25 Essential Expressions

Hi everyone!

While browsing http://www.deviantart.com, I came across a really great exercise for artists:

25 Essential Expressions Exercise by Nancy Lorenz

(25 Essential Expressions is copyright © Nancy Lorenz. Clicking on this link will take you outside of Mangastart.com. Mangastart.com is not responsible for any liabilities found on this external link.)

This sheet provides spaces for 25 fundamental expressions: download the image, print it out, and fill out as many as you can. Or, if you prefer drawing digitally, you can just draw directly over it. How much time you want to spend on each one is completely up to you - if you browse through DeviantArt and type “25 Essential Expressions” in the search bar, you’ll be able to see a ton of other artists’ interpretations.

Whether you draw manga/comics professionally or doodle occasionally as a hobby, practicing expressions is important for the same reasons in real life: expressions convey emotions, feelings, and unspoken statements. Sometimes all it takes is a glimpse of one expression to understand an entire situation. In the case of manga, expressions are important because it’s a balance between drawings and dialogue - you wouldn’t want to end up reading a novel whenever you picked up a manga, right? XD There are a lot of things that you can say without actually say them, and that’s an important lesson for artists, as we are very visual people by nature and can often read between the lines even when nothing is actually said or written out.

For the more advanced artist, expressions are important especially if you have one particular character that you work with. You wouldn’t want a manga full of one character who had the same expression all the time, right? (Well, unless that’s the character’s personality, of course, but even then, there are ways to express emotion alternative to the face!)

I would encourage everyone to try out this exercise - and please, share them when you’re done! We’d love to see them. I will even encourage the rest of the MangaStart staff to do it too, as well as try it out myself. XD