Something like a crowd scene... or city scene... or school cafeteria scene...

Like cmon. Drawing all those faces... being consistent with the perspective... thats difficult. :(

what i've learned in almost 3 years of college art classes is that the more time you spend on detailing something, the more you will like it, the more your audience will like it, and the happier everyone will be.

so be patient with it. with crowds, simplify lots of heads into small round shapes. the further something is away from you, the less detail is going to be important. adding too much detail into backgrounds will distract from the focus. a few times i have seen comic artists turn a crowded city street into vague shapes and lines behind the characters, ignoring the textures that can really distract from the real goings-on.

unless its like, a place-setting scene. then like i said, spend as much time as you can on making it pretty :) time is the main thing here.

I know what you mean, the arrangement of chairs and tables in something like a cafeteria scene is one of the toughest. The only way to fix it is take your comic 'on location' as it were, and draw that scene from life.

A little tip appropriated from art school - for life/observational drawing and perspective . . don't treat the room like a grid, don't use rulers or try to rationalize everything with arithmetic. Be honest and draw what you see, not what you think you see.

Actually, with complicated arrangements, I often do draw "what I think I see." Because that's how I would simplify shapes and shades, and make sense of them in my "mind's eye."

If you try to draw exactly what you see, often it comes out crappy because (1) you didn't try to devise a composition, (2) you're not a machine and can't draw what you see.

Maybe we have different definitions of "what you think you see."

Hmm, interesting . . But I don't think simplifying shapes is a 'think you see' at all! It's normal to pare down when planning out a complicated scene. All I meant was trying to avoid using your mind to rationalize subjects - an obvious example could be drawing a chair with 4 legs when you can only 'see' three.

Anyway, Terefore, another tip is to start with a big sketch of the whole composition (you're arriving at from life) indicating where everything is. Generally, it's difficult to fill in the details until you know the position of all those objects is right - so feel free to make lots and lots of lines, kind of like a series of corrections that eventually find the subject - to be erased later or worked into the drawing.