Expressive Faces

One of the most challenging things for an artist--well, for me at least--is drawing and painting the expressions we encounter in our fellow humans. Portrait painters are mostly constrained in the range of facial expression they can produce. Dignity and seriousness generally prevail. In the golden age of illustration, an adept magazine or book illustrator could and did draw or paint people with very expressive faces. Some used photographic references but some (Albert Dorne, for example) did their work from imagination and experience. Probably video game artists and cgi art are where such feats of artistic legerdemain are most likely to be found today.

Expressive faces have been said fall into a simple classification: happiness, surprise, anger, disgust, fear, sadness, and neutral. Gary Faigin's useful book, The Artists Complete Guide to Facial Expression provides examples of each, drawn expressly for the book. Anyone who wants to produce believable drawings of human faces ought to at least have a look. Still, humans and human faces are more complex, expressions sometimes seem to be present, if mixed, in a single look or a momentary glance. Anger and fear are commonly melded in one look; surprise and happiness are common together, and so on.

So for me, drawing examples of complex expressive faces is another way to practice.

"Sadness," (detail), graphite on paper

This particular sketch dates from a few years back when I first began to study facial characteristics, trying to work that information into portraiture. The reference was probably a photo I saw online. Besides my interest in rendering volumes of the hair and skull it was important to me that the expression came through accurately. This is one of several dozen sketches during that time.

"Louis," charcoal on laid paper, 11x14

Another complex look resulted in this charcoal portrait of Louis Armstrong. Most images of Satchmo show him looking joyful and animated, with a big pearly grin and/or bulging eyes. But this particular one shows a serious man, a weary man with a touch of sorrow. His scarred upper lip and open stare gave me an entirely different sense of the man behind the facade, which became the point of the drawing.

The picture actually began as a study of charcoal techniques. I was practicing method rather than paying much attention to the drawing itself. But as I drew the envelope of the head lightly with soft vine charcoal on blue laid paper then built the volumes the seriousness and humanity of the face took over. I developed the portrait with vine and compressed charcoal in various hardnesses until an appropriate end point arrived then called it done.

"Anguish," digital sketch

Over the past couple of years one of the tools that has made it possible to do literally dozens of sketches and studies easily and quickly is the digital art program Sketchbook (and other digital drawing programs, to a lesser extent). During these last months, my work has returned to facial structure, expressions, and overall gesture. Here is a digital sketch, again done with Sketchbook and a Cintiq tablet), showing a man who is obviously very sad--grieving perhaps, for the death or loss of a loved one. Certainly he is well beyond sadness. The powerful online reference that caught my eye was an animated GIF that seemed to show a man sobbing, perhaps uncontrollably, but the rudimentary animation may be responsible. In any event, the man's facial expression was wrenching in its naked anguish and deep suffering. It is sadness magnified to unbearable.

Of course, many other expressions convey sadness in various ways and with many other emotions mixed in. The final drawing below is an elderly person whose sadness looked deep and resigned, to me. She gazes wistfully at something distant that only she can see. Her vanished youth? A bittersweet memory? Only in her mind's eye does it live. Both of these were drawn digitally as practice studies of expression without any plan to carry them further.

Studying complex facial expressions is one of those pursuits that at its best may provide creative electricity for the future.

"Sadness and Resignation," digital

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More on Expressions
Facial Expression
Artists Guide to Facial Expressions