What I absolutely love about your art style is their lively facial expressions! Could you please show us a tutorial on how to draw them?

galoogamelady:

Thank you! There is a tutorial that I’ve been looking for everywhere to no avail so I will cook up my own thing real quick. Mind you, this is not really a tutorial, more like a demonstration.
What I want to show you here is how a little detail can change the whole facial expression. To give you a good example, here are some Buttons faces with the only difference between them being the change of one feature in each row.
Let’s go with eyebrows first:

Then we got eyelids:

The focus of the eyes, the dilation of the pupils and even the size of the iris:

The mouth:

And though this might be more “body language” than “facial expression”, but I think the position of the head/neck counts as part of an expression:

Of course there are other things you can change on your subject’s face like squishing-stretching the whole head or just some of their features, scrunching up their nose, messing up their hair, etc. It all depends on how cartoony your character is. Buttons is semi-realistic so I don’t really go to the extremes with his face.

Another thing: when it comes to conveying an expression, I first think of the basic pose (angle of the head and neck, body language), much like how you start animating lipsync by creating the body language first. You don’t get to draw in the individual mouth posings until you got the body language down.

Same with drawings. Try not to start with the details, work your way to them!

That’s all I could think of for now. I got some more references and thoughts collected in this post from a year ago.
Have fun! 🙂