There is no recipe to successfully achieve this, just one big rule of thumb: how well you draw an emotion is related to how well you are able to stimulate that emotion in yourself, in other words to feel it as you draw and be aware of how you react to it – exactly as a convincing actor does. Similarly, we can feel many emotions at the same time, but the more numerous and/or contradictory they are, the more the face takes on an ambiguous mask as if they cancelled each other out. The diagram works much like a colour wheel: any two colours can be mixed, but if you mix too many of them, the result is an indefinable greyish hue. #Face expressions fullI tried to include many emotions that are complex yet often used, but by no means does this represent the full range of what a face can express. In this tutorial I discuss the parts of the face that change to express emotion, then go on to show how a wide range of facial expressions is achieved. In other words, an illustration needs to make up for real-life clues that are not present on paper. Just like theatre actors have to support their acting with more gesticulation and theatrical speech than usual, because "normal" facial expressions can't be easily seen by the audience, so do we have to bypass "what a sad face would look like" and aim for "what facial clues would be read as sadness". In drawing facial expressions one has to deal with the dichotomy of reality versus representation. A facial expression that is alive can make up for some weaknesses in proportions (partially because it will keep the eye from wandering away from the face!), but not the reverse – a character with a face like a wax mask is a turn-off. These are two massively important reasons why we should really work on this particular skill. The body expresses action, but the face is a window into someone's inner life, and the expression of this inner life in a character makes all the difference between a skilled, observant artist (or writer) and a wooden one. The human face ranks at the very top of the hierarchy of things the eye is immediately drawn to: if a face is visible in a given composition, the very first thing we look at is its expression. To anyone whose illustration work includes characters, facial expressions are like this computer monitor: if it doesn't work right, then all the brilliant engineering that went into building the hard drive is wasted.
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