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Aug '22- 19
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@faisalhussein394 Epic! Love it.
I do the blank silhouette crowd too, but only for distant characters In general I just have deliberately messy lineart so I can fudge background details without it looking weird in contrast to foreground elements XD
@faisalhussein394 Oooooof my wrist hurts just looking at that :'D Please tell me you at least do copy-pasting for the people in the very distance XD
I understand why the crowds are at a distance, you want us to focus on the characters and it worked.
I have to be honest of how I draw that much crowd, I spent hours worth of a day or two for a "panel" and the only copy I did was the far distance of flags, spears, and soldiers that are far enough and that is only for battle scene.
As for the first picture of the crowds watching the caravan guards like some sort of a parade, I never manage to make a single duplicate. It's all different.
Despite my hands suffering from aches, It feels good once it's done.
It's more of a mindset than a trick in my case. I save crowd scenes for when I'm particularly stressed out and want to occupy my thoughts on something else, so drawing detailed images with non repetitive elements is perfect. I try to give every person a purpose, it's relaxing for me to draw this way.
Now, when the crowd is shown from a distance, I simplify and use only one color. I do some copy paste for scenes like this too.
Truthfully, the larger the crowd the more blurry they should be. You eye can't see large areas clearly, you have a depth of field to your sight. So if you are focused on a certain distance, the closer stuff and stuff farther away should be blurry. This is why CGI backgrounds in movies always look fake, the are in focus out to infinity. So as you go further out, less detail is the way to go. And remember as you move further out everything blue shifts. This is atmosphere discoloration. Hence turning farther away stuff to grey or grey blue will give you depth.
This is also easier on the eye, and allows you to focus on a part of the panel that is important while still conveying how large the picture is.
I don't know how helpful this is, but I 3D model my crowds! Lucky for me, all my characters wear the same uniform so I don't have to worry about them being dressed uniquely.
Here's an example of how I pose my crowds. I knew there were plenty of scenes that happen in the dining hall, so I prepared for it.
For shots like these where they aren't the main focus, I'll leave the models as is (I doubt anyone is really looking that closely) Most people will be looking at Anopheles in this shot.
For these shots where they're more visible, I draw on top of the 3D models to add detail. I'm planning on going back and refining some of these, but most people reading aren't gonna see how janky some of the faces look.
This kind of crowd shot is easy for me since I don't have to worry about facial expressions or poses.
That's not technically true. It depends on a couple factors.
If you're talking about film or photos, focal distance is directly related to the f-stop setting and your lens length. If you're talking about a photo of something more than a couple feet away, a camera can easily pull the entire image into focus with f-stop and focal length adjustments. When you get closer than that it gets harder, that's why macro photography has such a thin strip of focus. For crowds however, you're usually talking about distances of 20-30 feet or more if the shot is from above the crowd. Within that distance it would be possible to adjust the f-stop to increase the amount of DOF blur for the effect you're talking about, but beyond a certain distance that's not feasible anymore.
Similarly, our eyes are only so far apart, so it becomes almost impossible to judge depth beyond 30-40 feet or so. If you're focused on something that far out everything else will also be in focus. Unless your eyesight is terrible. I remember thinking about that the last time I went skydiving. After the plane was out of sight it felt like I was falling into a flat picture because everything was so far away. If it wasn't for the wind and the man strapped to my back it would have felt like I was floating in a panorama.
Here are a few crowd shots from recent Heaven Hunters issues. You can see how beyond a certain depth the figures tend to get simplified just because I don't have enough pixels to really show that level of detail, particularly in the first one.
Think of it like LOD levels in a video game. The lowest LOD level always looks like garbage, but that's ok since it's going to be so small on the screen that no one will notice. It's also helpful to have a really clear focal point in your shot to pull the readers eyes away from where you cut corners. I think physical media has a production edge here just because physical pens can only go so small, and you can't zoom in really, so there's not going to be as much drift in the amount of detail you're willing to put in. When you do a whole bunch of figures in a crowd you develop muscle memory, and then drawing those little faces or the little hands is about as hard as signing your name.
If you want my advice, I'd recommend just knuckling down and putting the work into your crowds, particularly if they're supposed to be the focal point of your panel. Your readers will notice!
That reminds me; I've found drawing background details far less daunting once I decided to ink with a constant line weight of 5px, because the thickness of the brush kind of puts a limit to how much detail I can put in Before, I was always worried about making my distant backgrounds accurate and my drawings would always feel incomplete unless I got into really fine details on a pixel-by-pixel level :'D
Since mine is done digitaly, I typiccly just like to make a shadowy figure, and duplicate it several times over. It's not really great for colored pictures, but I think the atmosphere and tone of my comic helps make it blend just a bit better. Also, this is an older drawing, and nowadays I'd put a lot more effort into actually layering and sizing everything properly.
In this scene, in particular, I made only the front row have eyes, kept the figures in the second row extremly plain, and the back is just a long rough shape of the same color.
Also, when it comes to animals, and because my art work is digital, I can just duplicate the same more detailed thing over and over again. Because THIS particular scene is in an underground burrow, I was also able to darken them as they got further away.
Here, minewhile, I tried to be a bit clever when it came to cutting corners. These are all corpses that are months old, and were all buried together, so I figured that since they're decaying, their more unique features are going to be gone by now, and when it comes to funeral suits, why do they need to be so unique and distinct? Even the body position could remain the same, because it's a standard way people are buried.
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