How to Draw Expressions - The Evil Grin - Comic Character Design Class

1. Introduction to this Class: Hello, everyone. My name is Robert Marzullo, and welcome to my class on Drawing Expressions. Expressions can be tricky to do with a lot of variations and different decisions to make along the way. It's my goal in this class to simplify it for you and show you that there's a lot of basic shapes that you can utilize to make the process much easier. After we cover the primary expressions, I'm going to get into a project file with you where we start with a structure based approach, talk about the simple shapes and patterns to look for, and then show you how that structure makes the rest of the process much easier to accomplish and how it allows us to see and edit the work more effectively. By the end of this, you'll have a completed project file that you can share with the class. I would love to see it. And please let me know what you think of the content so I can improve it for everyone. So thank you very much for considering my class. Good luck with the art, and bye for now. 2. Basic Expressions Practice: Alright, welcome back. So the first thing I want to get into is the idea that you can really simplify expressions. So expressions, there's so much to cover, right? There's the way that the face pulls on certain areas, the different muscle groups. I mean, you get into it. It gets super complex. But we have to also remember that it all starts kind of here. Right? That conveys an expression all by itself. And this is where cartooning is so powerful, right? So I love paying attention to cartoons. I love watching them with my son and really seeing how they convey expression and storytelling through the various simplified and sometimes more complex versions of three D characters and things like that. But it's all interesting stuff, and a lot of times, it can be related down to very simple steps. So what we're going to do for this particular exercise is just practice drawing some very simple mannequins. So we're going right for shape based drawing of the head, mainly because this will allow us to just zero in and focus on just the expression. So it doesn't need to be some perfect shape. You see, mine's not. I've got an ear there in place. I've got a center line. I've got a spherical like shape for the top of the head and elongated head and a pointed chin down here. And again, whatever style you want to do we want to hurry up and get to the actual expression so that we can convey this in simplistic terms. So with this one, I'm just going to go for a neutral position. So draw a cross section where the brow will go. Again, position isn't a big deal. It's entire lap to you here. And then I'm going to put a little upside down triangle for the bottom of the nose, and then for a neutral look, I'm just going to put a line across and a line below that, which will sort of or almost a little mini pocket shadow, which will sort of convey a bottom lip. Then for this area, I like to drop in circles most of the time, not always. But what's kind of funny about this is if you just drop in two circles and two lines like this, I love doing it. It's like this really blank expression. In fact, a lot of times, what you'll see in a lot of cartooning is they'll purposely go, pretty heavy eyebrow and two little dots. And it's almost funnier like that, right? It's very blank expression. And they'll do that sometimes in juxtaposition or contrast. To having normally their eyes might be like this, and then all of a sudden they blank out and they just put the pupils. And I think that's just a really kind of comedic approach to it. But anyways, that might just be my interpretation of it. So essentially, again, just focus on drawing, and they don't have to be spherical, you know, some eyestyles are more like this, right? But just keep in mind that if you typically narrow the eyes, it can almost look a little bit like they're squinting. So we'll get into some of that expressiveness, as well. There's a lot that goes on with the eyes, obviously. But for this one, we'll just go like this. So here and here. And so a very neutral expression. And that's it. Like, essentially, we want to get in, get out. I shouldn't even refine it so that you can see that a lot of this works in a very simplified manner, and that's sort of the beauty of it. And what's great is that you can jump over these and render and stylize and do all your fun stuff on top. And it just works because you did the groundwork of a basic expression. So play around with head shapes. You don't need to make them all look like the same character unless, you know, it's a goal of yours. And so now for the next one, let's also tilt the head back because I'm going to do a surprised expression. And so when you do this, you might also want to generally want to show it with body language as well. There's a lot of gesture and just the orientation of the head and relationship to the body. That's actually why I want to go and place. Next in here just because, again, the relationship of the head to neck will sort of reinforce that gesture, right? So with this one, we're going to tilt it back. Again, simple head shape. We don't have to get into the full Andrew loumus method for these. And then for the brow line, so this is something to consider is that the brow line is typically halfway down from the top of the head to the bottom of the chin, right? But in a more caricaturized or cartoon state or a more expressive state, you tend to want to stretch this a little bit. I do anyways. I'm going to bring that brow line up pretty high because for one, the head is tilted up. Now, you see there's a lot of distance here from that brow line to the chin, much more than normal, if you again, study the Andre Lums method or some of the stuff I've taught on drawing heads. But the reason being is we're actually sort of getting ready to add more space for the open mouth. I'm just going to draw this sort of lamp shade kind of shape, very simplified, obviously, bottom of the nose, again, that upside down triangle. And so, and for the eyes, again, I'm going to drop in some circles, the eyeballs. But, you know, you got to think that every time you go to draw around these, you're changing the skin around them, right? The eyes are always the same, the eyeball shapes are always the same. But you're going to do very different versions of so open expression, you're going to bring that eyelid way up on the top portion of that sphere. Bottom eyelids, I don't think move a whole lot, but, you know, again, in cartooning and drawing, you can definitely do whatever you want. Generally, you're going to show the iris in full view. But again, I'm just pointing out that when you go to draw the eyelids, you're going to maneuver those accordingly. Now, for the expression here, if this is surprised or even somewhat fearful, we just put those eyebrows you know, I like to put a couple little quick angles there, but you see how simple they are and just like that. And so, again, as I draw around this, I would actually leave most of these eye shapes in plain view. And you can even do tiny little pupils, right? There's all sorts of things you can do there to add to this. I'll stop right about there because it's you start to see so much is conveyed with just a few simple lines, it sort of encourages you to do the rest of it. Like, it feels like just the right approach. And generally when you're on the right approach, it gets easier, almost like you start feeling like you're working in a downhill forward motion that's kind of hard to walk away from. So just like when you get a really good thumbnail sketch, you just immediately feel energized, right? You want to do more to it. For the next one, we'll do a little bit more of an angry kind of look So we'll tilt the head down. You can start the cross section of the face. You see, I'm just sort of grabbing whatever area and building out from it, because I'm not so awfully critical right now of the initial head shape. So I know they're not perfect, but then, again, is anything ever truly perfect? I don't think so. So, something like that. And so now if we're going for that sort of sinister look, we know that immediately the eyebrows are pointed downward. Lots of expressiveness to the eyebrows. Here, we will do something a little bit more sort of squinted for the eyes. So I'm just going to do, like, a straight top eyelid, a little roundedness to the bottom, and that's it. Again, there's that bottom of that nose. And then, you know, lots of things you can do here. So if you really push those eyebrows down in the middle like that, really compress them down, then you already got anger, right? But then if you put a smile, it's almost like maniacal or somebody like the joker who's, you know, kind of crazy. Like a lot of times when you have a mixed expressions, they come across as crazy, right? Like, if you have something that's angry eyes with a smile, sort of a psycho kind of look, or maybe a bad joke, I don't know. I guess it depends on the story. But then if you have them grinting or grimacing, I never know how to really explain that one. But, you know, this kind of gnashing teeth kind of look. And they're just, like, you know, mad and showing anger and disgust. So there's different ways to really think about this one. I'll go and place a smile one for now. It's kind of more fun. But that's another thing. We'll get into that a little bit in more detail of where mixing them up really, you know, gives you a bit of a lot more variety, really, to your characters, a lot better storytelling. There's so many subtleties in the expressions, but for this one, we'll just do the mad, crazy look. Not not real happy with that particular drawing, but it gets the job done. Alright, so for the next one, and I'll try a little bit more of a feminine head shape. So for this one, I'll go more rounded, a little bit of a pointed chin, that kind of oval, a tapered oval kind of look. Almost looks like I'm just drawing a balloon, right? If I go like this, I got a balloon. And then drop the ears in, even though there's no real expressiveness to the ears, but they're great placeholders for the rest of it. So eyebrows up here. Start with some big kind of cartoon like eyes, tiny little tiny little nose, and we'll get that smile in first, since it's really the most important part of a happy expression. And obviously, you've got variations here. It can be open mouth, top teeth. It can be all teeth. It can be bottom teeth, top, there's just a few different variations. Everybody smiles a little different. You've got the ear to ear grin, and then you've got just a smirk. So lots of subtleties that you can get into there. And then the eyebrows back, you know, without doing that extra little thing like this, as soon as you add that, it almost feels like they're like, smiling, but it's more like unsure of something. But if you just tilt them back like this, it generally is a more welcoming appearance. And you can't put the eyes totally in the middle. I guess you can, but I generally don't usually balance it out with a somewhat relaxed expression. So, for instance, if the top eyelid covers the iris just a little bit, it's usually a relaxed position. As soon as we start seeing white on both sides of the iris, like, we can do that over here with the fear expression. That's generally what it shows is that they're in such an extreme alarmed kind of eye opening experience that they're trying to take in all the surrounding fear. And danger. So we don't want that something a little more relaxed. I think there's a little bit to be said for the size of the pupils. I think typically bigger pupils look more relaxed, but I think that just varies certain people, you know, as far as pupil size, and then obviously, light, you know, there's a connection to the way that we take in light through the eyes and our people's dilate, things like that. But generally, I go for a little bit bigger peopleils. And actually, that didn't quite come out like I thought either. But again, this is a little bit of just messing around. I really feel like just the nose is too close to the mouth, so be careful of that. But yeah, you can play around with all sorts of variables after the fact. So that gives us a few to start with. I'm going to stop here. I don't want the lessons to get too awfully long, and hopefully it'll give you a chant in between lessons to practice, what we're talking about here, draw a few variations of each, whatever makes you feel comfortable with this approach. And you can let me know if you have any questions at any particular instance of this class, and I'll do my best to help you out. Thanks so much. Let's continue on to the next lesson and see what we come up with. 3. More Basic Expressions: And welcome back. So for the next one, we're going to go ahead and do something like on an angle, draw spherical shape, whatever jaw line you like. And we're going to make this guy really angry, kind of yelling. So something to consider here is the upper part of the head, right? Is a simplified skeleton, you can't tell. And so you get your ocular cavities there, but you got your top of your skull. This is going to stay stationary, but the more we have the character yell, we need to consider that that bottom jaw drops, right? Slants a little bit. In the big heroesque tough guys, you know, you can still get away with a more squared off approach to the jaw line for something like this. But it's just something to consider. And see, this is where it gets tricky, too, because some of this overlaps or it all overlaps really dramatically on knowing facial anatomy. So we'll get into a little bit of that, as well, but Again, I don't want to overcomplicate it too much. I want to try to simplify it for you. Just consider that there's a pivot point right here under the ear. So wherever you place that ear, remember what I said about the ear being a great placeholder? Well, this is another one for you. That pivot point is right there, right? And so when it drops down like that, it doesn't drop down like this. It drops down and back. You know, hinges. It's a hinging point. So just consider that, and the rest just sort of stretches away from that, really. So, you know, your top skull is stationary. So knowing that, again, hopefully that didn't confuse you too much, we'll drop in the downward area to the brows. And then for the forehead, you actually have the corrugator muscle which compresses the eyebrows and will give you these vertical wrinkles that you'll see with anger right through the middle of the forehead there. So you don't necessarily have to learn the anatomy terms, but I find it to be a little bit helpful here and there. But then you have depressor ones which make your frown on the side of your face. So it is helpful to look at those anatomical breakdowns here and there. Don't expect to get it all at once. I think that's a bit cumbersome of an approach, but it is kind of neat to start picking up on little ones here and there as you go. There's a lot of relationships that are that make sense based on other things you might have already studied, like the zygomatic bone goes up over the ear, while the muscles there are in relation to that. I think they're called zygomatic, something major and minor. But again, some of it will start to make sense just based upon previous relations you might have made from drawing the skull, and I explained some of that in the head drawing course. So if you haven't taken that, check it out if you need to. Ah, so again, with the expression here, mouth open, you know, eyes compressed downwards, squinting of the eyes. See, I drew those in like little slivers and maybe some wrinkles, you know, radiating from that compression area right there, and that's really it. So it's not as expressive as we could really make it. We could take this and break up all this kind of skeletal structure stuff. But yeah, we could definitely take this a lot further, right? So you can draw the tongue too. That kind of adds a little bit of expressiveness to something like this, I think. But we could definitely take that a lot further. So we could really stretch that expression. I need to fix that chin right there. It came off the the right point there, something like that. And again, pretty crude, but hopefully it gets the point across and gets you rolling with the concepts. So let's go ahead and bring that guy over. I know we're going to get into ones where we draw some of these in more detail so that I can, you know, explain some of the minutia in the process for refinement and, you know, getting into something. That you can utilize more effectively. So now, another one with happy is sort of like over the top happiness, laughter, extreme laughter, things like that. So let's draw the head tilting back. So again, that expressiveness that you get from just the relationship of the head to the neck or the head to the viewer, really. Like, so the head is rotated back, or laughing up in the air hysterically. And so, again, just that orientation of the head can sort of reinforce the expression that we're going for. Just a big open mouth smile, so I'll start there, mainly because two, I don't know if I alluded to this before, but when you have the expression that's most dominant, it's almost like anything else that you draw, where if something's the most dominant or a strong focal point or closer to the viewer, things like that, it almost makes sense to kind of start with it. And I think with expressions, it really matters because, again, what are you trying to convey in this? What's the most important piece of the puzzle? Well, to me, I want the attention to be there, and I can work out from there. So that's my thought process, anyways. Not sure if that applies to everybody, but we'll say it does. And so the bottom of the nose, I'm actually going to take that same shape, and I'm just going to rotate it. I say that we're looking up at the character. You're seeing some of the bottom plane change of the nose. And then for the eyes, you know, you can start with a curvature for the feeling that we're looking up at the eyes. They're now rounding back instead of, you know, if you look at this guy, they're rounding down, right? So head tilted back, you know, we have to sort of reverse that. They're rounding down. And then if you go with open eyes, it's, you know, it's one way to do it. And then, you know, eyebrows tilted back. And then if they're really pretty, you know, hysterical or whatever, you know, laughing pretty heavily, they're probably going to squint their eyes. You'll see that in a lot of cartooning, right? So their eyes are closed, they're laughing so hard. A little bit of squinting. And the same thing, I would say the eyebrows tilted back. Well, let's test it. So if we take those eyebrows and we point them down, now now it's a mixed emotions and, again, sort of kind of a crazy look, maybe a mean laugh. But I don't picture you squint your eyes and laugh and eyebrows down. I just feel like this makes a lot more sense. So let's try that. Now, obviously, you could put wrinkles on top of the brow, as well. We'll get into that later. But again, we want to keep this pretty simple. But that right there, to me, does the trick. And again, less is more. So we'll just stop right there, even though it's again, forgive me. I know these are rough, but hopefully they're conveying the information they need to. So the next one, let's do sort of depression or sadness, what do we got? We've got, I guess we don't have that. So let's do that. So we'll draw this cross character. You know, the head could be pointed down. Now, obviously a lot of body language with this, when you get into the full gesture of the body, slumped shoulders, right, just you can bring the body inward, so the arms, everything. I know it's deviating from the face here, but just something that I can throw in while I'm getting this head shape is that you can really convey sadness all throughout the body, the way that the arms would be maybe wrapped inward and more, you know, nestled into one's self versus generally with confidence and excitement, you'll see arms open, a nice wide body posture. So just things to consider when you get to that part. But for this part, going to downslope the eyebrows, something like that. Uh, is some expressiveness to the nose, the nostrils, basically. But we'll get into that later when we're doing more refinement, because I think that goes more into the facial anatomy, the superficial skin folds and all that. But there is some of that. And it's a lot more noticeable in the eyes and mouth, obviously. So the mouth, you know, depressor, depressed kind of look, I think it's kind of crazy, too, that the muscle in here somewhere, and I'll point it out later is the depressor. And I just never realized that's in relationship to the depressed expression, makes total sense, right? So you also get pull or fold to the skin, not on everybody. You know, kids are obviously going to be a little bit less likely to have this as noticeable. Elderly people, you're going to see it very noticeable. But it sort of happens in the more extreme poses anyways, because if you really pull down on this area, it tends to pull away from the nose, which is more stationary. So it's just kind of good to get that in there, I think. And then eyebrows slope downward. Again, you can put a little bit of, like, pinching up here. Because they're pulling down, and there's, again, that stationary point where the skin just sort of folds because that's all it can do. And so for the eyes, you know, you can do a wide eyed expression, but then just slope down the sides of them. You know, there's a lot you can get away with with the eyes here for this type of look. And then you can reinforce this. I mean, it really doesn't matter at this point, I guess, but if you have the eyes looking up, you get one kind of look to it. You know, maybe they're looking up at somebody. And so this is kind of neat, I think, because what happens is it sort of shows when somebody's depressed or they're being reprimanded or something or whatever, typically will turn their body, their head away, and look back with their eyes. It's almost like a physical gesture of, I don't really want to be here. I'm trying to get I'm trying to turn away as it is. So you can show that looks like that. Another thing is just to make no eye contact at all. I just look down. Or they're looking down and going, Oh, I just dropped my car keys in that storm drain. That's a really bad day. Who knows? But all sorts of narrative you can come up with that helps you draw, hopefully. I like to always make up stories as I draw. So there's that. So there's the really sad and you can get into wrinkles around the eyes, all sorts of stuff there. But, again, we're gonna get into that a little bit later. Okay, so enough depressive sadness. Goodness. I end up with the blues after this one. So I also want you to practice mixing a lot of this stuff up. So again, that's really where you're going to get variety. Pinchers is a great place. Go and pull, like, a bunch of different images of different expressions and practice these simplified breakdowns of them. Again, keep the shape simple. Don't get too caught up in fixing everything. Volume, I think, is better in this particular instance. And then, so what you want to also practice is you get a little bit more storytelling out of this or probably a lot more storytelling out of this when you start to mash them up a little bit more, and you get a little more versatility. So it's like instead of, like, the real major ones of mad, sad, everybody's mad or sad and every shot, it really drains the potential of the story, right? But if you take and you say, Okay, well, this guy's, like, got that kind of calm, you know, slick demeanor or maybe he's up to no good, and it's, like, a sly little look back. You know, it's getting in these mix of emotions that I think makes the characters look a lot more believable and alive. So with this one, I'm going to put one eyebrow down, one up. The smart Alec kind of look. And then I'll have them looking back but I'm just going to put the more narrow eyes, a little bit of a squint going on there. And then a nose is a nose. And then a smirk so that, you know, just to one side as well. Like, again, you play around with say, Oh, you know, maybe I want a full on grind with this type of eyebrow look or eye expression. And again, over and over, you just mix up all the different possibilities, the eye placement, and maneuver that around. You know, remember, some of these wrinkles and lines serve the expression, but if you add too many, you're gonna change the age of the character. So you got to sort of be a strategic with those, I guess. But just something like that. See it just looks like it's kind of smirking and its it just gives you more range of storytelling, I think. So we'll go ahead and stop here, practices, really, you know, get a nice variety of them, play around with different head shapes, keep things nice and simple. I'll give you some samples to work with. I'll clean this up or, you know, make more examples if need be, and let me know if you have any questions. So with that, let's move on to our next lesson. 4. Basic Structure of the Head: Okay, so now I'm going to break one of these down for you step by step, and hopefully this will give you more examples of how to draw the facial anatomy in relationship to the expression. So with this one, we're going to start with a downward tilt to the head. You start more spherical up here. Slice off the sides and get this vertical line. I know it's at an angle, but that's vertical, then horizontal, and then bring that over for the brow line. And then for the front of the face, I'm just going to draw in a big plane shift like this. If you thought of the face as one big rectangle. And so, really, you have this temporal ridge which you generally will draw another oval around this oval and then sort of relate that so it's not so, you know, flat to the side, then flat to the face. You need a transition, right? So this sort of gives you that transition along with the zygomatic bone. But again, we want to keep this super simple for the most part. So even though the Androumus method is very repeatable and very structurally sound, it's just a great series of tasks there to get to what you need, we want something relatively simple here for this exercise today. So it tends to lead to a little bit more caricaturized drawing if you do this anyway. And this is even pretty structured, really. I mean, you can definitely use less than this if you want. And then the ever important center line, I find that to be important and almost if not almost everything, everything I draw. So we're also going to do a little bit of relationship to the neck just because it gives us that sort of foundational or relationship to what the head is actually doing versus a blank bit of canvas there. No, just something like that. Doesn't need to be much. So there we go. So there's our base structure. Yours doesn't have to look like this. You can try very different proportions if you want. It's totally up to you. I just, you know, sort of fits what I'm getting ready to go for. So my goal for this one is to show you sort of a villainous, maniacal smile, sort of the madman type character. Okay, so now to quickly drop in a bit of this expression. And so for this, I want to get the eyebrows, in a downward compressed motion or expression, I don't know about a motion, I guess if you got really quick eyebrows. And so some of those wrinkles there for the eyes, as I mentioned before, I generally like to start with spherical, you know, circles, spherical circles. Just place the eyeballs. Always helps me to feel out that area. And then I'm going to give this dastardly character, like, the bigger hook nose. Remember, you can, a lot of time just start with that shape at the bottom and then build out from there. I usually find that to be easier. So maybe try that. Uh, but there's also a lot to be said for getting the mouth in rather quickly, as well, because a lot's going to sort of happen from this. So remember what I said about the biggest part of an expression being kind of paramount in the design. Well, if they've got, like, a big joker like smile, then it makes sense that you want to get that in pretty early on. I mean, there's always a relationship of the nose and the top lip. Like, the distance is pretty important. As soon as you get that wrong, it generally will look odd. But it's more or less, I think that the relationship of, in this case, that structure will need to be adjusted because, again, if we talk about that pivot or that hinge beneath the ear and this lower jaw dropping, it generally isn't going to drop like this unless you've got a serious underbite. Some characters will. I guess that's going to look pretty cool, right? Or to consider that most of the time it's going to do a little bit more of that, which means this bottom chin area, I'll just represent it with an oval here. Isn't probably going to line up to the center line. It's probably going to need to tuck back at least a little bit. So you'll see as we refine that, that's something that has to happen there. So I'm going to draw a little bit of the face because what it does, it allows me to check sort of where I'm going with this. So again, if I went off just that previous structure, I would continue with this sort of rectangular straight alignment going downward, sort of like legos, like one piece, another piece, another piece. And I would end up with a chin way out to here. So that's not what I want. I have to remember to push this back. So again, thinking about the mouth as you do this is part of that process. Like, you just have to kind of build it all out. And something I always tell people is if you can think of all of this, like clay, it sort of opens up your mind to this being a malleable surface, something that you can push and pull and poke and prod and play around with. And because of that, there's all sorts of cool possibilities. But if you go into with too much of a rigid way of thinking, then, you know, less options, right? Less potential possibilities and too much right and wrong thinking can slow up your creativity. So I'm going to bring that chan back. I probably need to bring it back a little bit more, but now you can see that center line. You should end up with, I guess, especially at an angle view like this, there should be more of a narrow space on one side and more distance on the other to show that we are at an angle to the view of this character. So I think that's starting to work. I think that once we place the eyes, you know, the eyelids, it'll make more sense. So I think this is going in the right direction. I like to put a little oval for the tip of the nose. And I'll probably even keep pushing this back because you can probably notice I'm trying to do is find out how far I can really push this back. And sometimes it's a matter, too, of shifting even what you started on one side of past the center line. Kind of like what I just mentioned with the chin, but I'm seeing it right here. So I'm going to edit that just because I want you to know, I want this to come out nice so that you understand that you can really zero in on certain elements of a face and get more out of it. So I think that part of the problem here is that I have that circle too much in plain view. In fact, a lot of times we might need to move these circles around just a little bit. So let me show you that. Makes a big difference on the overall expression because eyes are we're used to looking at eyes. And so it can look odd if you put an eye. So on an angle view, if you put an eye way out here, and then you show the full encompassing area of the eye, the eyelids, it looks kind of odd, right? Something almost tells us, Won't that be nestled into that eye cavity a little more? So I think that's where I went wrong. And so, again, I just want to correct that as we go here. So hopefully, see what I mean? I don't want to give you bad examples. And likewise, we take all this cheekbone and everything. We kind of push that back in further. Even if it is a person that has pretty defined cheekbones. So, again, a lot of times it's being aware of how much you see from the point of the center, the medial line of the head outward. I think that's going to work a little bit better. I don't know if you can see the difference there, but I feel like I can see it there. So let's try that. Because a lot of times it's getting the right start to these basic concepts and shapes, and then all the other details work out better. And I think that's why it takes a lot of practice, a lot of trial and error before you really start to pick up on this. And that's why certain artists, it just looks like their characters look so much more believable, but it's actually small little shifts like that that can make a pretty significant difference. So there we go. So now we have a bit more the base shapes in place. And again, I could keep maneuvering this. I feel like I can nudge the shape of the teeth back just a little bit more. You see, I'm constantly playing with just the spot or not just spot, this basic setup right here. And as I get more and more confident with it, I can get rid of some of these construction lines that sort of aren't as necessary at this point. Also, you got this masseter muscle, so you can bring out that and the jaw right there if you want. And you also get well, I'll show you in the next part where we draw the actual skin folds and more of the facial anatomy as it relates to this. So the main part of this one is just really zero in on the use of these basic shapes as building blocks. So again, circles for the eyes, and then really kind of pinpoint the placement of them, I would go for the shadow under the nose versus the nose shape. I mean, you can think of the nose shape as a big triangle, but I think it's easier just to do the shadow underneath and then the overall shape of the opening of the mouth. Not even the teeth. You know, the teeth is the next stage. And there's lots of variation there. You can do upper teeth, just lower teeth. We're going to do a closed teeth grin, but there's, obviously a lot of variation there. But just it shapes like that is sort of something that you can simplify in your mind and really, you know, really zero in on, basically. So we're going to stop here, get this right, play around with your adjustments, take your time with it. Again, any questions? Let me know. And then let's head over to the next lesson, and I'll show you how to refine the anatomy of this space over top of the structure that we've built thus far. So with that, let's move on to the next lesson. 5. Refining the Expression: And welcome back. So now we're going to do is focus on redrawing through this. So all the structure is in place. We've got lots of building blocks, initial layout to work with. And so I can soft eraser this. I'm just using a big soft airbrush to lightly push back those lines just like I would with a needed eraser on paper. And so now I want to draw through this, and I'm going to think more about things like, rope drawing. I guess it could almost be thought of connecting the dots a little bit. But you really want to get used to looking through and past the structure. So I talk about this one a lot. I think it's really important that structure serves a lot of purpose, and it can help us fix things symmetrically across the center line of the face. It can help us develop proportions and really ease our process for drawing by, again, doing a lot of the preliminary work. Just like if you were going to build a house, you would have to get all your structure right, and then you can put over the nice facade and the detail work and all that stuff. But that being said with art, you have to look through it as well because you're trying to hopefully capture something that is interesting, alive, unique, all these things. And so it's not just tracing a previous step. If you get too much in that way of thinking, you'll sort of stifle I think the creativity. At least I feel that way. So I'm looking for wrinkles and organic folds. Now, I want to also think about what I call anchor points or in my mind, I call anchor points. So the side of the nose and the side of the mouth, for instance, the nostrils can move a little bit. The side of the mouth can definitely pull back with, you know, that big wide ear to ear grin. Well, but the skin in between those two points is sort of just being strung along, right? So it's being pulled. So to me, the anchor points, and again, that's my own term. I don't know if that's the way you'd really refer to it as, but it's the way I think about it's the side of the nose, the side of the mouth, and then I just drape the skin and the wrinkle from those two points, and then I play around with variations of that. And so more wrinkles, more tension to those areas for somebody doing a more extreme smile. And also, if I want to incorporate more of a stylistic version of that, I might add more wrinkles based on that. I generally add more wrinkles in these areas and more shadows. Or villainous characters, I think it sort of adds to the flavor. And so more detail to me in the face can you know, for one, it can signify age, obviously, but it can also be a really neat way to zero in on certain elements of evil gran or, you know, villainous face. So you'll see I'll try to really push that as I go. And so now for the eyes, and with this, I'm basically thinking about wrapping the eyelids around that sphere that I've already established. But the other thing to consider here is we've got the expression. So how wide eyed is the expression. But we also need to consider that most of the expression comes from the top eyelid. So it's about 80 to 90% of the movement comes from the top eyelid, but we still have ten to 20% of the bottom eyelid that adds to things like squinting, droopy, tired expressions. So there is some range of motion there that we still need to consider. Again, in cartooning, or comic work or any storytelling, I feel like I can take creative liberties with those concepts. So I think of, like, animated series when I was a kid, and then I still watch it with my son today. But, you know, they really animate the eyes, right. Sometimes they'll even change the entire shape of the eyes. Now, I know that's a bit much for what we're doing here, especially if you're gravitating towards, like, 90 style comics. But I think it's important to say that you can play around with any of these variables. You know, it's up to you. You know, you're the creative genius here. You can play around with all these things. But there are certain concepts where if you take them too far, you might look at it and go, Oh, that just doesn't feel right, doesn't look believable, even though we're drawing things that are just not real, you know, believable, ultimately. But yeah, so just, you know, keep that in mind. But again, I typically don't move the bottom eyelid nearly as much. Uh, that being said, too, you can see that I put the irises where they were right in the middle to add to that kind of crazy expression. And if you wanted to push that further, you could just raise the top eyelids even more or shrink down the irises. A lot of styles will do that and then make sure to have a nice amount of white above and below the iris. That just reinforces that bit of crazy expression. And likewise, the fear expression. That's really, I think, what conveys a sense of a madness or craziness that they have a look of fear in their eyes, but they're smiling and their eyebrows are down. So it's usually the mix of emotions, and that's why we look at it like, Wow, this person's hard to read, and they might just be a little bit psychotic. Why are they showing these various emotions versus the very easily discernible ones of, like, a pleasant smile and a happy grin. So anyways, that's at least my interpretation of it. So here I'm drawing some spiky hair. I actually don't go with this one, and I'll pull the camera back here in a second for you. But I was testing out this particular hairstyle. I was trying to reinforce this kind of crazy look with a messy hairstyle. So that's another thing that you can sort of think about. Like, what if the clothes? What if the hair matches the emotion and expression of, you know, bit psychotic. So maybe they don't brush their hair as much or, you know, they've been up all night devising their evil plan, so they have messy hair. I don't know. You could think of any number of narratives there, but I ultimately don't end up going with this particular one, but I like to play around with the different hairstyles, but I do like to think about the character's narrative as I do this. So, you know, it's just like if you're thinking of the joker as you draw him, then you're going to have a very distinct set of ideas to work with. Well, since we're drawing our own character, which can be joker like or, you know, villainous characters of a certain type. So I mean, I imagine if you say the skinny, psychotic villain, you could apply that to so many different stories, right, not just the joker, obviously, but And then from there, though, you can spin that and say, Okay, do I want my character to look more like something out of arcane? Do I want it to have this particular style or, you know, come from this type of narrative? And so it just gives you that sort of base to work with. And then you pull it and stretch it a bit further and say, Okay, but my version of this guy or something similar is this. And when you start to do that, it's like you get a point of reference, which is super important. But then you take it in your own direction and you come up with something that's a little more unique. And that's really what leads you to be more creative so that you start to see all these ideas around you, which are really just rehashed ideas anyways. It's just some are more popular than others. So we tend to look around us and go, Well, I can't use that. That's a really iconic popular thing. But if you look far enough back, you know, historically, you'll see that they're just ideas that have been sort of, you know, reutilized and revamped and uh, modified, things like that. But even the messy hair, you know, back to that, I tried to make it a little bit spiky to go with the sharp angles of villainous character. And here I'm just sort of reiterating or showing you that, hey, you got the downward push in between the eyebrows for that angry look. You got the pinch points or anchor points of the side of the nose, the mouth. I even relates down to the chin, and then the positioning of the irises in relationship to the big whites of the eyes. That's really it. So hopefully this one shows you how to refine the character. We'll move on to the next lesson where I will basically show you how to add one more level of refinement and hopefully like the end result. So with that, let's move forward. 6. Refining the Line Work: And so now we're going to refine this guy. And so at this stage of the work, I'm just thinking about things like line weight. Here I'm going to start fixing things. I kind of pointing out that eye is a little too big and a little too forward in the eye cavity. Now, I got to admit that when you're drawing somebody that looks crazy, that's another thing you can play around with. You could intentionally make them less symmetrical. So we typically associate symmetry with beauty. Kind of sad when you think about it. It's not really fair that that means beauty. You know, if you're an unsymmetrical person, and we all really are. So don't feel bad. I'm definitely very asymmetrical. And so you do want to fix things, though, that stand out. Like, you don't want it to be a bad focal point. But that means that, again, you can use it as an intentional focal point. Uh, for kind of the crazy scientists, the mad scientists, I think, then one big eye might actually kind of work, you know, especially if you put what is that? The monocular molecule, I don't know how you say it, the single eyeglass piece and the other eye, then it makes even more sense. But, you know, you do fix certain things. That's why I flipped the work here, and that's why I wanted to show you that. Uh, you got to be careful of not getting too hyper focused on that, though. I think that sometimes that can also negatively impact the creativity. So be careful of that. It's like you want to fix things, but nothing perfect nothing's perfect, including real humans. You know, you just kind of have to find where that level and limit is for you. But you generally know if it's constantly pulling you out of your creative zone. Like, just sometimes it's almost, I think, preferable not to fix too much at that point and just keep creating. You can always go back and analyze it later, I guess. So, the other thing I tend to think about here, hopefully see it in the eyes is I'm also trying to incorporate a variation of big lines, shapes of shadows, thicker lines, and smaller tiny details so that essentially I get this feeling of contrast. That's really what I'm looking for. So it may look like I'm just, you know, adding wrinkles for the sake of adding wrinkles. But if you notice with the teeth, even how I leave less details in the front of the teeth, almost, you know, no, no details. I'm purposely really doing that. I mean, I don't know if it's implemented in just the right way, but there is intention there. I do that throughout the piece, where to me, it does a couple of things, one of which, again, back to focal points, it draws your eye to areas I'm trying to point out. Also, by the contrast or detail here but not here, you're sort of emulating where light would be. So a good colorist will go back through and really take advantage of that. And it's a sense of scale. So if I draw too many lines that are just all the same thickness everywhere, the artwork sort of flattens out a bit more. But if I add some thicker lines and a bunch of tinier lines here and some that fade off and some that are connected, I'm essentially controlling few different things as I render. And I like that sense of variation in the work. So, likewise, just applying different textures. So one of the things that I was looking forward to doing with the hair of this character is sort of getting in some of those wavy strands in the top bit of hair, which I can do a lot of those little back and forth zig zag patterns and see like patterns for the highlights. But then also when I do the side of the head, you'll see I just use a little bit of stippling. And then I use even a little bit different texture for the scruff on the chin. So to me, all those areas are options to stylize and change it up a bit so that when somebody looks at the piece, there's more than one thing to appreciate. And there's a sort of delineation that you do by doing that, and it's something that you look for when you go to ink somebody else's work is you look for those opportunities to delineate things because what it ultimately does, it allows the viewer to see it and read things independently with all of it, you know, not just kind of blobbing together and, you know, not being distinguishable from one particular aspect to another. So I know that's a bit off from actual expressions, but since we're talking about rendering this particular expression, I figured I would throw that in there. And so just adding a little bit of the clothing design just to, you know, again, I guess, back to the delineation, just to give a little bit more separation and add a little bit more, you know, character element to this piece. But that's really it. And so what I would like to do is, you know, obviously see your work. If you got any questions, let me know. And also, you know, what other expressions and character concepts would you like to cover? Was this informative for you in a way that hopefully my goal is always to help you push the barriers of where you're at and create something new, hopefully inspire you, motivate you, all that good stuff? Uh, but, you know, let me know. Like, are there certain archetypes that you'd like to see? Should I cover all the main archetypes? I kind of think I should. I think it would be fun to do and something we can do ongoing. But let me know. So, as always, I appreciate your continued support of my lessons. Good luck with art, and bye for now.