Not as in attracting a gathering of people...but as in literally depicting crowds in a graphic way.
I always like it when I see a book about drawing that covers some subject I've never seen written about before. Jack Hamm wrote some good basic books on drawing that have been around for a long time. They're well illustrated and they're full of basic, straightforward and clear instruction, which is more than I can say for most books on drawing. Also they're extremely cheap. If you search for "Jack Hamm" on Amazon.com, you'll find his books. He has one on drawing people, one about drawing animals, one that's all about landscapes and one on cartooning.
I'm not usually a big fan of books about "cartooning", because to me, drawing is drawing, and you should start with a realistic approach anyway. All the greatest animators (and cartoonists) started by studying real life and then figured out ways to simplify and caricature what they saw around them. Starting out as a "cartoonist" makes your art very limited and means you'll end up copying someone else's shortcuts.
For the most part, I can't really recommend Hamm's book "Cartooning the Head and Figure" because it's mostly full of cliched formulas. I would, however, definitely recommend his book on realistic life drawing and anatomy if you're interested, and I'm sure his book on drawing animals is good too (i've got it somewhere but I haven't looked at it in ages).
But again, I wouldn't really suggest his book on Cartooning to anyone. It was written in 1967 and it's definitely a product of that time. I'm glad it's still published in the same original format, and it's pretty interesting as a bit of a time capsule, but it mostly has pages like "how to draw hobos and tramps" and "how to draw pretty girls" and the like...basically, kind of outdated, quaint ideas about how to draw using formulas. I don't like books that recommend using formulas to draw. I think great drawing comes from observation and learning to see things clearly and with a fresh eye, not relying on shortcuts and formulas!
The page on "Hobos and Tramps".
Somebody should make an updated book on drawing that includes formulas on how to draw modern clichès, so instead of "How to Draw Hobos and Tramps" it would teach you "How to Draw Hipsters and Baristas" or something like that.
Anyway, the page that I wanted to share is one where he talks about "how to draw crowds"...which isn't really a topic I've seen anyone tackle in a drawing book before. Every once in a while, when storyboarding, you'll run into this challenge and it's always a bit tricky. The crowd is never the focus of the drawing (they're almost always a background element), so how do you draw the crowd so it reads clearly as a crowd without being distracting?
Some rather inventive solutions, I thought. By the way, that odd white shape in the lower left hand corner is in the actual book, it's not a mistake in my scan.
Some other thoughts on crowds that have helped me over the years...
If there's a way to throw the crowd into silhouettes, that can work (like this one from Carl Barks)
Coloring a crowd can get you into trouble. Your first instinct is to give them all different colored pants, shirts, hair, etc. It can easily turn into a lot of little color patches that don't relate to each other and look like Skittles. Somehow, Hergé (or his colorist) pulls it off in these two panels from "King Ottokar's Sceptre".
It's risky but it works here. I would even say if you're going to do it, choose a couple of colors and repeat them on figures to give the picture a sense of harmony. Or just stick with everyone wearing either cool colors...or warm colors to create harmony and avoid distracting contrast in the crowd. But this panel below doesn't follow either of those suggestions and works beautifully. So what do I know?

I think it works okay because the figures in the crowd are large enough in the frame that they can stand to be different colors. Also, each figure is pretty much just one color, which helps. When the figures get too small, little pieces of contrasting color get distracting. (like of you colored everyone's shirt and pants differently). Notice how in this panel from "The Blue Lotus" with smaller figures in a crowd, there isn't as much variation in the colors on the characters. Hergé was smart and composed the crowd so mostly we see only the figure's heads in the crowd...that way the colorist can make them all mostly skin color and they blend together. And when it comes to clothes, they're mostly variations of blue with a few green ones thrown in. Not a lot of contrast (there are a couple of orange, brown, red and yellow spots too...but not that many).

Morris, the artist behind the Lucky Luke series, went even simpler. He just had his colorist make the crowd all the same color in this panel below. It's a trick he uses all the time in his books. Notice how he gave them all black vests to get a little more separation between all the figures and help silhouette the heads clearly. Also they're all about the same size and build so they read as a group. If you start making everyone in a crowd look too different from each other, they become TOO interesting and distracting. Keep everyone in the crowd a pretty similar shape, size and type to avoid confusing the viewer.
A couple more examples from "Star Light" (artwork by Gorlan Parlov). Coloring a crowd all one color is a lot more common in comic books than you might expect. It might seem like "cheating" but it makes sense. Otherwise it would turn into teeny, tiny spots of color and lose its identity as one thing (it's just
one crowd).
I love how (in the top panel below) there's the foreground group, who are colored darker and with the warm purple tones (both of which make them advance towards the viewer) and then you have the background group colored lighter and with cooler brown and green tones (both of which make them recede into the background), giving the picture depth.
Also, it's a cool technique to use subtle variations within the palette to differentiate hair, shirts, pants, etc.
In this big group shot below, the crowd in the foreground is again colored the same way, with little variations within the same brown color scheme. And the background crowd (on the other side of the space ship) doesn't have any variation to make them look like they are father away (objects have less contrast and variation in color the further away from us they are, due to atmospheric perspective--basically particles in the air, like water, smog and smoke).

Another similar solution from Conrad's "Donito". He draws the foreground characters very distinctly but the background ones are a little more loosely suggested. Then the foreground characters have full color (although they're all very similar in palette). As for the background characters, they're all covered with a blue tone to group them together, and since there's a bit of blue sky behind them, they kind of become part of the background. And as an added bonus, the warm colored (and more detailed) characters in the foreground seem closer, while the cooler colors and more sketchy detail on the background figures help those figures recede into the background. It gives a nice sense of depth to the panel.
Anyway, that's probably more than anyone needs to know about drawing crowds, but there you go. Someday it''l come up, and now you'll have a bunch of solutions at your fingertips!
I'm sad you wont be putting out a storyboarding book but I'm glad you're still doing this graphic novel!
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DeleteThanks for the support....maybe I will write that book one day. In the meantime, read this blog for free!
ReplyDeleteHappy to follow you on social media and support your upcoming graphic novel Mark. Thank you for your insightful storyboarding advice!
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