For this months article I thought I would talk about facial expressions and how to convey a wide range of emotions in your characters (it's easier to do then you think).   When I'm figuring out an illustration I think a lot about emotion, both the emotion or feeling that I want the reader to be left with and the emotional state of my characters and how to show that.  A character's body language and gesture plays a big role in that, but so does their facial expression.

When you are composing your illustration you should be thinking about what the character is feeling in this moment not as a static thing but as them REACTING to either the environment they are in, the situation or the other characters in the scene. If you can, try to go beyond the most basic emotions like; happiness, sadness, anger, scared, disgust and surprised.

Instead think about giving your characters more nuanced expressions. Most people aren't just happy, they might by happy and a little scared or kind of sad and angry, they could be both disgusted and laughing at a situation or laughing so hard it hurts.  How do you convey these more complex emotions? 

Well first you should understand what tools you have in your arsenal.  In my mind the main facial features you can use to convey emotion are:

1. The eyebrows - both in their location on the face (closer to the eyes or farther away, left or right) as well as their shape.

2. The eyes - the shape of them, where they're placed on the face and where they are looking (denoted by the pupils)

3. The mouth - through the shape and location on the face

4. The head - mostly in it's relationship to other features like the shoulders.  For instance is the head shrunken into the shoulders, leaned towards who's speaking or away from them?

I've left off the ears and nose because generally I don't think they do a lot to help convey emotions. When you are thinking about how to convey the subtly of emotions through the face be sure to take advantage of all these options. You would be surprised by how much changing just one of these features can change the emotion displayed.

Take the below faces as an example. In each of the eight faces the shape of the face, eyebrows and eyes are all the same. I literally just copied and pasted then. The ONLY thing that is changing from face to face is the mouth.

Can you see the range of emotion that you can get, just by changing that one thing? Which face is fearful? Which is just trying to put on a brave front? Which is unsure? So many different emotions get conveyed by changing one little thing.

The other thing that is good to remember when figuring out facial expressions is that subtle things can really change the intensity of the emotion expressed, dialing it up or down. Take another look at these eight faces, it's the same as the previous except I've changed the shape of the eyes, making them full circles. Notice how making that one tweak changes the emotional conveyed.

I encourage you to try this exercise yourself either with simple shapes like here or with your own characters. Pick one feature that is going to change and make all the other features the same. Then try to change more features and see what happens.

Remember it's not just the shape and size of the features that you can change but their placement on the body and in the case of the eyes where they are looking.  Here's a series of rock faces I did as an experiment using these same ideas.

I'm using really simple shapes but you can see how much emotion gets portrayed just with these small changes.