anime drawing emotions anonymous

zumstein22141 April 16, 2023 Comment

Just like in real life, the facial expressions of characters in manga and anime are essential for understanding emotion and communicating nonverbally. Everything from the size and shape of the eyes, to the way the mouth rests can say a lot about how a character is feeling or what they’re thinking.

For this guide, we’ll be going over some common emotions and how best to portray them in your drawings. Using images as references (or even looking at yourself in the mirror) will be extremely beneficial to get you started.

Expressing happiness in your manga character is one of the easier emotions to work with and there are several different way to draw it.

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Let’s start with the eyes – generally, when a character is happy, their eyes get excessively large with a bit of glare and their brows arch high.

* Refer to the “Drawing Manga Eyes” tutorial for a refresher on eye basics. (Or here for a complete guide to drawing manga)

When a character is very excited, their eyes are often drawn closed. To get this effect, all you need to do is draw a thin line arching either upward and add a few lashes and wrinkles for detail. For female characters, some blushing lines under the eyes can be added as well.

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For the mouth, you can either draw it open wide to show excitement, or closed with a small smile to express general happiness and satisfaction. Not much details goes into a closed mouth, but when it’s open you will want to expose some of the top teeth as well as the tongue and add a bit of shading under the bottom lip.

Another very common emotion, and one that’s fairly simple to draw, is sadness. To express this, draw the eyes much more narrow than they normally would be, with the eyebrows curving downward.

By adding aggressive shading under the brows, you can really invoke a feeling of depression in the character. If you want to go one step further, add some tears on the bottom eyelids.

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For the mouth, you can again draw it open or closed, but this time it will be arching downward. If you decide to go with an open mouth, you won’t have to draw any teeth; you just need a small, frown, open just enough to see a bit of the tongue.

If you’re a fan of action manga and anime, you should be familiar with seeing characters who are angry. Anger is one of the most detail oriented expressions to draw, and you can really experiment with different shapes and lines.

Starting with the eyes - you’ll want them to be a lot more pointed and narrow than usual. Use harsh lines, large pupils, and dark shadows to make it seem like the eyes are sunken. It’s also alright to go a little crazy with wrinkles for this expression.

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You can have a lot of fun with the mouth as well. Is your character so angry, they’re yelling? Or are they holding back with a bitter scowl on their face.

Start with a large, rectangular shape with rounded corners. The top lip area should curve upward, while the bottom lip (slightly longer than the top) remains straight. You’ll want to show both the top and bottom teeth, as well as the tongue, and add a lot of shading under the bottom lip.

You can be creative on how large the mouth should be, how many teeth are showing, and the amount of shadow you use. Similar to how you drew sadness, you’ll want features to arch downward and be mainly dark.

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Portraying surprise in a manga character is pretty similar to happiness - They’ll typically have large, exaggerated eyes and a small mouth. The main difference being the amount of detail you add.

The pupils should be drawn very small, while the white of the eyes very large and round. Add a lot of tiny lines around the pupils and outside of the lids to make it seem like the person is shaking a bit.

For the eyebrows, you’ll want to make them very dramatic. From the inside of the face, they should swoop down towards the top lids, then follow the arch of the eye in a sort of “S” shape.

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The mouth can either be drawn extremely large to show excitement, or small and curved to express disbelief. For a large, excited look, you can mimic the mouth you drew for happiness, but exaggerate the size even more. For a smaller mouth, you’ll want to draw a frown, open just enough to see the tongue. Add extra lines and bottom lip shading to add to the dramatics.

The way you draw expressions should be characteristic of your own style. For practice, try copying some drawings from your favorite manga artists. Once you feel comfortable mimicking someone else’s style, you can adapt those techniques to your own.Drawing Anime expressions comes down to lots of practice and memorization of certain patterns in the facial features. Once we internalize how the elements of expression work – the eyes, the eyebrows, the nose, and the mouth, we can adjust to convey a set of varying expressions. Understanding how facial features come to form expressions such as laughter, confusion, anger, happiness, sadness, excitement and so on, we can become confident and comfortable at drawing Anime expressions from our memory.

Let’s start by studying the most common facial expressions in Anime and Manga art. We will use a classic example Neon Genesis Evangelion, as well as some others.

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For each redrawn frame in this guide, we will go through the analysis of the composition of the facial features that provide for a specific expression.

Without further ado, let’s then start on our important work of identifying how features are adjusted to achieve the desired emotion in an Anime drawing.

Before we get into specific expressions and how to draw them, it is important to discuss exactly what we will be working with. When developing a new expression for your Anime characters, realize that you are working with specific elements. Here they are:

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This means as we evaluate expressions, pay attention to the eyes and the lips first. How were they drawn to express happiness, anger, sadness, excitement, surprise, and so on? Try identifying them separately. First, segment the features and look at them separately and also look at them in that order: eyes and lips, eyebrows, nose, then the silhouette of the face.

Further, when we set out to redraw some expressions, or design expressions of our own, try this approach of designing elements in a sequence:

Excitement, happiness, laughter are all interrelated emotions and represented very closely in Anime art. Laughter and general feeling of happiness is usually accompanied by an open mouth, closed eyes that follow the roundness of the eyebrows and some indicator of emotional spike on the cheeks – usually a form of crosshatching is employed, or change of color to show blushing.

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Happy and content feelings are similarly represented, mostly with the lips closed. Lips are drawn in an arc curving up communicating that the character is pleased or content.

Look closely at the line representing the mouth at the above drawing, the line is thicker at the edges and disappears in the middle. Where the line ceases to exist is an area where the lips are pressed closer together, resulting in less of an opening for the shadows to occur.

One of the ways to draw a content or happy face when drawing Anime expressions is to create a careful half-smile with the lips closed, and draw the eyes open not too wide, as well as have the eyebrows follow the shape of the eye.

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To show laughter or joy, we can further manipulate the facial features. Remember, we are working with the eyebrows, the eyes, the nose, the lips and the shape of the cheeks/jaw in orchestrating our emotions on Anime characters. In the example right above, the eyes are closet shut, the jaw is open (except in many angles, instead of moving the jaw down, the nose moves up on the face to make space for the open mouth, note this is not the case in real life. In reality, the bottom of the jaw moves down, and the top (above upper lip) and the nose stay stationary). The teeth are showing.

In the example above, a female character is drawn in a similar way: the eyes are closed, and the teeth are on display. Feelings of joy are largely expressed by the eyebrows and the corners of the mouth. Also, notice the tilt of the head, she is kicking her head back, as people often do when they are laughing or smiling.

Sadness is usually represented with the eyes shown as staring into the distance, as if staring at something beyond the tangible materials items in the vicinity. The above frame can express sadness or concern. The lines that develop the lips are carefully designed and drawn to indicate displeasure. The eyebrow is lowered close to the eye. Both work in tandem to create a foreboding feeling.