Character Design Tutorial: How to Draw Facial Expressions

Learn the basics of drawing a characters’ facial expressions, from the skin and the wrinkles to how different facial features affect each other, with Laura Ewing

The face is one of the most expressive parts of the body, which is why understanding how to illustrate believable facial expressions can be the difference between creating a good character and a great one..

Laura Ewing (@le_lauraewing) is a storyboard artist and character designer whose job it is to capture the essence of a story quickly and efficiently for films, documentaries, and publishing houses. In this tutorial, she shares a few basic tips for drawing facial expressions that your viewer will instantly be able to understand.

1. Eyes and eyebrows

Eyebrows are a useful tool for expressing feelings. Their shape helps us to clearly illustrate how a face changes with emotion: a furrowed brow and pulled down eyebrows clearly show a character is unhappy, while a raised eyebrows indicate surprise, and a single raised eyebrow suggests inquisitiveness or confusion.

Make sure to draw them along the same line. While the eyebrows may curve and bend, moving them as a connected entity will make them more engaging.

2. Each part is connected

Just as the eyebrows are connected, so too is the rest of the face: if the chin moves, the mouth, nose, ears, eyes, skin, and even the tip of your character’s beard will move with it. Even if you cannot see certain parts of the face, their positioning will still influence what is visible, so thinking of the face as a whole will help you create a convincing composition.

One way of harmonizing your layout is to draw along a line. Laura’s character, Haldor, is a good example of the power of shapes: his neutral face is drawn along a straight vertical line, his surprised face curves outwards, stretching his eyes, nose, and mouth with it, and his angry face curves in on itself, scrunching his features together.

3. Body

Use the body to complement what you’re communicating with the face.

Once again, it’s a question of angles so consider the lines you are drawing across: drawing the shoulders along a straight diagonal line will convey confidence and strength, curving the shoulders downwards so they hanggives a sense of sadness or disappointment, and pulling the shoulders up and the head down shows tension and, in the case of Laura’s character, grumpiness.

If you liked this tutorial, you can learn more about how to reveal your character’s personality by working on a concept and illustrating it using Photoshop on Laura Ewing’s Domestika course Character Creation for Animation: Shapes, Color, and Expression.

You may also like:

- Digital Painting for Characters: Color and Light, a course by Joel Santana
- Character Design for Animation with Photoshop, a course by Caio Martins
- Cartoon-Style Character Design with Procreate, a course by Ed Vill