I officially hate drawing crowd scenes. They suck. If I ever have to draw a crowd scene in one of my own comics I’m copy-pasting the whole damn thing.
What are the best tricks you’ve seen artists use? I know there’s at least one manga artist who draws everyone in a crowd as a blobby outline. (I can’t seem to find a picture)
empty ovals for heads. Do some close faces with detail, then diminishing detail with distance.
Plus, bang your head vigorously against the table every ten minutes or so.
Don’t some artists just drop in some varied layers of cross-hatching to “imply” mass and space, with only an occasional, clear outline to indicate that the mass is a crowd (vs. a cloud bank, a skyline of buildings, etc…)
A lot of comic-strip artists used to take photos of city scenes, xerox them with the contrast cranked up, then paste the resulting picture (that, done right, looks like a hand-drawn shot of buildings) into a panel with a word balloon coming from a window, or something. It looks as if you’ve pulled back for artistic reasons and for variety, but what you’ve really done is saved yourself the trouble of drawing an entire panel.
As I recall, in the crowd scene where Anakin Skywalker had a landspeeder race, Lucas used multi-colored Q-tips in the bleachers.
The key trick to tole painting is to put two or three dabs of paint together on the palette, let the brush dip into all at once, then twirl the brush as you lay down a stroke. This is for things like leaves on a stem. Adds realistic highlights that look like they took hours to do.
One trick I use for backgrounds is to have a sponge or rag pick up the top layer of paint to reveal another color below. You can paint whole lawn areas in a few strokes.
Henry Darger traced figures he cut out of magazine or newspaper ads. In some of his crowded scenes, you can see the same figure repeated over and over. It doesn’t detract from his work at all; in fact, it’s just his style.
Greg Lamb pastes the same porn face on all of the women he draws and Rob Liefeld never draws feet.
Greg Land, not Lamb…and he traces the whole figure, not just the face. (Frequently full figures taken straight, save for changing clothing to make them look like the character they’re intended to be, although he also does composites of traced parts.)
And some of the full figures are very clearly taken from porn. (Ultimate Power was a veritable pornucopia.)
‘Pornface’ is the canonical general name for the phenomena, but he uses multiple references (though he has a couple headshots he uses at the least provocation), not all of which are from porn - nor is it restricted to the women. It’s generally inappropriate facial expressions - too much emotion, entirely the wrong emotion, not enough emotion, bad eyelines (because the original model was looking in the wrong direction for the scene, and Land didn’t bother fixing it, or did so badly), etc.
Some of Land’s tracing: (Disabled, because there is one nude in there.) JIMSMASH ! ! !: MORE GREG LAND RIPOFFS
More of it (this one’s worksafe).
Famous movie poster artist Drew Struzan does the same thing, but with more style.
Struzan, so far as I know, uses the more common (and honest, and unlazy) route of taking the photos himself (or using live models), not Land’s technique of finding a vaguely appropriate photo (from a magazine, or reference book, or movie, or…) and tracing it.
I wouldn’t count staging photos as lazy, so much as reference. Alex Ross is well known for it and no one would call him a lazy artist.
I wish I could find something to trace for one of the crowd scenes. It’s a horrible perspective. In bleachers. Of cheering fans. I’m working on setting it up in Poser (which is another trick, but only semi-lazy.)
Background trick - Google Image Search is your friend. Up the contrast and blur or posterize it a little and it’ll blend right in.
Neither would I, which is why I referred to Struzan’s technique as unlazy (as well as honest).
It’s Land whose use of photo references is lazy, since he traces other people’s pics.
My apologies - I read too fast.
And Land does a bad job of it. I see little wrong with using photos for reference, as long as you change things enough that you can’t tell (you know, like having characters have the same face and hair style from panel to panel)
NOT a lazy trick, but cool enough to share - Leonard Manco uses his fingerprints for stubble and smoke. It’s really cool. I noticed it in Hellblazer 202 & 203 first.