Useful Expressions!

For your characters, a useful exercise is to determine the range of expressions you will need in your story and pin down those expressions for consistency.

Draw their expressions, and keep it on hand to refer to when drawing your comics. It sure helps when you are under a deadline. It also has the added benefit of making you figure out these important facial features of your characters so they don’t look lifeless on the page.

Nancey Lorenz (an artist at deviantArt) has come up with this useful set of "25 Essential Expressions".



Now, some of your characters might not reasonably express being drunk or flirty, but simply replace those with the closest similar idea that makes sense. A little kid might not be drunk, but they do fall under the influence of sugar, etc.

Similarly, think about the critical plot points in your story, where do they take place? What does that location look like under different lighting conditions, from different angles? Which point of view and setting will best support the emotion at that moment in the story? It's sort of like doing the expression set for your characters, just applying it to location.