@theamazingartofescapism asked me about how I draw hair. I’m sure I missed out heaps of stuff but in general this is how I approach it. Hope it’s helpful 😀
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!
HEAD’S UP ARTISTS THAT RESIZE IN PHOTOSHOP. This really saved my life. I’d noticed that gross halo around art whenever I resized something but never knew how to get rid of it til Onta showed me and ahhhhh. I’m just so happy there was a solution to it so I really hope this helps others out too!! (also look at more cute bear faces I drew~)
YOU HAVE SAVED MY LIFE, I do some contract work often and I need to transform objects and layers all the time and I noticed this the other day that the quality of each element was going fuzzy and gross and It made me a bit like “oh crap wtf”
How to, step-by-step, make expressions mean different things by changing just one facial feature at a time. *shrug* I’m not very good at explaining how I do expressions, I just…feel out what kinds of muscles seem to fit and tweak those. And sometimes, ever so slightly, little adjustments could mean the difference between fury and euphoria.
AngelMihe 
