Small Urban Sketching People

Page of small urban sketching people

I cut up little pieces of watercolour paper to make tiny canvases to restrict my drawing space. Then drew some people from memory and others from photographs. It is a good exercise to practice limiting the level of detail in people sketches.

*e.g. Body Proportions. Leg Lengths. White Areas. 2nd Layer of Colour*

Here’s some tips:

Bodies and legs can be equal size for a standard frame. But it’s ok to make the legs longer to convey a taller person.
One leg shorter than the other to convey movement.
Add props for variety. (e.g. hats, pets, bags etc.)
Leave white on each element to create depth.
Define your style by creating stylists vs realistic figures, e.g. small circles for heads instead of regular sized ovals, or connecting head to body or leaving a gap.

Adding Props to Small Urban Sketching People — Props, e.g. phone, bags, pets etc.

Here’s some of the challenges I encountered while creating the feature image:

Challenge:	Resolution:	Notes:
Heads too big or too small.	This is going to improve the more practice I have. If the head is too small or too big, you can use hair and hats to disguise the error so that it’s not noticeable within a larger sketch.	I’ve seen lots of different urban sketchers creating figures with oversized heads or pin heads. If you’re doing this as a style choice, then your heads need to have an element of consistentsy.
Starting at the head and making the body too big, which made me run out of space and had to miss feet off.	Before sketching just add 4 little dots. To mark: Top of the Head, Top of the Body, Mid point of the body, and feet. So that you know your figure will fit in the space.	After a slew of practicing I think it will be easy enough to eye-ball the proportions.
Some of the postures are off. Making the figures have an unrealistic balance or lean to them.	Draw a quick line of action (in pencil so you can rub it out), to capture a believable gesture. OR Sketch your figure in pencil first and make adjustments before inking your figures.	I much prefer to ink without sketching. I like this intentional approach, but on some of my examples I drew a quick pen line of action – and they’re not too visible once the figures are coloured in.
Some of the figures looked flat after I’d inked and painted.	Add 2nd layer of colour if figure to add more depth.

Here’s some of my style preferences I discovered through the feature image exercise:

Small random shapes for feet even when doing carrot people.
Bleed top clothing into bottom clothing to add looseness.

My people sketches usually have people as the focal point and the surrounding area are just sense-of-place props, but now that I’ve started sketching more buildings I want to include people that add context to the scenes. I love detail, so it was a challenge to limit the level of detail I could physically include.

The canvases I created varied between 2cm and 4cm. These seemed quite large to include in an urban sketch, but I decided to start bigger on this round, and then next time around I’ll go even smaller (and even less detail).