Ask for help: How to draw a large smile?

by Rinne, December 1st 2022 © 2022 Rinne

Whenever I try to draw a large smile, it always looks very stiff and scary.
How should I modify them to make them look natural?

And are there any effective exercises for portraying expressions?

===========================

80% of the content of my text is translated by the DeepL translator. I am very sorry if this causes any inconvenience in terms of expression and understanding.

Cave Paint

You have a very nice sense of structure to the face. And the line quality is confident.

the most off putting thing is going to be some of the pupils of the eyes do not sit properly within the eye lid. Unless it is an extreme expression the lid on either the top or bottom is going to cover up part of the iris.

as far as the mouth goes, as a person smiles the distance between the top of the lip and the bottom of the nose will shrink.

there is either one of two things, that is going on here and only can tell what the problem is going to be. 1. You might be depending to much on proportion measuments to lay out a structure to your drawing. Proportion should be checked against the subject before applying them to the page. Because the measurements that are different from the standard are what makes a person an individual. OR 2. Your tangents are throwing you off. You tend to fight overlapping shapes either placing them to far apart or making the outlines touch. Shapes that overlap and cause a “T” like intersection with the outline give the image depth. So learn to embrace those moments.

I really don’t think proption is a problem but I just wanted to put that in your brain as a possibility.

2
Rinne

Thank you so much for the advice!

I hadn't noticed that the distance between the nose and mouth shortens when I smile, thanks for reminding me, I'll try to focus on the effect of expression on the proportions!

About the eyes, I did pay attention to whether the eyelids cover the iris, but when the character is so happy or surprised that the eyelids don't cover the iris, My works become weird, not like the character is opening the eyes wide but more like the character doesn't have upper eyelids, maybe I didn't draw the muscles around the eyes well.

I have read about the role of the "T" shape in enhancing the depth of the picture in some art books, and I will focus on practicing this from now on.

Thanks again for your reply!

Bigboom

Well, have you tried decreasing the thickness of the lineart? I mean, with digital There's always a way to make the brush smaller to give a more delicate effect, of course with the traditional one there's no way to do that unless you have specific pens, so try to make the wrinkle lines with a lighter fist. I hope it helped you :)

2
Rinne

Thanks for the advice! I do have the problem of when drawing wrinkles, I will try to correct.

Polyvios Animations

Hello, rinne, and welcome aboard, and how are you this finest evening? Greatest work on your structure, forces, negative spaces within the shapes and lines, and facial relationships, but the gestures of most all of the faces above don't seem to feel and look the most natural and most gladdest yet. Why don't you kindly free up your dominand and non-dominant hands with 30 mins of 30 second expressions of smile sketches ambidextrously, really if you haven't already.

The reason why you should try out this littlest trick is because to make your understanding of the facial movements the least stiffest and the most alive and mostly intrinsically motivated. For more details, look into some Proko tutorials on YouTube and Pinterest on faces and expressions.

Good luck to you, and I hope you've found this things completely and ultimately helpful.

1
Rinne

Hi Polyvios, good evening. Thanks for your reply!

I'm actually practicing 30 mins of sketching, and the smiles shown above are 5 and 10 mins of sketching. 5 and 10 mins sketching does make some progress, but 30 second sketches don't seem to make much progress for some reason.

And the problem of "stiff muscle lines" is almost always present in my sketches ......

I've been following proko's youtube channel and the tutorials are really good!