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 iâm rly glad it shows in my work! i donât think thereâs anything i could tell you that you wouldnât be able to learn from online tutorials, but iâd 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 itâs not even for art, sometimes iâll rewind a video a few times if my brain latches onto a good expression, itâs like coco melon to me lmao
intentionally or not, i can usually tell where i âsourceâ my expressions from, like muscle memory or artists that subconsciously make the same face that theyâre drawing
^ itâs practically a hobby in itself
expressions = personality. it gives character and context to your subject, and itâs always personal. whenever i struggle to draw someoneâs face, chances are itâs bc the expression doesnât feel âin-character.â 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 âget to know a characterâ before i can draw them. if i donât have a sense of their personality, even just visual personality, then i wonât feel like i have the tools to properly portray the character
a lot of ppl already understand the concept of âhe would not fucking say that,â and the same thing applies to art. two characters shouldnât have perfectly interchangeable styles of expression. if they mind-swapped, you should be able to know just by looking at them. âhe would not fucking smile like that.â
^ 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. iâll 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 charactersâ faces alone, no dialogue needed
for more tangible advice, you can put this into practice by just copying other pplâs 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 couldâve 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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