Colour and the six basic facial expressions

When you're drawing facial expressions, you have a big advantage if you're using colour. Take a look at this identification parade. These are symbols of the six basic human facial expressions: Sadness, Joy, Anger, Fear, Disgust and Surprise.

Half shut your eyes until the faces turn into blobs. Well, even more like blobs than they are already. Given good eyesight, you won't need a degree in physiognomy to pick out who's feeling blue, who's seeing red and who's going a little green. Sunny-Smile and White-With-Fright should present few obstacles. Admittedly Surprise is a difficult one, but you can't have everything. (I've never quite understood why the exception proves the rule, but it's a good get-out.)

Expression lines

Without colour you can see below that each face (or if you like, symbol) contains only the features that most express the emotion it represents. Or rather, that I feel most express it. If you don't agree, good. That means you'll reach for a bit of paper and start doodling yourself. In no time at all you'll be involved in a revealing and fascinating game.

If you don't think you can draw, bear in mind that there are two kinds of drawing. And you only need to learn one of them. You've been able to do symbol drawing ever since you could hold a crayon.

The face game

This face-drawing game is very like a procedure that one of the earliest cartoonists, Rodolphe Topffer evolved a century and a half ago. He maintained that to draw emotions, you didn't need to spend years of slavish copying from models and marble busts, as art students did in those days.

...Where was I? Ah yes. You were just reaching for a piece of paper and a pen or pencil. You were about to draw a rough shape with eyes and a mouth.

We're wired to see faces and read what mood they're in from the moment we're born. Our survival depends on it. However rough your scribble, rest assured that not only will it be seen as a face. It will have an expression.

You can either decide what facial expression you've drawn, or go for one of the classics - sad, happy, angry, fearful, disgusted or surprised. If you go for happy, alter the lines or draw another face to make it look happier. (Try making a smiley face. Whether or not you like them, smileys can throw some useful light on drawing facial expressions.)

...Now draw another face to make it even happier. Another to make it more delighted still, and so on until you simply cannot make it any happier.

Now have a go at a Gloomy. (A sad smiley is rather a contradiction in terms so I call it a Gloomy.)

Drawing

The easiest way of drawing faces is with a tablet and stylus. (Don't try drawing on your computer with a mouse. It's likely to put you off digital drawing for good.) Try a tablet and stylus with Photoshop Elements or another computer art editor. The stylus gives you all the precision of a pen, plus you can keep the expressive lines you like while easily erasing the ones that don't advance your cause. That's important because once a line expresses just what you want it to, it's almost impossible to recapture that first fine careless rapture.

Almost any shape with two dots and a dash in roughly the right place will be seen as a face. However, once the face is seen, the artist's easy ride comes to an abrupt end. The minutest variation in a line can completely alter the character and expression of a face. If you've ever tried painting a portrait, you'll know that it only takes the tiniest dot of white in an eye to turn a lively gleam into a mad stare!

Finding the features that make the expression

You may find it's the mouth that makes the difference to the facial expression of emotions. Sometimes it's the eyes, or it could be the eyebrows. You may not think of eyebrows, but they're important. I'm always intrigued by the dog Gromit in the Wallace and Gromit films. Gromit uses his mouth to drink the odd mug of coffee, but that's about it. He never makes a sound. All the facial expression comes from his eyes and eyebrows - yet you can almost hear him thinking.

PS There's another version of the face-making game. If you have a smartphone with a touch screen or a Pocket PC, have a go!