Drawing A Crowd - Christmas Style

Introduction

Well if you remember my Christmas Challenge posting from the other week well you're perhaps aware that I've not yet delivered anything on my promise. But, that's not to say I haven't been working on it. Of course life tends to get in the way but I have (honestly) been drawing a lot more again since I've been in better spirits. And true to my often supressed desires, there's a fair amount of detailed work gone into this one.

OK, I set the bar quite high for myself wanting to put my characters into a room full of Santas, but I wasn't quite sure how to go about it.

Don't Crowd Me!

The first thing you do is look to see how other people do crowds, but it soon became apparent that it wasnt a crowd that I wanted! Take a look at the following..

I found Tom Richmond's article which describes a common way to go about it. It is in this simple example just a sea of faces...

Constructing a crowd scene tutorial

It works quite well, but it just wouldn't work in my cartoon frame because the angle is wrong. Also I wanted to focus on what the crowd was wearing, the faces aren't actually that important. Anyway, have a read of the article because there's some interesting points that will help you get a more natural looking crowd (if that's the style you're after).

What I was actually after was a room of socialising santas with a smattering of elves, just to balance out the numbers. I was going to have to do it the hard way. So before I type much else I'll show you what I produced.

The completed crowd scene

Disecting the Scene

I know we all draw using layers, but it I think helps to considering the concept of simple layer elements as a solution before you start drawing. A bit vague?.. well hopefully this will make sense...

1. The obvious first layer is the foreground holding our two LGM characters dressed in their festive costume. This is the easy bit, it was simply a case of finding some old artwork and overpainting a santa suit and an elve outfit. (yes I'm recycling 😉)
2. The next layer back isn't quite so obvious, but it's all the other santas. It's built using a number of overlapping santas (I traced some from examples I found on the web) and added some of my own. I found that the further back examples only required a head or a hat to fill in the spaces, and it soon started to give the impression of a party. Finally to help establish perspective I added the tiled floor to help draw your eyes back and deepen the room.
3. Next step was to add the columns and the tree layer to balance out the top of the frame and establish a midrange backdrop. It also helps lend the idea that they're somewhere quite grandiose.
4. Finally after adding a graduated floodfill background, I traced a room outline and selectively thinned out and erased sections of line to reduce its impact. I only wanted it to suggest a shape, not take your attention.

Busy Busy Busy

The problem you can find with a busy image like this is your main characters from layer 1 can get lost in the santas in layer 2. I used two methods to help here...

1. Choose your positioning of santas in layer 2 so that nothing 'binds' with the details on layer 1. This is more of a problem with the LGM wearing the red outfit. I could have chosen to use more elves behind him, but I wanted the party to be composed primarily of santas. Keep them all on separate layers at first so you can keep moving them around and rescaling them as you build up the crowd.
2. Thicken the black outline on layer 1. I know it sounds a bit heavy handed (excuse the pun) but in practice it's just enough to help keep the two layers distinct.

Finally because this frame will be used for a cartoon, leave space (or keep detail minimal) for speech bubbles and logos. Here there is space top and bottom where nothing important would be lost.

Update: 28/12/2016 - http://area5-1.webcomic.ws/comics/55/