Cartoon bird expressions

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I’ve been thinking that my characters need expressions that show them laughing, smiling, surprised, and being sad. I have two references for facial expressions: Jack Hamm’s Cartooning the Head & Figure and Gary Faigin’s The Artist’s Complete Guide to Facial Expression. The former is super corny, old-fashioned cartoon-style, which you’d expect from Jack Hamm, who worked on Bugs Bunny back in the day. Guide to Facial Expression is super-advanced with deep analysis of the muscles involved in the expressions we humans can show. At this stage of my artistic development I went with Cartooning the Head & Figure.

The problem I ran into was that Jimmy Jay is 5-years old and all of my expressions came out looking adult. Solution: more practice with attention given to keeping Jimmy Jay from prematurely aging. On the bright side, some of these expressions will work for his mother.

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Jimmy’s 5 o’clock shadow makes him look a little down-and-out.