Art Lesson #29: Drawing People

Part One. We're going to spend a few weeks on this!

Several of you have said you want to get into adding figures to your sketches, but you’re intimidated by drawing people.

I get it! This is a thing we all get hung up on! You can make a building wonky, you can draw a lopsided tree, and it somehow looks okay. But when a person is a little off—if the head is too big or the legs are too short or the mouth is in the wrong place—it’s freaky and weird and throws us off.

So I’m going to show you how I add little figures to my sketches. By “little” I mean small, casually drawn human shapes that are just one more element in your drawing.

Such as:

Or maybe you want slightly more detailed figures, like these: