hello mx toy, i was wondering, howd you get good at drawing faces and expressions? your expressions are some of my favorite parts of your art!
wow, tysm!! :D facial expressions are one of my fav things ever, so i’m rly glad it shows in my work! i don’t think there’s anything i could tell you that you wouldn’t be able to learn from online tutorials, but i’d be happy to take advantage of this opportunity to infodump give you my thought process ^__^
in the same way that art is more observation than drawing, i love looking at expressions and saving a mental roster of faces from characters/irl to mirror. hell, sometimes it’s not even for art, sometimes i’ll rewind a video a few times if my brain latches onto a good expression, it’s like coco melon to me lmao
intentionally or not, i can usually tell where i “source” my expressions from, like muscle memory or artists that subconsciously make the same face that they’re drawing
^ it’s practically a hobby in itself
expressions = personality. it gives character and context to your subject, and it’s always personal. whenever i struggle to draw someone’s face, chances are it’s bc the expression doesn’t feel “in-character.” most emotions are universal to some degree, but the way those emotions are expressed is unique to the individual. every character has their own style of emoting, which is why i have to “get to know a character” before i can draw them. if i don’t have a sense of their personality, even just visual personality, then i won’t feel like i have the tools to properly portray the character
a lot of ppl already understand the concept of “he would not fucking say that,” and the same thing applies to art. two characters shouldn’t have perfectly interchangeable styles of expression. if they mind-swapped, you should be able to know just by looking at them. “he would not fucking smile like that.”
^ dif or simplistic art styles, but still signature expressions
additionally, expressions = storytelling. i tend to plan out comics by drawing expression thumbnails before anything else bc the emotion is the first thing we recognize in a given exchange. i’ll usually already have a script written out by the time i put pencil to paper, but the most important part when transforming my scripts into actual panels is capturing the Feeling (which is why my first drafts are so rough lol)
it kinda ties back into the personality thing: if you rly know your characters, you can portray them at their barest essentials, even as stick figures. body language is such an effective form of communication that you can even tell a story thru the characters’ faces alone, no dialogue needed
for more tangible advice, you can put this into practice by just copying other ppl’s expressions. i feel like i learn best when i do redraws, but i try to copy the feeling rather than the exact expression, looking at the emotion rather than the individual lines creating them, and then build off of it:
this def could’ve been shorter, but i love thinking abt this kind of thing. thanks for giving me the chance to talk abt it!
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