The basic emotions are a cross-cultural, universal medium of expression. You can use this medium to tell a story.
That’s why I’m creating some expression boards and guidelines for drawing my characters – here Taja – with watercolors, so that I can replicate them more easily later and see in advance how the individual facial expressions work, or whether they still need some work.
Here I’m trying an approach that’s as easy to replicate as possible to draw the character over and over again. Parts of the face are broken down into simple geometric shapes and guidelines are drawn.
Secondary emotions such as pride, gratitude and jealousy can later be derived from the basic emotions. The rough drawing is painted over with ink line art and then filled in with watercolors. At the end I have a reference image with the six basic emotions, which later helps to ensure that the character does not change too much over time.
In this phase I also test other perspectives and how I create them. Here you can see that I shorten the snout a bit in the second attempt.
I usually color the pictures to get a real “feel” of how the pictures will look later.
These are some of Taja’s original rough drafts. Some of the pictures also have notes how they were designed. With each new draft, the character develops further, from the first idea to the final improvement. The top three pictures are each different attempts, the bottom three are iterations of the picture in the top right.
It’s also important to look for good references beforehand, or when you need something like a certain facial expression, when you want to find out where a particular wrinkle is on the face. When I stream character creation, I take some time before the stream to look for suitable references and solidify an idea. This makes the process in the stream much smoother.
