All language subtitles for 081 Drawing Character Expression Sheets Part 1.en

In this lecture we're going to be learning how to draw character facial expression sheets so a facial

expression she is basically a bunch of different facial expressions of the same character.

And this sheet can be used for many different reasons.

If you're doing an actual 2D hand drawn animation project we're actually animating frame by frame.

You would want to create a and or a facial expression sheet so that way you kind of have an idea of

what your character's facial expressions look like even if you're not doing actual animation if you're

doing some like a comic book.

Are you going to be drawing your character in different poses different scenarios.

You want to really take some time and actually designing their facial expressions and kind of reuse

those facial expressions over and over again.

So they kind of match up throughout all the different drawings.

If you just start drawing your characters and changing the facial expressions every time it's gonna

start to not look like them.

So by doing a character facial expression sheet like this it allows you to design each type of facial

expression and then you look at that and use as reference.

So rather than looking at a photograph as a reference you're actually looking back at your own designs

as reference as you redraw your character.

So let's go ahead and let's begin.

So the first thing we're going to talk about is we need to talk about exaggeration and also just simplicity.

So when it comes to facial expressions when you're trying to show a character's motions you want to

make sure that their face is very simple.

And some of the most basic ways to break down the face is to think of it as sort of your generic Happy

Face smiley face angry face stuff like that.

So let's start off with happy for example.

Oh happy face is this curved like that

right.

The eyebrows might just be something like this.

So there's our happy face and actually what I'm going to do is I want to make this look a little bit

more accurate to an actual human face.

So going to go ahead and just kind of draw a circle for one I circle for the other eye and then draw

sort of my smile down here like this.

Right

there's kind of my smiley face so that's happy.

If we wanted to do somebody angry what we want to do is it's really mostly in the eyes.

You can have somebody with a lot of different mouth types but the anger is going to be in the eyebrows.

So we want to do is we just want to add that angular eyebrow like that.

Let's go ahead and kind of mark out the eyebrows for a happy face or kind of something like that.

And when you're angry it depends on how angry you are.

If you're just kind of angry you might just have kind of a straight mouth like this.

And if you're gonna be very angry you might have even more angled eyebrows.

So if come down here let's go to an angle those down even more.

And let's have some kind of drop over

the actual eyeballs curse and then the face or the mouth.

I mean rather than just being a straight line it might be open this person might be yelling and when

somebody yells you kind of get this trapezoid shape it's a little bit more curved on the bottom but

you kind of get a shape going on like that.

And as you can see these are just incredibly simple.

Anybody can draw these.

And this is what we're gonna to base our character's facial expressions off of.

So let's do a sad one now.

So we'll start off with the eyes and just like all facial expressions most of that expression is going

to be in the eyes and especially the eyebrows.

So somebody said you're going to kind of get your eyebrows going up like this kind of worried looking

and then for the mouth we might just get a little line like that or if we wanted to we could just do

a full on frowny face right.

So there's a sad person.

Let's say that we're drawing somebody that surprised.

So surprise is basically going to be some raised eyebrows.

Now when we start drawing our characters if you remember me talking about it earlier in the course when

somebody's surprise oftentimes they'll show the white of their eyes on the upper side of their iris.

What I mean by this is if this is our Iris with our pupil the eye will kind of show like that.

You'll see that white of the eye right there.

And that makes him look either scared or nervous.

It can look like a lot of different things.

But when somebody's surprise especially when they're raising their eyebrows they'll probably look something

like that.

But another part of it is gonna be those raised eyebrows and somebody surprise you're going to kind

of get these arched eyebrows like this really high.

The more we can exaggerate that the better the expression will look.

And for the mouth oftentimes will kind of get maybe an open mouth like this.

They're all like Oh.

But that kind of like with all the other expressions you can kind of interchange the mouths out and

it'll kind of suddenly change the facial expression itself.

Lastly let's go ahead and do a confused face.

So for confused go drawn those eyes

and when somebody is confused oftentimes you'll see somebody whose eyebrows go up and one go down.

So we'll go ahead and kind of do that.

So when we'll kind of go down like this and then one will kind of go up like this and this might be

a little bit more suspicious than confused but it's somewhere in there for the mouth you might go something

like this.

There's a lot of different models you could put and it will again change that expression.

So let me just put a little line like that to represent the mouth.

So the thing to really remember about facial expressions when you're drawing your characters is simplify

and we've basically simplified these six very common facial facial expressions into very simple line

work.

They're almost the stick figure versions of facial expressions and we're really actually going to base

our character faces off of these or their expressions off of these.

So when somebody's smiling we want them our viewer to know that they're smiling.

So drawing a line like this you know for the upper lip and showing their teeth that kind of looks like

a smile.

But if we can just kind of exaggerate that a little bit more into something more like this with a curve

right that just looks a lot better.

We we can read that a little bit better.

And so we need to always remember to simplify.

And then the second part is to exaggerate.

So when we're drawing facial expressions we really want to exaggerate and do what they call pushing

the expression.

So when we draw poses with a full body we talked about we talked about how we want to push those poses

and exaggerate them.

So if somebody is lifting their arm up we don't just want them to kind of be lifting their arm up we

want them to be stretching and really lifting that arm up right.

It's the same for facial expressions.

So eyebrows need to be really angled down if somebody is angry.

If somebody is really sad that mouth needs to be very sad if somebody's making a small mouth like right

here then we need to really make that mouth small.

It's very exaggerated and that's what's going to give you very expressive characters.

All right let's go ahead and let's move on.

So now that we kind of have an idea about these men go ahead and cut these out actually.

OK so we have that reference there.

Next what we're gonna do.

We can turn that off now if you're drawing paper and pencil this is going to take a little bit more

time because you're gonna have to redraw your head form a few times but you're doing this digitally.

It's a little bit quicker because you can just copy and paste but what we want to do is we want to go

ahead and we want to draw a character head form and we're going to use this form over and over again

and we're going to draw different expressions on it.

Now this is one way of doing it but a lot of people that become more advanced eventually we like to

draw the head pose in different poses because as different expressions are made their body might express

in different ways as well.

So we'll go ahead

and change over to Black.

We'll go ahead

and draw a circle like that and maybe you can make that a little bit cleaner

we're gonna go ahead and mark out the center of the face.

I think this is gonna be a boy character.

I'll just roughly kind of sketch something out and I can clean it up here in a second.

Now doing character expression sheets is not about drawing these perfect amazing drawings.

You can keep it very sketchy and very messy but always remember when you're drawing that under drawing

that you want to keep it nice and light that way you can come in with darker pencil or markers or whatever

and darken in your final design.

All right.

So there we go.

Now this is gonna change a little bit.

This is just to give us a rough idea of our character's head size and stuff like that.

But when the character opens her mouth for example the jaw will come down more.

So this will all change.

Let's go ahead and draw in the years.

So I go ahead and give my character some nice big sort of blocky years

some like that do the same thing on the other side.

Try to keep them even

go and draw the inside of the year.

Even though I'm drawing really dark right now it's just because in photoshop I can go ahead and lighten

that up here in a minute but just make sure that if you're drawing with paper and pencil that you really

are drawing lightly because you don't want this under drawing to show up too much now if you want to

fall along with me.

And you're using paper and pencil if you want you can download from the resources.

This head right here and you can go ahead and use it as your head block that you can draw your facial

expressions on.

So that's an option for you as well if you don't want to draw your own character heads.

All right.

Next time to go ahead and come mark where I want that nose to be.

So this is a child character.

So that means that the fore head is gonna be a little bit bigger the eyes are gonna be a little bit

bigger

gone forever that mouth is gonna be somewhere down there.

And we also bigger ears so that all makes our character look a little bit younger.

And you can see them just using simple shapes circles and lines and stuff like that just to kind of

figure out where I'm going to place that I kind of like this eye right there.

So I'll go ahead and I'm gonna grab this eye here and just move it over

something like that

and as we design or character the eyelids and stuff like that are going to change.

So I can just keep these as simple ovals sort of circle type shapes.

We can add the eyelids on them later and I'll go ahead and kind of mark out where my eyebrows would

be if they were just kind of neutral.

So I don't draw them in all the way just simple little lines like that.

And that will kind of help me just keep in mind where the eyebrows would be in a neutral state.

Now I think this face is actually a little bit off center.

So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go ahead and move this nose over center a little bit better.

In fact I could probably go ahead and just move this entire center line over just a little bit.

All right that looks better.

No go ahead and add in a neck.

So there's a child's the neck will be pretty thin

and figure out where you want those shoulders to be shoulders can sometimes be a little bit hard to

play so it's good to draw men lightly and then you can't raise them out.

Once you figure out exactly where you want them to go

I make the neck a little bit more tapered

All right then I'm gonna go ahead and kind of just sketch in the hair so that way each time I draw this

it's just a little bit quicker for me.

I can just kind of use the same hairstyle.

You always want the hair to kind of be coming off the head.

You don't want the hair to be like plastered right onto the sphere that the head is based off of.

Otherwise it's gonna look really weird.

It's gonna make the head look smaller.

You always want that hair to come off the head quite a bit.

And also kind of depends on the hairstyle but

remember to keep your lines nice and loose struck quickly and that will help keep them loose.

If it doesn't look very good you can always either undo it if you're working digitally or you can embrace

it as long as you're drawing lightly so it's better to draw light and and really quick and get those

nice smooth curvy lines in there than to get these really rigid but like scratchy not very curvy or

dynamic lines

all right.

That looks pretty good for a head.

So now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go ahead and I'm just gonna copy and paste this over and do it

six times because we're gonna be drawing six different facial expressions so draw poetry there.

Let's grab another one.

Now if you're drawing this with paper and pencil This is where it might take a little bit of time for

you to redraw this a handful of times so that you have a few head forms to draw off of but like I said

if you want you can go ahead and download these head forms that I've just drawn here and you can use

those to base your characters off of.

OK there we go.

So those look pretty good.

So let's go ahead and let's start drawing some facial expressions.

So what I'd recommend is you want to design your character first.

So I just quickly sketch this character out.

I kind of had an idea of what I wanted them to look like for you.

You'll probably have to do some actual design work and figure out what your character's costume their

hair all of that stuff looks like when you're doing a character expression sheet.

But in this case I just kind of went ahead and my schedule now.

So once you design your character you'll typically have kind of a neutral face that I recommend that

you draw if you wanted to you could even add it to your character expression sheet.

So for example on this head over here if I wanted to I could go ahead and just kind of sketch out like

a neutral face

right.

So we want to be smiling.

He wouldn't really be making any facial expressions is just be a very neutral face and I could use that

to base all my other faces off of.

And that's just all kind of part of that design process of your character.

But we're going to assume that we kind of already have our character designed out so we're gonna start

with a smile or happy.

So if we remember with this right here these facial expressions and action and go and drag that up so

that way.

Woops so that way we can kind of see those over our head forms.

All right.

So we have a happy face right here so we want to just keep this nice and simple so what we can do is

we can start by actually just kind of sketching out a happy face.

So when go ahead and just starting from where about that line was that I put for the mouth I can just

kind of sketch in a small little mouth like this

right.

And what would probably actually be better.

So I went ahead and I started doing these on a separate layer.

I want to go ahead and bring down the opacity to light in these drawings up

and we can start sketching on top of that.

Can you raise what I already did there.

I'll just draw that back in.

All right.

So for happy face we can just go ahead and sketch in sort of that happy mouth.

It's very simple sort of smiley face type shape

then we can go ahead and search sketching in the nose so I know want the nostrils to be something like

that.

Just a very simple sort of generic looking animation character knows

and I'll add a little line up here on the top of a nose like that just kind of show that there's some

form of there.

Now this is kind of my second refined so you should still be drawing kind of light at this point.

You'd want to be drawing with your darkest pencil yeah or different colored pencil to be drawn.

Kind of lately when I had the little lines into the corners of the mouth like that.

Now there's different mouths we could be doing at this point.

We wanted to be kind of a at a little mouth like that.

The main thing is that our mouth is moving upwards.

Happy faces move upwards so the smile will move upwards the eyebrows will move upwards right.

It's all emotion moving upwards.

You'll see that when we draw sad faces later that all the motions are moving downwards.

The mouth moves downwards the eyebrows move downwards the sensor happy we just want to keep in mind

that we're trying to move them upwards so if we want to add in kind of a goofy little crooked smile

like that we can do that as long as the main shape is moving upwards right.

Go ahead and raise this out a little bit so we can see his teeth a little bit more then we can go ahead

and add a bottom lip so that this is a male character.

Typically you just only want to add in that bottom line like that and I'm not even sure that I really

like that.

So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go ahead and raise this out and that's the great thing about doing

this design sheet is it's about finding what you want your characters expressions to look like.

So in this case I think just kind of more of a simple sort of just line like that for a smile is good

and there can be different variations as well so I could do one where I have my character just smiling

like this I could do another shot where he's showing his teeth there's different ones you can do so

don't think that each facial expression just has to have one version of it you can do different versions.

I'm going to keep this to six different facial expressions just keep this lecture a little bit shorter

but definitely do as many expressions as you feel your character needs.

So just do kind of a simple mouth like that.

Go ahead move on to the ISO for the eyes I'll just go ahead and kind of add in sort of a curved line

like this on top for the eyebrows and keep his eyes kind of nice and open.

So I'm coming down a little bit from the top of that Oval which is where the top is.

Eyelid would kind of be that just kind of help shape out that oval shape that I drew before to make

it look a little bit more like an eye

and then since he's smiling I'm gonna go ahead add a line like that because what's happening is his

cheek is kind of bunching up right here and right there and that kind of pushes up into the eye.

So you want to make sure that we kind of capture that and the eyelid.

Go ahead and draw his IRS.

So if your character design is already designed you know what color their eyes would be or what the

size of them would be stuff like that.

So just kind of do something like that

kind of reshape his bottom lip a little bit think that looks a little bit better.

All right then let's go ahead and we can just sketch on the side of his face so because he's smiling

his cheeks will be a little bit sort of more plump and around as they bunch up

again.

This is a character design sheet.

So this is or an expression design she and so none of this has to look perfect.

You can keep it pretty sketchy looking you don't have to have super clean liner or anything like that.

In fact I recommend that you keep it nice and clean.

All right then I'm going to go ahead and do the eyebrows.

So just kind of angle them upwards like this going to shape them out.

Something like that

then we can go ahead and do the years so go ahead and draw the ears out clean it up a little bit more

from the sketch underneath

all right that's looking pretty good.

Now I want the eyebrows to show a little bit more sort of injuries and we kind of split this hair up

like that

and sometimes you're doing sketches like this is totally ok.

If the eyebrows kind of go through the hair you'll see that a lot of different styles of characters

but in this case I'll kind of let that happen.

Go ahead and kind of add a little bit of mess to his hair.

This is a young boy character so it's probably getting into a lot of mischief and stuff like that little

adventure.

So want to make sure that we tell that and our characters costume hair all that stuff

that looks pretty good so those kind of a happy face for a character but one two I could go ahead and

shade this out so you go ahead and see let's start by shooting things and that are really obvious.

So stuff for example like the IRS on a dark and that in the eyebrows

under the nose do a little bit right here under the lip bring the opacity down and make that look a

little bit softer

and go and shade in that year that

role is going to get a little bit of shadow underneath the neck right here.

So go ahead and shade that in as well

go ahead.

Let's light in this up a little bit and add a little bit of extra shavings on this bottom line ball

and some light shading there.

See we can add a little bit of light shading underneath the eyelashes for the top eyelid

can also add a little bit of shading and actually I'll switch back to kind of some darker shading on

some shading from underneath the hair.

So that hair will kind of be casting that cash shadow onto the fore head a little bit

if we wanted to we could even add let's add a T-shirt to our character

so just kind of add a caller like this.

All right great.

So there we go there's just kind of a happy version of our character.

He's got a little bit of a smile and again you can make the smile a little bit bigger and just play

around with this stuff a lot.

So change the mouth up a little bit.

Try different things and maybe try it on different heads as well because this is a design process.

The expression she is all about designing your characters expression.

So if you don't like the way it looks then keep working on it until you kind of figure out a little

bit better what you want that character sheet to look like or what you want that expression to look

like.

All right.

Next let's go ahead and let's try an angry face.

So we'll go on to this next head here.

So looking at what we have on our angry face right up there in the top right corner we need the eyebrows

to angle downwards first off.

Now this is going to be a super angry face it's just gonna be a kind of angry face so we don't have

to make the eyebrows angled down as much.

So let's go ahead looks just kind of England downwards

kind of like this.

I'll do the same thing to the other one.

You want to keep them pretty even.

All right.

So that looks pretty good.

So the angled downward so this is already kind of creating a little bit more of an angry looking expression.

So it's not super angry because if we wanted to we could angle them down a lot more and that would make

them look a lot more angry.

But in this case you don't want them to look super angry at.

So we got that going on.

Then let's go ahead and do the math.

So for the math we're just gonna kind of keep it a small little mouth like this.

Just kind of a simple line like that one a little creases in the corner just kind of angled down like

this at the bottom.

We might come back and change that.

We'll see.

Let's go ahead.

Draw the nose and we're going to basically just draw that same nose in such kind of a curved line on

each edge of the nostril and a line curving in the opposite direction for the nostril hole and I'd like

to kind of mark out the difference between the top surface and the bottom surface of the nose with a

little line like that and line that little line up here to differentiate the top of the nose plain up

here and the bridge of the nose.

All right.

So that looks pretty good.

So what we're drawing a an angry eye we need to kind of squint the eyes a little bit so we wouldn't

want to draw an eye like this like we did on the last one where the eyelid is open all the way.

We want to kind of follow the shape of this eyebrow right here.

So what that would kind of look like is sort of something like this

right.

And this might not look perfect yet.

I might draw this in and just think that doesn't look right that doesn't look good.

And I'll have to keep working on it.

This looks kind of good to me.

So let's keep running with this for a minute.

Let's see so we can also go ahead and add in some of the scrunching from the muscle so sometimes you'll

get a line right there and a line right there because you get that sort of muscle kind of pushing down

like that

I mean go ahead and kind of sketch in this upper eyelid.

This

and as you can see as this eyebrow pushes downwards you kind of get this overhang of the brow.

So you want to make sure we get this in now while you're designing character facial expressions.

You want to make sure that you look at reference of real expressions and try to exaggerate that.

It's also a good idea to look at other people's character designs see what their facial expressions

looks like and use that as some reference.

You want to copy them obviously you want to make sure that you're kind of studying other people's artwork

and real facial expressions so that way your facial expressions come out a little bit more realistic

looking.

If you start just drawing stuff out of your head it's not gonna look as good.

So I may not be looking at reference right now but that's just because I've drawn so many faces before

that I kind of have a good idea of what those facial expressions are like when you're developing a character's

facial expressions.

Even for me I often look at real photographs so that I can make sure that it looks relatively accurate.

All right.

Now since this character is not smiling we're not going to get this sort of straight line here where

the cheek is squishing so I'll just kind of draw a line like this

in a line like that.

All right

go ahead and take an up top eyelash

when you drawing a male character it's OK to have a dark thick eyelash.

You just usually typically want to make sure you don't kind of have a curving thing coming off like

that because if you do that it's going to make that character look a little bit more female or feminine.

So if you're trying to make more of a male or masking looking character you just want to make sure that

you kind of lead that little curve off the corner of the eyelash.

All right.

So let's go ahead and draw and the IRS now in this case we can maybe even change it up a little bit.

So I'm gonna go ahead make our character looking off to the side like this.

Now you'll notice that I kind of drew those in as ovals rather than just drawing a circle like this.

Whoops sorry that's kind of covering it up rather than drawing a circle like that.

I did it more like an over like this.

And that's because as a circle on a sphere begins to rotate around the sphere what happens is you kind

of get more of a perspective view.

So it kind of turns into more of an oval.

So that's why I drew those as ovals so make sure that when you draw characters if their eyes are kind

of looking off to the side from whatever direction you're looking at your character that you kind of

turn them into more of ovals rather than circles.

All right then I'll go ahead and add in the pupil like that

kind of add in a few extra wrinkles on the bottom because he's not very happy so when people aren't

very happy.

They don't make very flattering faces.

And so you want to kind of get some of those wrinkles in there.

I'm gonna go ahead and sketch in the eyebrows now.

So I'm just keeping the eyebrows very simple just kind of these triangle wedge shapes

that

all right.

Let's go ahead and let's sketch in the rest of the head

Ben since he's angry.

Maybe his hair's a little bit more messed up.

Maybe he's kind of a bender or something.

So go ahead and kind of make his hair look a little bit messier than in the last one

free expression looks pretty good.

He maybe worked on a little bit more but let's just go ahead.

What she did in her head start the eyes.

Then I'll go ahead and shade in the bottom of the nose or the lip

ear

shading is looking a little bit dark.

I'm gonna go ahead and light it up just a little bit.

Go ahead and shade in

cash shadow from the jaw line that then I can go back in there and just kind of shade in some lighter

shading such on such as on this bottom lip.

So add some shading there could be a little bit underneath I will bet on the eyelid

All right that looks pretty good.

All right let's go ahead and let's move on to the next facial expression.

So we've done happy sad or happy mad.

Let's go ahead and let's try a sad one actually.

Let's go ahead and let's do an angry one because we're already working on angry ones so let's do the

extra anger.

Angry one which is this one right here.