Gorilla Cartoons

When it comes to portrait drawing, emotions are what breathe life to the faces that we draw. Without them, our drawings would be dead and flat. In order to portray emotions convincingly, we must be familiar with the facial expressions that comprise them.

Fortunately, most of the heavy lifting of this task has been done for us. Researches have discovered that there are 6 universal emotional expressions that re common in all of us. And the details of these expressions have also been well documented.

This information is tremendously useful for the portrait drawing artists and in my attempt to learn how to draw people faces; I’ve sought out Dr. Ekman’s books. In this article, I’d like to share with you the six universal expressions and the traits that distinguish them. You can use this knowledge to learn how to draw people faces.

Surprised: The main feature of surprise is that the mouth is wide open and the eyes are also very open.

Fear: In fear the face is very tense. The eyes are wide open and the mouth is ajar. The tension in the face is the main different between fear and surprised.

Disgust: The face is wrinkled and the mouth and nose is pulled up. The lips are pull upward slightly. The intensity of the feeling will be collated with the wrinkling of the face.

Anger: The main features of anger are that the eyebrows are drawing tightly together. The nostrils flare and there is a lot of tension in the mouth.

Joy: This one should be familiar to most people. The mouth widens in a smile and the eyes become smaller as the cheek pushed upward. One key about the smile is that there are wrinkles on the sides of the eyes called “crow’s feet.” Unlike anger, there is no tension in the face.

Sadness: The inner corners of the eyebrows are raised and the eye’s have a slight downward slant. The mouth is also curved downward and the entire faces seem to sag down. Although interestingly in some cases of extreme sadness, there is a complete lack of emotion.

Now that you know how to draw these different emotions, you’ll be able to put a lot more life into your drawings when practicing drawing portraits.

To learn about drawing eyes simply go to my blogand check out all the FREE lessons that I’ve posted there. You’ll learn things like how to sketch people and much more.