People and Movement in the City

A street without people feels like a stage before the performance: correctly built, but empty. As soon as two or three figures are standing in it, your sketch gains scale, direction and life. The good news: you don't need any knowledge of anatomy for this. You need a handful of strokes, one simple rule for placement and the willingness to look unfinished.

The figure reduced to five strokes

Build every figure from the same elements: a small head, a shoulder line, a hint of the hips, two lines for the legs. Nothing more. The head is smaller than your instinct tells you – roughly one eighth of the total height. You can almost always spot a beginner's figure by the oversized head, which makes the whole shape look childlike. Better to draw it a touch too small.

The shoulders, on the other hand, may be broad, about two to two and a half head-widths. This ratio – small head, broad shoulders – is read instantly by the eye as an adult human, even if the rest consists of just three strokes. The upper body tapers slightly towards the hips, the legs start off as two brisk lines that separate slightly at the bottom.

And now the most important part: no faces, no hands. A face on a two-centimetre figure always turns into a grimace, a hand always into a lump. Let the head stay a smooth shape and let the arms taper to a point. The viewer fills in the rest in her head, more reliably than you could ever draw it.

All heads at your eye level

This is the one trick that instantly places your figures in space. If you're standing while drawing, the heads of all standing adults lie roughly at your eye level – whether someone is five or fifty metres away. People further away get smaller, but they shrink from below: their feet move upwards towards the horizon, their heads stay on the same line.

At the beginning, feel free to draw this line very lightly right across the sheet, at the height of your eyes. Then place every figure so that its head touches this line, and vary only where the feet land. If you're sitting on a step or in a café, your eye level is lower – then the line cuts standing passers-by at about chest or shoulder height, and does so equally for all of them. The rule stays the same, only the intersection point shifts.

Movement arises from weight and tilt

A standing figure is symmetrical and boring. Walking people shift their weight: one leg carries, the other swings. This tips the hips upward on one side, and the shoulder line tips slightly against it. Deliberately draw these two lines not parallel but tilted slightly against each other – and suddenly the figure is standing in life rather than in a shop window.

Then there's the overall tilt. Someone walking leans minimally in the direction of travel, someone heading uphill leans considerably more, someone carrying a bag hangs towards the opposite side. An axis that isn't vertical is automatically read by the eye as movement. Exaggerate the tilt rather than setting it too timidly; on small figures a restrained angle gets lost in the tangle of strokes.

Groups are one shape, not many figures

Three people standing together aren't drawn as three separate individuals. Otherwise you end up with a fence of evenly spaced posts. See the group as a single silhouette: one continuous outline with two or three heads sticking out at the top and a few legs hanging out at the bottom. Within this shape you indicate with one or two hatching lines where one person overlaps another. Overlap is your best friend here, because it creates depth – avoid placing figures side by side with gaps between them.

Look for three seconds, then draw from memory

Passers-by don't wait. That's why glancing back and forth between subject and paper doesn't work here. Use your memory instead: pick a person, look at them intently for three seconds, memorise only the tilt, the stride and the outline – then look away and draw from memory. What you retain is precisely the essential; everything you forget you wouldn't have needed anyway. If the person is long gone, it doesn't matter. Your figure is finished.

Seated people in the café

Seated people are the easiest exercise of all, because the table hides half the problem. You draw the head, the shoulders, a suggested arm – and the whole construction of hips, legs and chair disappears behind the edge of the table. Just make sure the shoulders of seated people sit noticeably lower than those of the standing people in the background, at about two thirds of the standing height. And: seated people stay put for minutes, so you can take your time looking.

Exercise

Find a place with foot traffic: a station concourse, a market square, a pedestrian zone, or at a pinch a window above a busy street. Draw a light horizontal line across the sheet at your eye level. Set a timer for 10 minutes and draw 20 passers-by in that time, no more than 30 seconds per figure. Head on the line (or suitably lower if you're sitting), shoulder line, hips, two leg lines – no faces, no hands, no corrections. Whatever goes wrong stays as it is; you start the next figure beside it. At the end you'll have a sheet full of people and a feel for how little line is enough.