Drawing People in Action: A Character Sketching Crash Course - with Marc Taro Holmes

I love drawing people. I actually think that I'm much better at it than at drawing buildings.

However, I am still stuck at making portraits, so Marc Taro Holmes' workshop on  how to draw people in action was absolutely fantastic.

Check out this link for a more detailed description of the lesson.

Standing in the middle of La Rambla, trying to sketch people as fast as possible was very challenging, specially in the beginning when still warming up.

However, gradually it stopped being stressful and started being just a lot of fun.

Marc had us first use a pencil to draw very general lines of our subjects and only later add ink and details.

People coming towards us : quick, there's no time to overthink it!

The last exercise consisted in choosing people doing one activity and sketching that, starting with pencil, then ink and finally adding colour. I chose these ice cream sellers.

Girls selling ice cream on La Rambla

The important thing I learned from Marc Holmes was that when sketching an event or action, I should focus on the action as such first and add details later - even if those details are taken from a different person. It's the action that counts.

I haven't practised this since I came back from Barcelona, but it's definitely an exercise I wish to repeat and improve on.