Learning to Draw Big, Complicated Scenes

Drawing is a hobby of mine. Like many people who draw casually, I often draw individual objects, such as people, animals, or artifacts. But drawing big, complicated scenes is something I've always wanted to do, and always admired in other artists.

Sergio Aragones is one of those artists. He's a cartoonist who worked for Mad magazine and made the comic book Groo the Wanderer. Here is one of his complicated scenes, but in Groo they could be even more epic.

But you can't get good at something without trying. Meetings are a great place to sketch, because it often does not require your full attention. You can listen and draw at the same time. Recently I bit the bullet and tried to draw a complex scene. Here's what I came up with:

What I thought I did well was that the perspective isn't terrible, and I made the buildings in the foreground darker than those in the background, a good trick for suggesting depth. I like how the park turned out. The perspective is basically isometric, though, where ideally there would be three point perspective. 

Moving on from this, I thought I needed to copy a photograph. I searched the internet's images for "busy market" and found this photograph:

Here is the sketch I made of it. I'm pretty happy with it, but when you're copying from a photograph many of the difficult elements are done for you. 

With hope I'll get better at making complex scenes straight out of my head. I want my drawings to be more like Sergio's, with his great coherence and imagination.

Got to keep practicing.