Making Faces: Drawing Expressions For Comics And Cartoons

by 8fish

Chances are, you already know how to draw some expressions. But face it, your stories can only get so far with "happy," "sad" and "angry." In order to give your characters some character, you need to know what they look like when they're about to sneeze, when they smell something stinky or when they're flirting, horrified or completely blotto. Lucky for you, that's what this book is all about! Making Faces contains everything you need to give your characters a wide range of expressions! Part 1: The Basics. How to draw heads, mouths, noses and eyes, and how they change shape when they move.
Part 2: The Faces. Over 50 step-by-step demonstrations for a variety of expressions divided into scenarios. Each scenario shows four or five expressions from a single character, from simple emotions to more subtle and complex variations, so you see how a face changes with each emotion. Sidebars illustrate the same expressions on a variety of other characters.
Part 3: Storytelling. How to move your story along using expression, point of view, body language and composition. See how it all comes together with damsels in distress, a noir-style interrogation, a Western standoff and other situations. Illustrated with a diverse cast of characters from hobos to superheroes to teenage girls, this guide will help you create the looks that say it all.

Genres: Art, Drawing, Animation, Reference, Nonfiction

176 pages, Paperback

First published June 27, 2008

Reviews

[Ietrio]

Far from being written by a talented person, it can be quite useful for the first steps of the child. And the book is far less formulaic than others in the same range.

[Andrea]

A bit self-important and unnecessarily smart at times, but it was fun to see different styles. Probably useful for a beginner hobby artist.

[favio]

Pretty good

The book was good but more for beginners.
The illustrations were stylish and instructive. Not to mention funny. The level of expression of the drawings are awesome definitely good starter work.

[Jaime Guzman]

A good start on facial expressions

The book goes over the fundamentals of drawing faces and later gets into facial expressions. Each artist brings their own individual art style and their drawing process of developing facial expressions. A good book to have in a cartoonist's library.
Avoid the Kindle version of this book which has grainy images and the intro page that introduces the artists is unreadable.

[Susan]

The guys who wrote this book are talented. But a lot of the expressions are incorrect. They combine positions of mouth and eyes that the human face can't actually make. And while many of the expressions are clever, and confidently and boldly drawn, they quite often don't express the particular emotions they claim to illustrate. I don't honestly think it's a book to learn much from. Also every image of a female in the book is oppressive. And it's egregiously white.

[Desepe De]

Sorry I bought this

When I first saw the book, I was happy to get it and add it to my reference library. I wish there was a way to look inside books in more detail. There were only 2 images of a Black person; one was of the artist Andre 3000 and other was of a Black man as a villain. Seriously? That's the only image of a Black man? A villain?
Enough is enough. I'm so sorry I spent my money on this!

[Stef Garvin]

I enjoyed the diversity of style in the book and the input of different artists. The variety of characters was helpful in exploring different approaches.