i've been fixated on pkmn lately!!
I will make future trio cuddlel if it's the last thing I do. They WILL nerd about exploring their new colour-filled world together. Also who tells Sunflora about the handsome Dusknoir's new team.
decided to stream some doodles on discord!
the battery for my pen had actually died so I did all of these with both my finger and my laptop mouse lol
Also as someone who usually starts screaming internally when trying to draw a bionicle mask with expressions,
How the beans do you do it? what's your process?
Hooog I admittedly have a lot of trouble explaining my methodology when it comes to art but I'll do my best.
It's pretty much a process of boiling down the key elements that make a character distinctive and then mapping those onto a cartoon head, and then making adjustments that follow whatever stylistic rules you keep in place.
The most key parts of a cartoon face when you're going for readable/extreme expressions are the eyes, eyebrows, cheeks, and mouth. This is pretty neutral, but in more extreme expressions, the face shape itself distorts- how much is up to your discretion, I tend to go pretty subtle.
For me, most important thing to remember is how the "cheek" region being moved affects the shape of the eye. It's less of an overt element and moreso a physical mass in the face that's important to keep in mind when building expressions.
I also tend to stylize characters pretty heavily so that they're quicker for me to draw. the Miramax movies and Templar animations honestly did a lot of the heavy lifting for me here in terms of simplifying the physical toys into something more parseable, but even then I've kind of corrupted them down into something distinctly mine, which just takes a lot of drawing these characters (this is relevant because a simpler character design means you have more freedom for expressions).
I was thinking about doing a breakdown of each specific feature I feel is integral to these characters but I realized my point would be more gracefully illustrated by drawing the characters as they actually appear in MoL.
i sure have, uh. made some changes. By emphasizing the eyes and making the overall features simpler, I can do much more with them in a shorter amount of time than I could if I were being completely loyal to the original designs (note: this is why characters intended for animation, particularly 2D TV animation, tend to be very simply designed).
The rest of it is just practice, I'm afraid. In a ton of drawings I'll need to redraw the faces several times to get the expression as close as I can to what I have in my head. Getting references for specific expressions can also help, though admittedly it's not something I do as much as I should.
Here's one of the first times I drew these two as Matoran, back in Feb 2020. Practice takes a long time but it genuinely does pay off.
Hopefully this was somewhat helpful, at least! The most important thing is to just keep drawing and not get permanently discouraged, it'll all come in time.
