Facial Expressions – A Visual Reference for Artists

By Mark Simon

Watson-Guptill, 2005

9" x 10¾", 256 pages

Here is true reference book. It contains almost no text and is filled with photographs of different people with different expressions. The cover design gives a good idea of wat is to be found inside the book.

Each page contains 16 photographs of one model. The first set of photographs are generally a neutral pose taken from different angles, including down and up views. Then the expressions. Each expression is usually taken from face, three-quarter and side views. There are about 14 expressions per model. The sequencing of the models is organized according to age. The youngest model is 20 and the oldest is 83 and there is a good variety of physiognomies and morphologies.

All the expressions are really interesting. Some models are more subtle while some other models are very expressive. Some are even really funny to look at. Very inspiring.

Every artist is advised to keep a morgue filled with photographs that may eventually be used for reference. One problem, there though, is that it is very difficult to find good expressions references. Usually, photos published in magazines are rather neutral or seductive. This book fills in this void.

The strongest point of this book is that it really shows the range of mobility the facial features can take. Traditionally, cartoonists have a set of caricatured facial expressions and those are used and reused almost automatically. While this is fine for cartoon, and, in a sense, this can even give a sense of styling, they are nevertheless symbolic expressions. Those precanned expressions will quickly fall short when applied to 3D models in CG animations. Nobody really smiles like smilies.

Jason Osipa, in Stop Staring, excellently pointed out this tendency to push even realistic 3D character facial features to cartoon proportions while animating expressions on their face and showed that in reality, the facial features don't move that much and that it is the face lines that gives this appearance of exageration and that drives the expresssions in the viewr's mind. This book clearly shows the actual effect those facial lines have of the expressivity of faces.

Also, traditional expressions, in cartoonist sets, covers a very few basic emotions. They generally fall into the set of emotions that the psychologist have catalogued which are anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness and surprise. But, first, the faces can express much more complex thought process than pure emotions. And even expressing emotions differ greatly depending on the circumstances and the scale of the emotions. And there are also cultural and educational factors that affect the expressions. The bottom line is that correctly drawing or modeling facial expressions cannot amount to gluing a precanned expression morph target. There is much more subtleties involved. This book shows that the same emotion can be expressed very differently from model to model.

In addition to facial expressions, the book also contains a set of photograph of a skull and the face muscles modeled in clay. a phoneme gallery where real people mouths, of different ages, are photographed front and side viws. a hat gallery and a small kissing gallery for the difficult drawinga or modeling of two heads in contact. There is also a small section with sequencial photograph of people changing from one expression to another.

When I first saw this book on the bookshelves, I bought it after just browsing through the pages and then placed it on my bookshelves. Every time I need to design a new character or work on an expression, I get this book out and browse it again. Last time I browsed it was 3 days ago and I decided to write a review of it. I rarely copy exactly a photograph I find in this book and I rarely find the exact expression I'm looking for. But everytime I reference it, I get new ideas and new directions to explore. When I'm at the design phase, I often get caught in a sort of attractor where I tend to repeat the same design approach over and over without really going further. This book helps me get out of my mindset attractor and design outside my box.