Start Making Faces!

Fifteen years (or so) ago I met this artist who did story boards for Batman the Animated Series and we struck up an art buddy relationship. It was more of a email/chat thing and it was much more difficult to send picture files to everybody because cable/dsl wasn't readily available to everybody. So it was more a talk about process...

When we finally got together I showed him what I was working on and I could tell he was disappointed. It wasn't (he said) that my proportions were terrible but he had a problem with my character's faces... And what I took away from our meeting was that he couldn't believe my faces were so bad! I remember him saying this once or twice that to him "faces were EASY!" Well maybe they were for him or maybe he didn't like my style. I lost touch with him after the online board we were members of closed down and I didn't really want to see him face to face after what I thought was "harsh" criticism...

But Over the years I have taken his criticism to heart and concentrated more on faces. My faces have slowly improved through practice and another valuable lesson I learned. This lesson was reference. It was to make sure I had a mirror handy to help with facial expression. I think the mirror is an invaluable tool especially for someone who finds faces challenging. It is not as much about the proportion as it is the expression!

Recently I was doing a search for art/illustration books at my local library and came across this book:

Making Faces: Drawing Expressions For Comics And Cartoons (Paperback)

There is some great stuff about proportion and expression. I can't say it would be super useful to a professional but for somebody like myself (a struggling self taught student) it has been helpful in 1) pointing out how to use muscles in the face and 2) the neck position and muscles are also important in making a believable facial expression...

There are a lot of sample pictures and exercises and though not a long book if you can get it from your library or score a new or used copy for ten or so dollars then I think you would find it helpful...

So if faces aren't "easy"for you give this book a look. I think you can also look at some sample pages on Amazon


I have stuff going on at the moment including exercises for making comics and animating stuff in Anime Studio Debut and Flip Boom. One of the cool things is that I can apply things I learn to all the different areas of interest...

Keep on drawing and I hope you had great Canada Day and Fourth of July holidays!

ArrrOOooo!