I’m a big fan of Marc Taro Holmes.  His precise and yet loose (how does he do that?) building drawings are a wonder to behold, at least for this street sketcher.  Marc works larger than I do, looser than I do, and a whole lot better than I do but I can’t get enough of his work.

His recent book, Urban Sketcher: Techniques for Seeing and Drawing on Location rests next to my butt location when I watch TV and while I’ve read it twice, I find myself flipping through it, studying the drawings, as my wife and I watch…yawn…American Idol.

But what I’m not, however, is a sketcher who searches out people to draw, attends life drawing classes, and the rest.  Sorry folks, but I find people boring.  Buildings are just cooler.  That said, when Marc, in conjunction with Craftsy, offered a course titled People in Motion I immediately signed up.  I was going to get to see Marc draw…yippee!

I’m really glad I did.  Marc is not only a great artist/sketcher, he’s a well-organized, articulate teacher with a willingness to provide lots of information in high-density form, showing you every step of his approach to drawing people.  People or xylophones, what Marc teaches in this class will help you draw them quicker and better.

He provides several ways of doing it but his primary method is a four-part approach.  I suspect that more often than not, Marc himself smushes the four parts together when he’s on the street sketching, but for learning what he’s thinking as he captures people dividing up the thought processes and results of them on paper, is an ideal way to get the points across.  And you know what?  Marc has even got me, yeah…go figure, ME interested in drawing people.

I encourage anyone who would like to capture ANYTHING quickly onto paper, to at least view the intro video of this course.  Better, just take the course.  It’ll be money well spent.