Trying to reacquaint myself with how to draw characters after a month of mostly drawing buildings an

Trying to reacquaint myself with how to draw characters after a month of mostly drawing buildings and designing light

So here’s a nifty little

tutorial on pushing expression without caricaturing the characters too much 

The thing about these actors is that their expressions rely so much like micro expressions to carry very very heavy emotion across in fairly restrained people, so either we caricature/stylise their faces and make them more comic-y or we rely on rules of design to push a more realistic style.

In the case of Jyn and Cassian the expression is a lot in the eyes, so we’ll focus on that:

Eg: usually with sadness, the eyebrows will pull up at the centre, pulling the eyes with it with a triangle where its highest point is closest to the bridge of the nose. But Cassian’s eyebrows don’t always do that. Sometimes he furrows them instead, but we can still play with that triangle!

So what I do, is I usually have the line of the eyelid moving up like the eyebrow, emphasising that as the long shape, and have the lines inside the eyebrows move in a rhythm to emphasise that triangle. Similarly I’ll try to draw the shape of the eye socket in a shape that also emphasises that (here I’m using diamonds, because squares are better for masculine characters).

Further, I changed the edge of his cap so it moves up subtly, rather than down, to emphasise that sadness once more time.

Same with Jyn. Here, too, I’ve furrowed her brow a little more than it was in the original shot, because eyebrows that move up can also imply joy, and the realisation that they’re trapped on Scarif definitely is not joyful.

Compare to this one, where I had the lines inside his eyebrows push down on the eyes, and the eyeshade tilted a little to emphasise the downward turn at the centre of the face.