I Really Needed It :)

I really needed it :)

(My response to @hyperchef ‘s reblog of this post)

Making an exaggerated expression that doesn’t look weird is mostly about figuring out what to exaggerate in order to convey the desired emotion. For instance, when a character is angry, exaggerate their brow line. When a character is happy, exaggerate their smile. When a character is sad, exaggerate their eyes. Examples:

By accentuating certain features, you can convey more intense emotions without it looking weird or off. Most emotions have a main focus point to which we subconsciously notice and use to figure out what someone else is feeling. Some more complex ones would be Disgust exaggerates the mouth, surprise accentuates the eyebrows, eyes and hair, sleepy exaggerates the mouth, eyes and eyebrows, and pain exaggerates everything all at once.

So for your eyes, problem, there are some tricks for drawing the tmnt eyes. Now I’m not sure exactly which style you’re talking about, but since you said you previously were working with realistic shapes, I’m guessing you’re having trouble with the Rise style.

Rise seems to have a “standard shape” for their eyes. It’s generally a rounded parallelogram. It’s composed of four convex lines that are sharpest at the eye’s tear ducts and point. The bottom is typically flat, though Leo and Donnie often have the top be completely flat and the bottom much more round, like a semi-circle.

As for the pupils, I honestly struggle a lot with this as well. I think the most important thing is to establish almost like certain standard sizes. So just keep scribbling a circle until you think it’s the appropriate size to be your standard middle size. From there you can make it bigger or smaller depending on the emotion.

so if the one on the far left is the standard, then the one in the middle is a sad smile and the one on the right is horrified shock.

You have to be careful though, I’ve found through my experience that it’s easy to become desensitized to this kind of thing. You draw a small pupil to show shock but after looking at it too long or drawing to many characters expressing that emotion, somehow it doesn’t look small enough anymore.

The same can happen in the other direction, you want a sweet expression but for some reason as soon as you’re happy with how big and round the pupil is, it’s already not enough. This is cause by you setting your eye to think that that is the standard size and now you think that the pinprick is the mid point, so “surprised” has to be smaller than that.

It’s actually really easy to undo this phenomenon, just erase the pupil, draw you pre-established standard, look at it for minute, then erase it and go back to what you were doing. This kind of thing is about relativity.

If you’re still having trouble with this stuff, you can message me with more questions that I can help you with and answer!

I hope you found this helpful. Expressions are tricky to nail. I usually draw and redraw the expressions in ROTP two or three times before I’m satisfied, and even then I’m constantly tweaking them. Don’t feel bad for not absolutely nailing it on the first try, just make sure you keep trying and tweaking your technique until you can make something you’re proud of!

Good questions! :]