here be things

Drawing basic facial expressions is not the hardest. Most people can draw a sad face, a happy face, angry etc., but making more multidimensional expressions is more of a challenge. I have gotten a lot of compliments on how I draw facial expressions, (specifically “angsty ones”) telling me that they are very dramatic and well… expressive! And there are actually only a few things I think about when I draw faces that take them to the next level, so I thought i’d illustrate them all here!

SUPER IMPORTANT TIP BEFORE WE START: Look at your own face when you draw faces. Even making the face when you are drawing (you don’t even have to look at it), will give you some sense of how the face muscles pull and where things fold and stretch, because you can feel it. You are the best reference when it comes to facial expressions!

Angles 

Draw the head in an angle that matches the expressions you want to make. It is not a requirement, but is going to add to the effect.

Symmetry vs asymmetry 

A face is rarely symmetric. Unless the face the character is making is 100 % relaxed or even dissociating, the eyebrows, mouth and facial muscles will have different placements of their respective side. This image shows the dramatic impact asymmetry has on a face: 

That’s the difference between a smile and a smirk!

The first one’s like “oh yeah?” and the second is like “oH YEAH??”

The “balloon squishing principle”

This is something I did subconsciously, and I didn’t know about until I made this tutorial. And this principle goes hand in hand with an asymmetric face. Basically, if you squish one part of the face, you need to even out the empty space by “inflating” the other part of the face so that it doesn’t appear shrunken. The picture hopefully explains it:

Teeth 

Don’t forget to add the gum when the mouth is open to its full potential!

Squinting and folding

Adding folds around the eyes when a character is squinting makes a HUGE difference. It makes a smile more genuine and a growl more intimidating. Adding folds to the face in general makes your characters more lifelike and ‘visually relatable’. Like, they look human, and less plastic or fake.

and so on..

Pupils and irises 

The placement of the iris and pupil in relation to the eyelids is very important! The less of the white you see, the more relaxed the character is. 

And then of course eyebrows and eyes go hand in hand!

Gestures, spitting, sweating… 

Adding more elements than just a face is key to making the character actually look like they are feeling what you want them to feel. Just the tiniest sweat drop adds to their anxiety, spitting adds frustration to their rage, slouching shoulders, waving hands, a double chin, extreme angles, the list goes on! Add whatever and see what kind of impact it makes! Does it do the trick? Great! Add it! 

Over exaggeration!! 

Remember that you can almost always exaggerate more. Don’t be afraid to do draw “too much” because you’re just experimenting. See what works and what doesn’t. What do you like to exaggerate?

Now that you know some theory, it’s time to practice!

Practicing!! 

The 25 Essential Expressions (a classic! I’ve done it multiple times)

And the one I do when I’m bored:

Fill a page with circles and fill them in with different expressions. Try and exaggerate as much as you can! 

This is mostly for experimenting. They are quicker to draw than complete faces, but the same rules should apply!

And that’s about it!

When i started as a dishwasher, i was trained by an old career dish pit man named Claudio. He'd spent his whole life washing dishes. It allowed him to move to just about any city in the world that he wanted to and get a job without having to deal with complex hiring processes or strict resumé requirements. Which was the main thing he wanted out of a career. I still think about him.

He'd seen a lot of people come through that station who either didn't consider it a real job or thought it was beneath them, on their way to "better" or "more important" things. And, in retrospect, those first two days he was sort of doing the minimum with me that he could do and still respect himself when he told the manager he'd trained me.

But, maybe it was because i was really interested in learning all the positions there were in a restaurant because i knew they were ALL important, or because i was a hard worker, or maybe it was because i tried to have real conversations with him in my broken spanish and did my best to not make him speak any english unless he wanted to, but after a couple days there was a big shift in the way he and i worked together, and he started to really teach me.

That place ran the dish pit with one dishwasher, so when he was done training me I was going to be doing the job on my own.

The thing that stuck with me the most, for the rest of my restaurant career, was this... and it wasn't just the actual things he was saying, but a completely new way of looking at what i was doing within the context of how the restaurant ran. I came in for my 3rd day and he said

"When you work alone, you want to go home by midnight?"

we clocked on at 3:30 and took a half hour lunch break and usually skipped our tens, so, yeah i absolutely did want to get off work by midnight

Then, even tho i already knew where most of everything was by that time, he took me around and showed me all the dishes, cups, pots and pans, spatulas, silverware, had me look at all of it. Then he told me to remember that almost every one of the dishes I was looking at would be used more than once by the end of our shift- we were clocking on to wash the entire building full of dishes multiple times.

Then he led me back over to the industrial dishwasher most restaurants have, which looks like this:

and then this 60 year old career dishwasher from Mexico City said the thing that changed how I looked at restaurant jobs forever

"This machine takes two full minutes to run a cycle. We are on the clock for 8 hours. That means we have a maximum of 240 times we can run this machine. If you want to wash all those dishes, clean your station, mop, and clock off by midnight? This machine has to be on and running every second of the shift.

If you don't have a full load of dishes collected, scraped, rinsed, stacked, and ready to go into the dishwasher the second it's done every single time? You can't do it. If, over the course of 8 hours, you let this machine lay idle for just one minute in between finishing each load and being turned on again? Instead of 240 loads, you'll do 160 loads.

[like, literally, he had done this math, he had these exact figures]

160 loads instead of 240 loads means you are doing 20 loads in an hour instead of 30 loads. That means the dishes are going to pile up. The cooks will run out of pots and pans and will have to stop and wait for you, the servers will run out of plates and cups and have to stop and wait for you, and your night is going to SUCK. Every part of how this restaurant works can grind to a halt because of that idle minute between dish loads, and if it does you'll have an entire building of people in a hurry and all waiting on you.

And it means you're going to be here until 2 am doing the 200+ loads of dishes this restaurant goes through every night.

For this to work, you MUST have this dishwasher on and running every minute of the shift. As soon as you turn it on you have two minutes to have the next load ready. See these large items i put to the side down here? One or two of them takes up all the space in the machine. I keep them here so that if the machine finishes and shuts off before i'm ready for it i can stick one of these in there and turn it on again immediately. You have to think like that to do this job without stress."

The way he was looking at how the whole restaurant ran, the way he was looking at how he'd spend each minute of the entire shift, the way he broke down what the physical limits were and how to max them out so he could do his job and go home on time without stressing out... The way this 60 year old guy, who had never had professional ambitions beyond being a dishwasher, was still such a competent and brilliant expert in his field.

It was all such an important lesson, and one that stayed with me through every position i went on to work in restaurants, dish pit, busser, server, cook, all the way up through manager before I finally got out of my restaurant career

Claudio never wanted to be anything but a dishwasher who didn't stay any later than he had to.

But he knew how that restaurant ran better than most of the other people in it. I never had a chance to truly thank him for the specific lesson he taught me, because while it had an immediate impact, I didn't really understand how valuable a lesson it was until much later.

In my younger years I worked at a medical office that managed both mental health and addiction recovery. The company had purchased an empty lot down the road from the building we rented to build a better facility with larger capacity. The CEO worked for months with the architect, and just as they were finalizing everything they happened to let me - who was the receptionist at that time - take a gander at the blueprints. It took all of three seconds for two major issues to jump out at me.

“The receptionist can’t see the waiting room from her desk with this layout.” I said. “It’s around the corner and blocked by a wall.”

“Is that important?” They asked.

“Do you want me to be able to keep track of the patients who are waiting?” I asked.

“Isn’t that what the sign-in sheet is for?” They asked me.

“Not everyone who comes here is signing in for an appointment, some are coming to check in, some people are here for the group therapy and need to be directed to the other side of the building, some people are painfully shy and if I don’t appear warm and inviting they won’t approach.” I explain.

“How often does that even happen?” They asked.

“Every day.” I explain.

“Bullshit.” They said.

“I’m not joking at all. Also, where is the chart room?” I asked.

“Oh, over here.” They said, pointing to a tiny closet on the far side of the building from the receptionist and check out desks. It was tucked neatly beside the CEO’s office. To get there the secretaries would have to go through two sets of security doors and it would be a five minute walk each way.

“Why isn’t it next to the front office, since that’s where the people who use it are?” I asked.

“We had concerns about people just going into the chart room to goof off and not do their work. It takes them away from their desks too much. You should only go in the chart room twice a day - once in the morning to pull the charts for the day, and once in the evening to put way the charts. It would remain locked and the CEO would have the key and let you in to supervise.” They said.

“We pull charts the day before so everything is ready to go and we can alert staff if a patient with additional needs is coming in. We have to go in the chart room every time a patient calls in that’s having a problem with their meds or is in crisis or otherwise has a question for the nurse. We have to go in there every time someone cancels and we are able to fit a waitlisted patient in. We go in there 20 - 30 times a day for legitimate reasons. The only reason any of us has ever gone in there to take a minute was when we got news that a patient had died and we were crying. And even then, we filed charts as we sobbed because no one in this office has free time.”

They stared at me.

“Sit with me for an hour and see what happens up here.” I said.

They took the blueprints away from me before I could keep looking at them, but they took me up on sitting with me. They didn’t last an hour. They changed the blueprints to fix both things I’d pointed out.

Unfortunately, they didn’t let me keep looking at it and they never asked the janitor what he thought, so no one caught the final fatal flaw in the design.

There were no closets in the entire building. Nowhere to put our supplies. And I’m not talking just a place for stationary and pens. I mean no janitorial closet. Nowhere to put paper towels and toilet paper or cleaning products. Nowhere to put holiday decorations or anything at all. They completely forgot about storage of any kind and immediately started eyeballing my hard-won chart room for it.

The system intrinsically abuses poor people.

So the context for this is making people feel annoyed when you interact with them. This is something that’s pretty common with us neurodivergents. I'm not able to respond to this person due to the post settings but I still wanted to respond. They'll probably never see this but whatever.

I grew up annoying the shit out of everyone around me because I wasn't able to pick up on those cues. So I know what it's like. I know what it's like to want to never to speak ever because I'm annoying people. To this day I still annoy the shit out of people, I'm pretty sure. I'm the most active people in group chats that I am active in, I natter on about mundane crap, I say hello to people and I can't tell if they want to be alone or not. I initiate the majority of the social interaction in my life, and I genuinely can't tell if it's because I annoy the shit out of people, if people just don't care about me, or if they're happy to just receive and not initiate themselves. I haven't worked around my autism enough to be able to tell yet.

But ultimately, at the end of the day, "stop talking in public" is not the healthy answer. It's a self pitying one. It can feel like you're punishing people but it's not, because they're probably not going to notice at all.

I'm not saying get over yourself because it's not that easy and beating yourself up for not getting over it is actually going to make the problem worse, not better, but you're not going to learn to interact with people better by taking an unhealthy perspective like that. Furthermore, it never actually fixes your social problems because it prevents you from learning.

What helped me was to learn to sit with the discomfort of Being Annoying. A lot of us have RSD and experience intense emotions when we know we're Being Annoying, but for most people, when they feel annoyed, it's not a big fucking deal. I've been annoyed by other people and the feeling of being annoyed is not nearly as intense as the feeling of Being Annoying. When I thought about how I handle it when people annoy me, that helped a lot with my Being Annoying spirals because I realised that hey, it's not a big deal when I'm annoyed, so it's not a big deal when I'm Being Annoying either.

And what if it was a big deal? What if someone spiralled over me Being Annoying the same way I spiral when I'm Being Annoying? What if they absolutely hate my guts the way my spiral says they are? What if everything in my spiral is true about how the other person responds to this?

So I took a moment to think about that from the point of view of the worst person I'm afraid of ever meeting. Let's pretend someone else was Being Annoying and I absolutely hate their guts, the way I'm afraid they are when I'm spiralling over this: I think about it all day, for hours, about how much I hate this annoying-ass person. I think about it for days. Let's say my worst nightmare comes true and I go around behind this person's back absolutely blasting them to other people about how much I fucking hate this person and they all turn around and also hate this person and their life is ruined forever and nobody will ever be friends with them again.

And I quickly realised holy shit, that's fucking unhinged.

I'd never treat someone like that, why would I expect them to treat me the same way?

And that's the lie the spiral tells you. That everyone is unhinged, that everyone despises you, that everyone is exactly the horrible person you're scared of them being, and that they have nothing better to do than utterly rip you apart for hours, days or even weeks afterwards, and that you're a terrible person for putting them through having to deal with their own feelings.

I think at the end of the day what the next stage is is to stop giving as much of a fuck about protecting people from their own feelings of annoyance. Sometimes I go interact with someone knowing full well I'm about to annoy the shit out of them. Well, it's not my job to protect them from their own feelings, it's not my job to try to guess boundaries that haven't been expressed to me. If they're annoyed, that's their problem. If they snap their boundaries to me, whatever, now I know their boundaries and how they express it isn't my problem. They're allowed to feel annoyance, it's not banned, it's not illegal, they're allowed. I've got another data point and I'm a bit better at reading people now.

They're annoyed? Tough shit, they can cry me a river, build me a bridge and get over it. My job is to respect boundaries and cues as I pick up on them, or as they're communicated to me, so I've done my part. It's not my job to be likable, it's not my job to read their mind, and it's not my job to protect them from their own emotions. Because that's what held me back the most; the idea that negative emotions like annoyance and anger were toxic and it was my job to protect people from those emotions, and I was a Bad Person if I didn't. Nah. They're just emotions. They can live with theirs, and I'll live with mine.

And sometimes, yeah, I interact with another person that's like me and I think they're annoying. What happens? Nothing. My feelings aren't that important and I'm not two years old so I don't throw a tantrum and try to wreck their life for it.

At the end of the day, what someone thinks of me isn't my business, and what I think of them isn't theirs.