How to draw tons of humans?

[nekoendy]

I find panels with lots of humans extremely hard to draw, even if everything else is relatively easy (trees, houses, birds, mountains, clouds...).
For example, I have this scene at the gate of a camp, where pretty much all warriors from the inside of the camp gather just to get killed and never appear again lol.
It's just weird to draw void silhouettes without identity, still painfully giving an identity to such low-importance characters seems like a waste of time.

[DualDragons]

I'd still draw them if I had a scene like that. Not sure what the goal of your killing scene is, but giving those characters some identity and killing them seems more impactful to me. Because then they'd seem like actual people with your own identity as you said. People you and I might relate to. And when those people are killed then it has the potential to make an impact, possibly leading to a 'oh shit!' moment from readers.

It's really the payoff of the scene I'm talking about here. It will be a lot of work but it will pay off more than having silhouettes of anonymous people getting slain. Because then it is harder for people (atleast for me) to connect with them and care for them and the scene.

I'd advise to still draw them, but it's up to you really.

[faisalhussein394]

Every time I want to draw a large group of people, I have to search and see a picture of crowds or scene from movies, comics like these:

Just looking at this angle helps me draw better and understand certain distance.

[TheLemmaLlama]

When you draw tons of anything (humans, trees, houses, mountains), the reader is going to lose most of the detail anyway, so it's not really worth detailing every single unit. Maybe give some details to some humans in the foreground, but otherwise start by thinking of the crowd as a blob/monolith, and then gradually refine it to look like a blob of humans (as opposed to a blob of something else). If you try to draw each individual human separately from the get go, you're gonna have a bad time!

[powerplantanimations]

I'll take this as a moment to try and innovate. Something that'll help your comic standout. Maybe do something thematic? What you're trying to say about warriors and war? Why they're faceless and all that? Maybe they seem faceless the first time we see them, but when a character says a name or something or learns more about this particular character, the character is no longer a silhouette.

[redfish]

vague sillhouettes can be done right
it is a good idea to maintain focus on what's important on the page vs the background people
I highly recommend Shillin. They're hella talented. I've linked a couple of comic pages which features a lot of background people constantly
black and white comic example https://tapas.io/episode/2399207
colour comic example https://tapas.io/episode/1412504

[Legendofgenii]

Maybe something like this, where they just become simple shapes at the back? (Image from Google).

I’d draw a few people at the front in detail - show their emotions with what’s about to happen, as that would make for a powerful image.

[Awesomeness_Studios]

When in doubt: make a custom digital brush for crowds

[river121693]

I dont think you should think about it as low importance characters dont deserve details. Rather, your comic deserves good art. Simplified human figure is its own important skills too, so I think its worth practicing.

You could use action, composition and layering tricks to keep reader focus on some characters, and transition everything else to vague figures/silhouette. For example, draw a detailed figure of 2 men fighting in the foreground, while in the background, people are less detailed and silhouettes.

This is a panel from my comic. The people in the foreground are the point of focus. Still a lot to draw, but it means everyone in the back are just vague shapes. For most of the back, I drew a few figures and just copy and paste them into different rows. I gradually changed each row's opacity to fade them out. I also layered in some smoke to obscure them even more which helps create depth too.
Also, i planned my comic so that this is one of the important panel so I can spend more time working on it.

[system]

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