Just Two Dots and a Line

Expressing Emotions

Nov 16, 2022

In our classes, the students have been asking about how to draw emotions. One of the texts that Amaris used earlier in the semester was Scott McCloud’s Making Comics, which does a good job of showing how to render a variety of emotions (and then gets a little goofy by trying to create a formula for various expressions), but her students were looking for something simpler, more “cartoony” and perhaps more approachable, so we’re revisiting some favorite artists to see how they are drawing readable expressions.

Below, Guy Delisle masterfully demonstrates emotion on a face that really only has two dots and a line–and he shows how to transition from one emotion to another in this four panel excerpt from Jerusalem: Chronicles from a Holy City.

Obviously in this example and others, our understanding of the expression is augmented by the rest of the panel—we interpret the juxtaposition of images; we visually read a scene. Perhaps that’s a great argument not to have only “talking heads” in panels, and instead add the visual complexity to transfer emotion and tap into reader empathy. It’s also important to note that we rarely read a stand-alone panel. That said, many of the emotions conveyed in the examples below are panels out of context, with a few common and complex emotions wonderfully expressed. We’ve chosen a variety of visual styles, but all of them are “cartoony,” embracing the visual language of comics.