Since getting interested in Urban Sketching this year, I’ve been on the look out for inspiration from sketchers who draw people, and I came across a dynamic artist called Suhita Shirodkar. She’s international correspondent with the non-profit organisation Urban Sketchers, and is also an artist, illustrator, journalist and teacher. Although she was born in India, she now lives in San Jose California. It took me a few months to realise that she was the same artist I reached out to in 2012 to ask whether I could feature a few of her images on my Bodrum Peninsula Travel Guide website.

Suhita responded straight away and said I was free to use her images on my travel site. Back then I don’t think she was as well known in the art community, and when you compare her art from then to now, you can see how much looser her sketches have become. The sketches I featured on my website show figures with a black line contour and much less dynamic, but nowadays she relies heavily on a purposeful line of action. But one thing that hasn’t changed is how well she captures a scene that tells a story—the essence of urban sketching.

Figure Sketching Made Simple

As well as following Suhita on Instagram (@suitasketch), I came across her Craftsy class – Figure Sketching Made Simple. I tried working through the class back in March, but I couldn’t get to grips with the Line of Action approach. It was so alien to my own style, that I gave up and moved on to another class. But six months later I tried again, and this time I was confident enough to work my way through all the lessons.

This class is about learning to draw people on the move, and Suhita uses a loose gestural style to create sketches full of energy. Here’s what the class covers:

1. Techniques to loosen up your gesture sketches
2. How to sketch people that move in and out of your scene
3. How to look for shapes
4. Capturing dramatic action
5. Drawing Connections
6. Creating Compositions

Line of Action and Drawing Verbs

I’ve come across the term line of action before, but I liked how Suhita converts that to “drawing verbs”, and this verb becomes the focal point for the figure.

Suhita uses line of action in a thicker stroke to anchor the subject, then draws secondary lines, then the detail (but not too much) in a thinner stroke.

Exaggerating Gestures

One of the elements that fascinates me about drawing people is that their gestures and poses are on a repeatable cycle. If you watch somebody standing in line, they may move about and shift their weight from foot to foot, but it’s a cycle of movement. So if you’re drawing them with their weight on one foot, and they move, you just have to wait until they shift their weight back to that foot again.

Another example of this cycle is watching people walking. As one leg moves forward, their opposite arm moves back. And to capture that movement you also have to take into account the slant of their shoulders and hips.

I learnt this when I was urban sketching in Leeds UK in a shopping mall. The people moved towards me so quickly, that the sketches I did were actually composites of multiple people. Each one had the same pose, and if you can master the logistics of gesture, you can draw anyone.

Suhita covered a lot of this topic in her class, but one of the key learnings was about exaggerating the posture a little more that what you actually see, so that there’s no mistaking the gesture. So if the hips are slightly slanted, slant them a little bit more. Doing this creates an dynamic figure.

Identifying Shapes

Another element of the gesture is figuring out the shape it occupies depending on whether the person is walking across your frame, towards you or away. Now the carrot shaped figure I’ve seen in architectural sketches (from artists like James Richards) makes sense.

This carrot shape figure gives the impression a person on the move with one foot slightly in front of the other—used to add life an energy into an otherwise static rendition of a building.

Learning from Others

I wish I was a purely intuitive painter, but I’m very much in the analytical camp. I like looking at other sketcher’s art and seeing what elements of their sketching style I’d like to master and incorporate into my own sketching style. Here’s my takeaway from Suhita:

• Creating energetic compositions quicker and with more energy: Refining my people-on-the-move Sketching Style.
• Being less fussy about anatomical precision: Moving towards interpretation/impression rather than photorealism.
• A more casual approach to adding colour: Dabbing and blobbing rather than colouring between the lines.

Up to this point I’ve been sketching people that haven’t been moving around much. I’m a sucker for a cafe location, where people are seated and not moving much. But there’s only so many seated and sedentary figures you can sketch before boredom hits—I’ve reached this point. 🙂

Although I got a lot out of Suhita’s Craftsy class, the way she draws her line of action to anchor each figure is completely alien to me. It doesn’t feel natural, and the lines are really heavy and intentional. It’s a style I can appreciate and works for her (and probably other artists too), but at this stage in my sketching adventure, it’s not the right fit for me.

Maybe somewhere down the line, when my sketching style gets looser, I’ll get enticed to move towards this minimal stroke technique. But for now, I like too many lines!

This is one of my quick sketches done from the video footage on the Craftsy class. I used a thin line of action and then lots of lines to capture the rest of the pose. I think as I get more adept and drawing figures in action, my lines with become less and less frantic, and I’ll be able to capture the same poses in less lines. But for now I like this frantic style.