rotting

i would avoid any harsh lines/super definition on the face. i usually add a soft touch of shading or a few very, very light lines, usually to show the fullness of the cheeks like i've done with eloise above.

there are exceptions. sometimes my characters like wilma and all of her children have dimples or a particular way their eyebrow crinkles, or some other definable feature. all that is okay! but just know the more lines you add to a character, the older they look--so you want to use a lighter hand when drawing very young children or babies.

as children age, they "grow" into their facial features. their heads are usually still a bit bigger in proportion to their bodies, with a jawline that is beginning to define, but still relatively soft.

with ellen and leon below, you can tell they are several years older than eloise above, but not so old they begin to look like teenagers or mini adults.

[Cueball is standing, with his arms out, in front of a Prototaxite towering over a mossy landscape. To his right, a Tamagotchi (bottom-left) and milk-caps (referred to in this comic as "pogs", top-left) appear. The 3 milk-caps that can be seen show a skull with a snake through its eyeball, a figure 8 & a star (3 more milk-caps are also shown, but have obscured pictures).] Cueball: Who else remembers pogs? Tamagotchis? Vast forests of Prototaxites towering over the mossy landscape as armored fish stir in the deep?