Hi, Tom here and welcome to this week's Circle Line Art School video: How to Draw
People in Perspective. In this video I'm going to show you one way to draw really
simple people in perspective, so that you can draw a crowd of people in a simple
space, so let's start by drawing the head as a simple oval and then the neck
and more circles to represent the body in its basic form, the upper leg and a
circle for the knee perhaps and the lower leg and the foot...
and then we can add a circle for the shoulder and then an upper arm and
forearm, the aim of drawing a basic person like
this is just really to get the general proportions of the person, so that it
looks okay, it doesn't need to look great, it just needs to look okay, there are
lots of ways of drawing people, some involve measurements, but I would suggests
that the best way is just to draw these sort of simple basic people and then you
can see if the proportions look right or not, once you've drawn it, so rather than
worrying about if it's right or not, if you just put the circles and ovals in
first and then just see if it looks okay, we're all different shapes and sizes and
proportions and I think you'll soon see if the heads to big or the feet are too small,
for it to be generally realistic or not, so just trust what you see,
once you've drawn it, so after erasing the pencil lines to make them a little bit
fainter, then I'll start to add some of the details to this drawing, I'll put in
the features of the face, just with small little marks, just a mark for the eyebrow,
mark for the eye, nose, mouth etc, and a bit of hair, just with some shading, and
then I'll work down through the body, adding the clothes and the folds in the
clothes and the style of clothing that I've chosen to draw, so I'll start by
adding a collar and a tie, basically because they are quite nice shapes to draw and then a
collar of a coat, I think when drawing clothes it's a good idea to think about
the body underneath the clothes, that would make sense, but also about how the
clothes sort of fold and move, so that it gives the impression that the person,
in this case is sort of walking towards us, so in the shape of the clothes and the
way that the folds are on the clothes, I want to indicate that slightly that the person's
coming towards us and maybe their hand is holding part of their coat and maybe
there is layers of fabric, so there's one, maybe a coat and then the jacket
underneath coat and then the shoes will be at different angles, because of the
weight of the body of the person, so if you think about, for example, when you're
standing, if you have your weight on both of your legs or just the weight of your
body just on one leg and if you're walking how that weight would be
dispersed, those sort of things are really useful
when you come to draw, then it helps you think about what you can actually see in
your drawing and how the movement of the person can be created just by drawing a
few lines that represent some of this movement and weight, as much as accuracy
in a anatomical way...
so now I've just about finished during the first person, I'll show you one
simple way of drawing a crowd of people, all in perspective, there are lots of
different ways of drawing people in perspective, but the main thing is the
horizon line is the line of the height of the viewer, the height of the eyes of
the person who's looking at the people, so we're going to be standing looking at
this person that we've just drawn at the same height as they are and therefore
the horizon line, because we're the same height as they are is going to be, just
behind their head, behind their eyes, because our eyes are the same height as
their eyes, now what that means when you're drawing a crowd of people is
anybody who is the same height as the person doing the drawing, and in this
case the person that we're seeing first, the adult that I've just drawn, their
heads, if they're adults and similar height, will also be on that horizon line,
if the ground is flat, so we're going to make it simple for ourselves by making
the ground, the thing that everybody's standing on, is flat, so the horizon line
will be the line where all the heads go of everybody here is an adult,
so if along this line we draw little ovals of different sizes, they can be, they can
become, different people's heads and depending on the size of the oval, will
tell us how big the person will be, so in this drawing the next people that I'm
going to draw are going to be the same height as the first person, but they're
going to be further away, that means their heads are going to be on this
horizontal line, but their feet aren't going to be as low as the first person,
that means their heads, the ovals, need to be a little bit smaller than the first
person, for the first person in this drawing I drew the basic shapes, but for the other
people I'm just going to sketch them in, starting with an oval for their heads
and then sketch the cloths in, showing, like I was talking about before, the sort
of the weight and the movement of the person, keeping an eye on the proportions and
the height of the person, so with these two people here that I am just
drawing, I can reference the first drawing, the first person that I drew, and
make sure that everything is slightly smaller, because they're slightly further
away, so now I've sketched the second and third person in a little bit, I'll start
on the person towards the right and they're going to be not shorter but
further away, so the actual pencil drawing will be shorter, but they'll be
the same size, but just further away, so the head slightly smaller than the
second and third person, so clearly there are lots of ways of drawing, but for this
one I'll try and explain how you can get lots of people into a drawing, so once
you've got two people, one near and one far, you can draw a line through the
heads, which will be very similar to the line of the horizon, but you can also
draw a line between a couple of the people that you've drawn from their feet
and where the line from their heads and the line from their feet meet, that will
be a vanishing point, a bit like if everybody was standing in a row and
they're all the same height person, they would all fit within those two lines,
those two diagonal lines that I'm just drawing now, so the heads would be on the
top line and their feet would be on the bottom line, but if these people moved
left or right, in the page, they wouldn't change size, it sounds odd to say, we all
know it, but it sounds odd when you said out loud, people only get bigger as they
get nearer you and they only get smaller to go further away, but if they go left
or right they stay the same height, so in a drawing like this, once you've got a
few people and you work out how they relate together, you can start drawing
with more confidence, knowing that the figures that you're drawing will have
space around them and space is well depicted, it sort of almost seems that
they could walk between each other and towards each other and they could run
between each other and it would still work as a drawing, so the basic principle
of this drawing, of keeping all the heads on one height, is a very simple way of
creating quite a dynamic image, where you can have lots of
different people doing lots of different things and then you could put them in an
environment of maybe people at a beach, people in a city walking around, lots of
things that you could do with this technique, in this video I am just
trying to show you the basic steps for it, for the next stage I'm going to
speed up the video and draw in some of the details of the people...
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Thank you very much for watching this video, I hope you find it useful for your
own drawing: Please subscribe to my youtube channel Circle Line Art School, for many
more art videos as a new video each week on a different art topic, please click on
one of the links below to see some of my other drawings in perspective, thank you
very much for watching and see you next time, goodbye!