Drawing Facial Expressions | Art Classes Online

A challenging aspect to drawing is learning how to draw facial expressions. An excited face looks very different from a fearful face, or a surprised one.

Emotions hardly look the same but they breathe life into a character and without them, our drawings will look flat.

In this blog post we will go over six of the most universally recognized emotions: joy, sadness, fear, surprise, anger and disgust and discuss tips for drawing them. For the video tutorial click here!

Drawing Facial Expressions: Six Essential Emotions

True expressions are involuntary and convey emotions, false expressions do not; when we are drawing a face, forced muscular movements or position can read ineffective at conveying emotion, which is what art, illustration and animation is all about.

A quick tip to help you become familiar with facial expressions by to keep a mirror handy at your work or studio desk, wherever you are sketching or creating art.

Many animators actually keep a mirror at their workspaces to model their own expressions when illustrating their. Characters. They even use full floor to ceiling mirrored rooms for studying sequences.

You can also blend multiple emotions by mixing the expressions. For example, you can blend anger with sadness by combining the angry brow with the frowning mouth or you can blend fear with curiosity in more advanced illustrations. Certain emotions blend more naturally with others, so keep this in mind.

Joy / Happiness

When a person expresses joy, the corners of the mouth are pulled upwards and back and the space between the top lip and nose follows.

The cheeks are raised and form wrinkles under the eye and in the corners, the eyes also narrow and sometimes tilt down. We can see in the photo above, the lower portion of the face is now wider and lifted.

Fear

In fear, the brows are raised and drawn together. We can see in our reference photo, wrinkles form on the forehead. In a fearful expression, the mouth is usually open but we’ll explore a different positioning of the mouth for this expression. For those of you here at the premiere with me, let me know how else we could express the emotion of fear when illustrating our character’s mouth.

Sadness

When we express sadness, the inner ends of the eyebrows are raised and move closer together. Horizontal skin wrinkles develop on the center of the forehead only.

We can see in the photo above, the inner corners of the eyes are pulled up and the outer corners are pulled down.

We can also see the downwards angle of the mouth which lengthens the face and indicates sadness.

Surprise

When a face is surprised or shocked, the eyebrows raise higher on the face and arc slightly.

The upper eyelids are raised and the show more of the whites.

Sometimes we see the jaw drops with the mouth open, sometimes the lips relax more subtly, this is where you can and should bring the uniqueness of your character into the expression. Ask yourself how would my character react to x situation? What is the underlying feeling they experience when x event or situation is placed in front of them? This is how you can take your common expressions to the next level.

Disgust

The last emotion we’ll study here is disgust or disappointment. In this expression, the lip is pulled down, and the skin on the bridge of the nose becomes wrinkled.The cheeks may rise and wrinkles show below the lower eyelids.

Depending on the positioning of the cheeks, the eye openings can become much narrower.

Facial expressions, like figure gestures as we learned last week, are fleeting. But with knowledge of the ways in which the underlying muscles move and work and with practice, we can draw them with conviction and convey human emotion.

Which of these six expressions is your favorite to draw? Tell me in the comments! If you try any of these out, be sure to tag me on Instagram EllaCreativeLLC so i can see and re-share!

See you guys next friday, happy sketching!