our ink. So up here I've used non-soluble think. You might remember that my, my pen ran out in one of the previous lessons and that's why i've, I've got two different inks. Well, I could equally just use this lovely shadow color. I can make a shadow for the background and then the people can just stand out by virtue of being bright and white, then negative space. But if we want, again, if we want to make them different and I want to make them pop, we could add touches of color, so we can add little flecks of, say here some cobalt, this is nice cobalt blue. We could have done this. Yellow, will this red? Now, if we go to our people up here, we could take a slightly different approach. So another thing that I quite like doing with my people is unifying them. So if we come back here, you see a unified them all by having the same color representing them. But if we go up here, what I could do is I could unify them by giving all their heads the same color. So now their heads are nice. Bright pulls. Quinacridone, so the same kind of used here. But I can also make them individually. So someone's got a green top, maybe some green trousers because, why not? Couple of people maybe if you just got something really dark, maybe dark trousers here, dark, I just can be hacked or maybe it's hair either way. And maybe someone else has got a nice warm and red top. Maybe this bike is red. And this way we're giving them some individuality, but we're not overdoing it. We're not over stretching ourselves. We're not. Again, if we go back to that first lesson about overdrawing, you can certainly over paint as well. In the foreground, not in the foreground staring at their feet, adding a shadow. It's also lovely way of just grounding people. We did it in the scene down here. And it works for animals, humans. Suddenly they're all grounded. And it helps when we're. Looking at perspective as well, it really helps. Here actually we haven't drawn in the legs, have we see with our color we can bring a, a wash down and then ground them. So we don't have to draw everything we can still apply that shadow process with more detail comes either more or less color is really up to you. So again, we focused on desktop because of his headphones. So maybe we just want to highlight is headphones and his shoes because they're the same color. And again, give him a nice shadow. Perhaps there's also something else interesting going on like a, a red pocket, or we want to highlight their hands as red with this chap. So stooped and old, we could maybe ignore the colors he is, but focus on the emotions that. So if we take more of a murky colors, this is a CPR. Well, just by giving him this almost monochrome feel, you're exaggerating the age, exaggerating the mood of this figure. But we're not focusing on details. We're focusing on what's important for us, perhaps in our champions in the foreground, we want to take a more mellow approach. Again, this could be a lovely bit of negative space, but if you wanted to add color, you could pay a bit more realistic. So we said that he's got a beanie hat on so we can get a, just an idea of the skin color. We could touch in a little bit of red Phillips and also just to highlight the nose and around the eyes. Having a little bit of red with Quinacridone does create quite a good skin shadow. Then he'd been in a has been either blue, so we can add that in. And now we've got a more mellow, certainly more realistic approach, which is really showing that this is a figure. We could take a bit of our shadow color and just emphasize the eye as well if we wanted, but without really overdoing it. So again, we're taking a mellow loose suggested approach because we're just adding people to a scene. We're not drawing portraits, were not doing a figure study. So that is my really simple ideas for color. Don't feel you have to stick with watercolor either. You could easily do these kind of touches with felt pens, with ink, with pencils. The colors in your scene don't have to be in watercolor. Just experiment and just let go of the idea that a head has to be an exact skin color, or that the height has to be exactly right, or that the shape of the bodies has to be exactly each of the individual person's shape. 9. My Scene - The Ink Work: So it's time to start my final project. In this first half, we're gonna be focusing on the linework using a fine liner this time. No different from an I used my fountain pen. But I just want to show you that it really doesn't matter what tools, what equipment you have, everything goes. You could even do this with a pencil or a buyer or something like that. We're going to be moving from once one aspect of this getting the scene on the page through to the other aspect, getting the people. And we'll talk about how we combine the two. So in some places I'm going to leave a little gap. So my people in other places, I'm going to put my people on top of the scene are mostly be doing the loopy quick people that in a couple of places will be using other techniques where we're getting a little bit more suggestion of who that person is. So let's have a little look at our reference photo. You can find in the class resources. Then we can start sketching our same in ink. So we are on to our final scene and you can see the reference photo here made it quite big so that we can really easily follow along. What we can see is a, an evening seen it. So this is in Norwich, a town in the East of England. And what we've got is a lovely big building on the side. It's an interesting perspective coming down the other side. And then lots of people and because it's evening, It's a little bit sort of backlit. What that is good for is because when we are starting as we are now, what we've got is a scene where we can over-focus on the people. The features are difficult to see and now really just shapes and silhouettes. So what we're gonna do, we're gonna do this in two stages, two videos. The first is going to be the line work, and the second is going to be the colors. Now, I have got my same sketch brick here, cartridge, sketchbook, and I'm going to just use a fine liner this time. And the reason I'm using a fine liner is just to demonstrate that the same techniques work no matter what pen you're using. This is a waterproof, fine liner. The techniques that we're using with the watercolors will be to wash the colors rather than the ink. So in some of the last lesson, when we looked at color specifically, we'd use some water soluble ink, which meant we can wash the Inca bit. This time. All the tone is going to come from our lovely colors. Now, without further ado, let's get started. So it's basically a portrait oriented seem. So we're going to start, I'd like to start towards the middle of our focal point. And our focal point is this lovely church. It doesn't matter if your mistakes, so you already have gotten a bit wonky, but you see I just correct it. Come up and up and down, back and correct my line. I'm going to come and I'm going to find this kind of silhouette of the building. Until I've captured this side of it. I can come down and I can start picking out fetus like there's this lovely tree. I like doing it. Not necessarily strictly as a continuous line drawing, but I like joining up blue stuff, which is why I've done this all basically so far as one big line. But don't feel the need to do that. This is about getting, you will see now you want it. Then adding simple people. Coming down here, we can get some of these other shapes, this so stacked columns of this building and just adjust them. All I'm doing getting suggestion of these different stacks shapes. Same here. I'm not going to draw all of them, just a few. This is a sketch. Remember, we could be doing this outside, so we need to sort of imagine if we were outside. How long can we really spend getting every detail? Now, moving around? Just quickly capture some of these shapes. And we're kind of moving away from the middle of the image here. So I'm starting with less detail. We can with build up the detail later. But literally finding like with our people, we find the simple shapes in the scene, the triangles, squares, the rectangles, pop those in, and then the scene sort of really just builds itself. So instead of trying to sketch a whole building, just try breaking it down. And when we get to sketch the people, instead of trying to sketch a whole person, break it down, sketch their shapes, and then you discover that you've accidentally already drawn your person. Okay, Now, couple more little shapes down here. We've got this cylindrical building and it's doorway. We've got the columns of this building. Just going to find little horizontal shapes before adding in some of these vertical shapes as well. Central columns. And I'd go away. We've got steps and steps often come with people that nice. It's good to know how to, how to simplify them and look what happens if we just draw a series of. Horizontal lines and all I'm doing is two horizontal lines quite close to each other with a little gap. And that just suggest very easily to the eye. It really suggests that there's a staircase. We could do the bannister. Just not over-complicate things. Now we can start thinking about the people and what I've not done. I have not finished off the bottom of the building. And this is one of the mistakes I talked at the beginning is over planning. But equally, we can leave things loose. So now I could say, well, you know, I've not finished off the bottom. So why not just captured couple of these people IN D minors? So the idea of shape-based people, because that's what they are in this scene now. Just silhouettes, they're just simple shapes. And I thought this person was holding an umbrella, so start drawing an umbrella. Then not that as my eyes deceiving me, but they can now have an umbrella, it's fine. You can invent scenes. It was a bit of a rainy day when I took this photo. That's that's my excuse and I'm going to stick with it. Now we can move forward as well. We can keep adding these people. And you can see this chap, we must be on a bit of a slope because this chap's head is a little bit lower than everyone else's head. And he's closer to us. Either he's shorter or there is shorter. Or instead of it being a totally flat thin, there must be a bit of a slope. Either way, let's just pop his head about where it appears in an image which is that level with the bottom of this tree. Hopefully he's a bald gentleman which is easier to sketch. This is where we can do that gestural style of touring. So I'm just, I've got his head. I'm picking out the key features, getting the shape energy of his arms and his legs are quite key on and look at him striding forward. Get the same on the other side. That's kinda handed a pocket there. Now, it's probably enough to illustrate the idea of this gentleman. If we wanted, we could pop a little suggestion or an ear, even a little nugget of a nose there. But don't go too far. This is just gentle touches going to move away from the people again for a second. And this is one of the keys I think, is to know what over-focus on the people in your scene. Because when you do that, you get lost in the detail and you never quite see the flow of the rest of the image. So I'm gonna go back and I'm going to start back on capturing our scene, the rest of the scene. And getting it as a sort of silhouette to start with. Just like people, this is all about simplifying, say, just capturing the simple vertical lines, horizontal lines, simple shapes like we've got this chimney or just like a rectangle with a rectangle on top. And then these windows, again, simple shapes, node is building towards something. Now instead of leaving the bottom unfinished this time, what I'm gonna do just to prove, maybe even just proved myself. It doesn't matter if you sketch a scene and then add people on top. That's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna get the bottom of these buildings in. We've got the next one here. The windows opening up a little bit because it's coming closer and the angles are less steep. Call these sort of fun signs coming in with a subway sign over the two here we've got a warning coming in here as well, and another one underneath it. And then right in the front, a nice little detail. Is this this bothers sign. So I'm not sure if it's something unique to the UK or not, but these stripy red and white signs you see there sort of a traditional barbers barbershop signs. And if amending it cuts, basically, we can bring in this very, very steep perspective here as a cutoff for negative space, which is going to frame our scene. And if you look on the other side of the image, we've got that same cutoff coming in here, this looming shape. So now we've got a scene framed. We can add a few more details in here that there's another building coming across a couple of little windows. We can see these openings actually disappeared behind this looming, looming shape. A couple of little people here, a couple of more lines just to suggest that busy-ness of lots of doorways. And we gotta kinda rooftop coming across there. Now we've got our scene finished. Not completely, but, but getting there, we've got these couple of people and now I'm going to work my way across and add a few more. So you talked about how this chapter is a bit lower, probably because there's a bit of a slope. But everyone else is, has a pretty much along this line to, this must be our horizon line. So if we focus on that, we get our heads in the right location. We can now sketch our people. We can sketch them. On top of our previous scene. Now this front Chap I'm going to be a bit gestural with as well striving towards us. He's got a lot of movement is quite close. So I've got that, hopefully got that feel of movement, little bit of extra detail. But I've not overdone it. You can see a man in you can because he's ghosted out because you can see behind him, at least for me, that implies he's moving and he's part of the scene, but he's not a fixed part of it. We've got a couple of people back here, much smaller now, much, much smaller. So we can see that their legs probably finished level with his elbow. So we can mark that in and to start getting our people. This is an example of where I'm not finishing them off. I could do lines around all of them, but they're next to each other and it's hard to tell where one begins and the other finishes, so we don't have to make the distinction. Got a few people here who are a bit closer. Their legs are finishing about here level these needs. So just make a little note of that and we can now start to move more towards our shape-based people. And I'm basing the shapes a little bit on what the people are actually looking like. This person has got a big hood on, their head becomes a big oval. This person is a little bit shorter, a little bit more fluffy, had a narrow shouldered, so we kept that in. Um, where else can we go Then? There's just loads of people at negative loads and loads of people came back. And this is where we can start just tucking in these little shape-based people and really just making it busy. But because we are working on the horizon line, because we're keeping them simple. It's relatively easy to avoid overdrawing that we don't want to do. As you come forward, we could start popping in. So we've got this chair or it's actually it's a notice board, isn't it? In a nutshell, why food it was chair. There's a notice board in the foreground that we can add in these kind of subways, little cues or something. We can put them in. And again, that's framing the scene. It's stopping us having to finish everything. We can. Fill in a few more gaps with people as well if we want. Just puffing people in, keeping their heads at the right height. And then working out where we need to just finish off our buildings around them. But now we're not spending ages finishing off the buildings. So just a few little bits, bits and pieces that we can add in. What you could do, you could use this as a framework and you can build and build and really carefully neaten it up. And if you start with a pencil, you could imagine how you could take this sketch to fully fledged painting or something. But for me that the spontaneity, the looseness of the sketch, is where the magic lies. So I'm going to do my last couple of lines just trying to get things feeling a little bit more balanced, bit more detail in line work where perhaps it feels a bit empty. And you can see how it's quite gentle up here. And actually, with all this alignment going on, I think we could do with just a little bit more of a depth of line, a bit more of a weight of line. And these are just personal feeling for how there's not a huge amount of science to it. But you can just look and decide where you need a little bit more, a little bit, a little bit of rebalancing. There we go. So that's my line work done. And it takes a little while. But that's because we've done so much in terms of talking about it. In terms of all these people look at this. We've got to at least what 20 people in I've seen. And it's also not perfect, but relatively accurate and enjoyable to sketch. The next thing we're gonna be doing is of course, adding our watercolors. And I'm just gonna be using this one small Chinese brush again. So get your watercolors or whatever you want to use, your pencils, your patterns. And the next lesson, we'll just bring this to life with a splash of color. 10. My Scene - Adding Colour: And finally we are onto the color. So I'm using my watercolors again, just one simple brush. And we're going to be playing some loose colors all over the scene. Or two keyframes. The decisions I make, I'll tell you all the colors I'm using as I use them. This can be a nice, loose light wash of color. But we're also going to make this people stand out. We're going to make this obvious that this is a busy scene. And we'll talk through the decisions we can make along the way to help achieve that. So here we go, time to splash on eye color. Now I'm not using watercolor paper today, so you can see what a few other things in here, It's still NT fine to put colors on. But what you've got to be careful with is that if you're not using watercolor paper, It's going to buckle a bit more. So we need to be a little bit more delicate with how we apply it. And often a little bit less water. But still I say less water, we can still use plenty. So let's just start. Now. I'm going to start with again with my scene. And I'm going to start, I love starting with the sky most often, say with some water, quite a bit of water, just not, not pools and pools for it. I'm going to get this guy going. Now this is a cobalt blue, lovely primary blue, relatively cool primary blue. And I'm going to add a tiny bit of fallow blue. And now you can see the fallow blue, electric bit more alive. And that just creates this ovary. Chris, feeling. We've got this glow haven't been coming up. So if I just drop a little bit of red, this is a scarlet lake, little bit of red in there. I know it's not a orange glow, but I'm just simulating what's going on the scene. It doesn't have to be exactly the same with my blue. I'm going to continue that down. The reason is blue can be the start of a nice shadow. And we can use that blue to just start introducing that shade where we sit. And we see shade really in the back of this image, don't we? And then coming around the front here of our, our church. And just gentle blue, so not really bold, but a nice gentle wash. And we can keep that coming in. Can you see what I'm trying to do here? I'm trying to sketch or pain around the people now, not going to worry if it goes over some of the people. But I'm trying to just keep it slightly apart from them. Now a couple of nice touches here. We've got this lovely golden gloves Coming up. So it's like sum up lights isn't there and the church. So whilst it's still nice and wet, if I just dropped a little bit of gold in there. And I can do the same. And some of these buildings where we see there's the lights on and in the subway sign and things like that. So we're getting that reflection or reflection with the contrast of lovely glow and this sort of more moody sky back here. Going to bring a little bit more mood in now as well. So I'm going to pick indigo, a nice dark color. You could use any other dark color, even an ultramarine mixed with piano or a CPR, or dark brown or Payne's gray. Anything a nice murky color. Now I'm going to deepen the shadow. We started this shadow with cobalt blue. Now we can deepen. And you see things are still, even though I'm not using a huge amount of water, things are still nice and wet, nice and loose and the colors are flowing. We can use these shadows to add shadow and light to our steps as well. And we can bring the shadow around, not just the people that are around this tree. The tree is a nice sort of construct. It. We can bring a bit of light in, just like the people are lovely little constructs to highlight our image. So it's the tree. Now once this shadow, I've brought it around here, I bought it around all the people, the people and are largely negative spaces standing out this. But the shadows also got some reflections. I'm going to take some of this gold. I'm just going to drop it in. Having dropped it in, we can move it around a bit if we want or we can just touch it. And what things are, what that's gonna do, it's thing, It's, watercolors have this lovely habit of painting themselves. It's only when we tried to over control them and get frustrated with them that things get overworked. If we just let them to repeat themselves and you've plenty of water, you will find that watercolors will produce lovely effects all of their own volition. A few little lines here just to suggest a bit of shape. Now we're going to move straight onto the people. And this is where we have a choice to make. We had a lot of ideas about color in the last lesson. Before this project. We could leave them blank. You can see what that would look like. I think there'll be a bit boring for me to just say, well, I'm not going to leave them blank. You can see that silhouetted, so we could silhouette them. Again. I think that's not as exciting. Um, it would be very effective and it'd be really lovely, totally summit. In reality, it's not what I might choose to do, be very classy, but I want to show you that loose and abstract can also work. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to pick a color and that's going to be their head color. And I'm going to pick a CPS. I am going for a dark brown. Got the wrong one in my dark brown for their heads. And let's see what happens with that. So just by touching this dark brown in on every head will get this idea of busy-ness flowing through the image. But also it makes it really easy for the viewer to pick out all the people and to recognize all the people as people. We can make it busier by splashing some of that in. Now they're not standing out a huge amount, are they? So what I'm gonna do is take a warm color this time of quinacridone sienna. And I'm going to touch that in as well, just over the top of my dark color. By doing that, I can stop bringing it down. I can I'm warming them up and I'm giving them more of a kick. And now it's not just dark color that our eyes are looking for. It's this idea of dark onto life that is representing our people. And again, I think this is already quite effective. All I'm gonna do now is just start adding tiny touches of punchier colour. So a little bit of blue here. And probably that's enough blue, maybe a little bit of a blue on our front man. Then let's go in with a little bit of a nice red. So that can be here. Coming down. Let's just giving our eye a way of picking out all these people. And they're totally abstract, only, not totally abstract, they are based on people, but you can see they're quite effective. There are obvious that let people, it's obvious that this is a busy scene. But we haven't spent for ever trying to create and craft them. Having done that, I'm going to just stop for a sec again. I don't want to get to over-involved with the people and risk running into one of my sort of what I describe as the common challenges. I'm going to just go back to my buildings. And this is where we can start introducing a few more details with the colors. So just finding some shadows, e.g. in these colors, maybe get a bit of indigo back again and deepen some of the shadows of the doorways. Maybe deepen here. Now that's a bit less wet. We'll be able to just create the shadows and make them a bit darker and they weren't sort of drift away like they have already. And that's what happens with watercolors. They diffuse out, which is why you can be loose and relatively confident that actually even being really loose is gonna be fine and produce something really interesting. Bit more depth for this building, which is nice and dark in the reference. And we can find some reflections of the sky with a little bit of blue in some of our Windows. Of course, our subway sign is a green, isn't it? So that was a bit murky because I hadn't cleaned my brush off for a while. That's fine. So just come in with another green on the other side. Now we've got our subway sign. And it can be nice and abstract. So this is not neat, but I can just pull it, loosen it, and have these colors flowing over the page. One thing I haven't talked about is using these, these frames. So obviously on this side, the colors sort of stopping at this looming object. Here we can introduce a little bit of shade. So that we can also show that we've got this, this framing object. Now, we've got the green in one place. And what's a good idea is if you've got a color in one place, introduce it in at least one other to balance it out. So I can pop this green into this building. I can use bit of the gold as well. Notice building into this tree, introducing gold as well. Introduce a few splashes to fill up some of the space. Some of these signs, these sort of subway areas are green as well. I know that this sign is actually quite light, but let's make it dark, Let's make it bold and stand out. Another decision that we can make. What haven't we done? Well, the last bit that we haven't done is what we talked about in the color lesson as well. Adding shadows to people so we can just find our people. We can ground the more the shadows show the people interacting with the ground and thus showing where they are. Highlighting, improving sent to position. We can make the shadows a bit more complicated if we want, especially in closer. So the shadows will get broader and then they'll get narrower again. So now we've got shadows which are really representing the people. We could add shadows within them, but we don't have to overdo it. We're just creating representations of people in the end of me. I'm going to call that done. So I'm going to add my initials at the coordinate because it's always good to just be proud of what you've done, what you've done, and be happy. It's not a perfect piece of art, but it's, it's fun, it's interesting. I've had an experience doing it. And it's also giving me a bit of practice and a bit of joy. Now, I hope you've enjoyed watching it. I hope that you enjoy these kind of loose techniques and it just gives you a bit more confident to move forward and just get out there, sketch some people don't be worried, they're going to ruin your scene and don't overthink it. If you overthink it and try too hard, then they might ruin your scene. He got loose and gentle. Then you get something fun like this. The last bit in this, in this course, in this class will be a sort of summary and a description of what you might want to try in your project. So let's move across and I'll show you how this looks when it's dried as well. 11. Your Final Project and Summary: Hello everyone. I'm well done for getting through all of the lessons. Thank you for joining in. And I'd encourage you now to have a go at your own project. This is mine, this is the finished image and I hope you like it. I certainly think it's really fun, lively sketch can tell it's full of people, but it also isn't full of stress. In fact, it was fun, it was interesting, was relaxing to do. And that's really what I personally want from my, from my experience and my creativity. What I'd encourage you to do is have a go. You might want to use my, my scene, which you can find the reference for the class resources. There's a couple of other references in there as well. If you want to try something a bit different, browser, go ahead, use your own town, you're on holiday or something like that. Just don't focus on the people. Build your scene and then at your people on topple, do a tiny bit of planning. Keep your people loose, make them simple. Add a few little touches to some of them. Don't stress. And when it comes to the color, don't worry about being too realistic. Just think, how do you want to portray your people? Do you want them silhouettes? Do you want them to Moody? Do you want them alive and punchy, or do you want them to stand out as negative space? Make this artistic decisions, make me aren't your own and have fun. What I'd love you to do when you're done, share your project with me in the class gallery. I'll make sure to come back and comment on anyone who leaves a project and also feel free to connect with me outside. You can find me at Toby urban sketch on Instagram, YouTube, or on my website. Thank you very much again for joining. And if you've enjoyed, please leave a review. If you've got the time and you're welcome. Of course. In fact, I love you, of course, to come and join him with some of my other classes. Thank you very much.