Understanding how your characters body and expression change when they’re doing different things is an important part of telling a story in comics.

The more expressive your character is, the easier it will be for readers to tell what they’re feeling. An easy way to understand how various expressions work is to look at our own faces when we feel different things: happiness, anger, fear, disgust etc, and then try and draw it.

Start by looking at yourself in a mirror and pulling some faces. Pay special attention to the shapes our eyes, eyebrows and mouth make, then try and draw them. Make sure to really exaggerate each different expression so they all feel very different. When you got the hang of drawing expressions, move on to drawing some movements.

Draw a little stick figure and try to make it look like it’s standing, running, sitting down, etc. If you feel a bit lost try and perform the action yourself and see what it looks like (a running position is very different than a walking one, for example). You’ll probably find out you know a lot of expressions and movements instinctively already - they are very important ways we use to understand other people, and you can probably draw an angry person (or a happy one) very well, even if you can’t describe their expression or movement in words.

Once you got some movements you like, let’s combine them with expressions and some dialogue. Draw your characters saying some things that match their positions and expressions. Try some simple emotions and sentences, then move on to more complicated stuff.

Here’s Tom’s angry Body Blip:

The plots everyone wrote last week are outstanding! Keep sending them to tibolota@gmail.com (or posting them on social media) and they’ll appear on our gallery over here.