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Description
This is just an expression sheet with one of my characters. Uhm yeah.

so, I told myself I was gonna try to finish this in four hours or less. At some point it became clear that I couldn’t get it done in that time frame so I decided to go for ten hours max, even knowing it was probably a stretch. The total time on this ended up being 14h, 20mins. So much for the four hours thing. There were several reasons it took so long, the first being that I just underestimated how long it would take, sketching front view faces isn’t the hardest thing around, but there are 16 of them. The sketch took about six hours. The second reason being that this character is very new, he’s been in my head for a long time but this is my first colored artwork of him, so I didn’t have time to do color studies. I just went with how he appeared in my head, which didn’t translate well onto a canvas as I will explain in a bit. The third reason is that I didn’t know exactly how I wanted to do this. I wanted to shade this the way I would do a comic page, but I hadn’t figured out exactly how I wanted to do different lightings and stuff in a comic and still make it consistent. I eventually landed on different shades of purple for different lighting, all on a multiply layer. I airbrushed on some shading too. Also, I went back and forth with the background. I wanted each box to be a different desaturated color, but that didn’t turn out so I hid that layer and just toned the canvas. All this back and forth and general color nonsense added probably four hours or more when it should have taken maybe one hour or so.

As for the character, I shall explain him now ;v;. He is a character from my story idea that I plan to make into a comic. None of the characters from this story have names yet, so he is just “character C”, I call him “C”. It’s kinda pathetic that he doesn’t have a name yet, but he has a backstory and personality and I know the role he’ll play and his character dynamics ect. This description is gonna get super long, so all you need to know for now is that he is actually a major villain/antagonist, he gets redeemed and becomes a good guy later, and he was raised in a cult. I struggled with this a lot because of the colors. In my head, he’s always been blond with blue eyes and light skin, but he still looked kinda scary and intimidating in my minds eye. When I put it to digital paper, the color palette just made him look SUPER angelic. I tried making his skin more tan, which made sense with the hot climate I imagined and helped break up all the light tones to make him look like he at least COULD be a bad guy, but it just wasn’t how I pictured him. I didn’t want to make any design changes before I even drew him as I imagined, so I just left it and hoped to fix it with shading. Another thing I should mention, is that I wanted to draw him differently based on the tone of the story, aka how I want the viewer to see him. There’s lots of places in the story where I would want the reader to feel bad for him or see him as a good person, so in those scenes I actually plan to draw his feature softer (bigger eyes, fluffier hair...). In scenes where I want him to look intimidating or badass, I would draw him looking scarier and make his hair much more spikey. I could make him the kind of villain who looks super nice and angelic, but is actually super scary and bad, but that just isn’t what I want him to be, and it would invalidate my whole drawing him different thing. Whatever, I’ll figure it out soon enough when I properly design him, but if anyone has ideas feel free to suggest them.

About the actual expressions thing, yeah, I’ll share my newfound wisdom. If anyone read this far, leave a comment with the word “incomprehensible” in it. You can comment just that or hide it discreetly, I just wanna know how many people actually read the whole thing lmao. I’ve found that drawing a bunch of wrinkles in the face is hella fun, I usually add them by and between the eyebrows if the character is doing anything with their eyebrows, I add lines across the nose bridge if the character is scrunching up their nose, and for more intense and visceral emotions I put a bunch of lines under the eyes. As long as you put the wrinkles close enough to the eyelid they won’t make your character look old I promise. Wrinkles also add a ton to the emotion, you can zoom in if you want to know more about their placement. Keep in mind where the character is looking, for #13 he’s supposed to be scared, so I have him looking up to imply that whatever he’s scared of is looming over him. For #8 he is embarrassed or shameful, so he is avoiding eye contact. #16 was meant to be a disgusted expression, I implied that whatever he is disgusted by is below his eye level, and so on. I feel like it’s hard to give advice on expressions in general, and easier to explain a specific emotion, so if you need help with how to do a specific face you can just ask me.

I am open to constructive criticism, please let me know your thoughts! ^-^

Description
This is just an expression sheet with one of my characters. Uhm yeah.

so, I told myself I was gonna try to finish this in four hours or less. At some point it became clear that I couldn’t get it done in that time frame so I decided to go for ten hours max, even knowing it was probably a stretch. The total time on this ended up being 14h, 20mins. So much for the four hours thing. There were several reasons it took so long, the first being that I just underestimated how long it would take, sketching front view faces isn’t the hardest thing around, but there are 16 of them. The sketch took about six hours. The second reason being that this character is very new, he’s been in my head for a long time but this is my first colored artwork of him, so I didn’t have time to do color studies. I just went with how he appeared in my head, which didn’t translate well onto a canvas as I will explain in a bit. The third reason is that I didn’t know exactly how I wanted to do this. I wanted to shade this the way I would do a comic page, but I hadn’t figured out exactly how I wanted to do different lightings and stuff in a comic and still make it consistent. I eventually landed on different shades of purple for different lighting, all on a multiply layer. I airbrushed on some shading too. Also, I went back and forth with the background. I wanted each box to be a different desaturated color, but that didn’t turn out so I hid that layer and just toned the canvas. All this back and forth and general color nonsense added probably four hours or more when it should have taken maybe one hour or so.

As for the character, I shall explain him now ;v;. He is a character from my story idea that I plan to make into a comic. None of the characters from this story have names yet, so he is just “character C”, I call him “C”. It’s kinda pathetic that he doesn’t have a name yet, but he has a backstory and personality and I know the role he’ll play and his character dynamics ect. This description is gonna get super long, so all you need to know for now is that he is actually a major villain/antagonist, he gets redeemed and becomes a good guy later, and he was raised in a cult. I struggled with this a lot because of the colors. In my head, he’s always been blond with blue eyes and light skin, but he still looked kinda scary and intimidating in my minds eye. When I put it to digital paper, the color palette just made him look SUPER angelic. I tried making his skin more tan, which made sense with the hot climate I imagined and helped break up all the light tones to make him look like he at least COULD be a bad guy, but it just wasn’t how I pictured him. I didn’t want to make any design changes before I even drew him as I imagined, so I just left it and hoped to fix it with shading. Another thing I should mention, is that I wanted to draw him differently based on the tone of the story, aka how I want the viewer to see him. There’s lots of places in the story where I would want the reader to feel bad for him or see him as a good person, so in those scenes I actually plan to draw his feature softer (bigger eyes, fluffier hair...). In scenes where I want him to look intimidating or badass, I would draw him looking scarier and make his hair much more spikey. I could make him the kind of villain who looks super nice and angelic, but is actually super scary and bad, but that just isn’t what I want him to be, and it would invalidate my whole drawing him different thing. Whatever, I’ll figure it out soon enough when I properly design him, but if anyone has ideas feel free to suggest them.

About the actual expressions thing, yeah, I’ll share my newfound wisdom. If anyone read this far, leave a comment with the word “incomprehensible” in it. You can comment just that or hide it discreetly, I just wanna know how many people actually read the whole thing lmao. I’ve found that drawing a bunch of wrinkles in the face is hella fun, I usually add them by and between the eyebrows if the character is doing anything with their eyebrows, I add lines across the nose bridge if the character is scrunching up their nose, and for more intense and visceral emotions I put a bunch of lines under the eyes. As long as you put the wrinkles close enough to the eyelid they won’t make your character look old I promise. Wrinkles also add a ton to the emotion, you can zoom in if you want to know more about their placement. Keep in mind where the character is looking, for #13 he’s supposed to be scared, so I have him looking up to imply that whatever he’s scared of is looming over him. For #8 he is embarrassed or shameful, so he is avoiding eye contact. #16 was meant to be a disgusted expression, I implied that whatever he is disgusted by is below his eye level, and so on. I feel like it’s hard to give advice on expressions in general, and easier to explain a specific emotion, so if you need help with how to do a specific face you can just ask me.

I am open to constructive criticism, please let me know your thoughts! ^-^