The Many Facets of Drawing Happy Faces!

Just like all expressions, drawing happy faces involves pulling of specific key muscle groups in the face. Instead of being complete stress of all the major facial features, there are combinations of stretched and relaxed muscles.

You should always have a caricature ready beside your main drawing as a point of reference. It will be a good map to guide you to stay true to the underlying shapes surrounding the happy face.

By this point in time, you should be familiar with your digital art program to know what brushes are needed to create general shading and smaller details.

Once you're ready, fire up your digital canvas and let's start drawing!

1. Front view

We will start drawing happy faces from the front view. This view will give you all the necessary details to look for in terms of facial muscles. If necessary, use a mirror to reference your own face as you observe how the muscles contract and expand.

I personally like to start on the eyes. Depending on the degree of happiness, most of the muscles being moved are the ones below the eyelid. The eyebrows and upper eyelid stay relatively relaxed. Some wrinkles are seen in the corner of each eye. Your main focus are the eye bags. Make sure it pushes upwards into the eyes and emphasize it accordingly.

The mouth itself is not a perfect watermelon slice. Rather, it is rounded at the edges. The only time where it resembles a watermelon is a smile. Right now, we are focusing on a laughing type state.

One more thing to be aware of is the cheeks. While the sad expression has the cheeks expanding towards the chin, the cheek muscles in this expression is expanding horizontally towards the ears.

2. Partial side view

Drawing happy faces from the partial side is very similar to drawing it in the front. The difference is knowing how to distort the shapes so it follows the side profile.

The most prominent part of this step is drawing the cheeks. It distorts just slightly depending on the degree of the partial side view. Sometimes you can not even see all the cheeks on the other side. Use your judgment!

Due to how the cheek distorts, the mouth will follow as well. The mouth will be the most difficult part because each side will look totally different from the other side. This is mostly due to the planes of the lips and the teeth. It is quite challenging to get it right so a mirror will help immensely here.

Just pay attention to the plans of the mouth very carefully. Remember to keep the corner of the mouths rounded off slightly. At the same time, remember to stretch the upper lip and lower lip. Also, please keep in mind that the chin is protruding forwards to help squeeze the mouth muscles horizontally.

3. Profile view

The best way is to understand this view is knowing how it interacts with the cheeks. This time, you want the cheeks to coverup the corners of the mouth. As a result, you want to use the cheek muscles, as it is moving towards the ears, as the new continuation point for the smiling corners of the lips.

As for the lips, you want the upper lips protruding upwards and outwards. The same can be said of the bottom lip. At the same time, what will really bring these two elements together really well is the chin. You want the chin to be also protruding upwards and outwards.

Don't forget the teeth like all our drawings before this. You want to show off that smile as best you can. For the most part, just imagine it because the mirror method may be too hard to use here!

4. Drawing happy faces and its many variations

Now that you have finished drawing happy faces in one state, think about all the other states of being happy. What about just a smile? There are many variations on just a smile alone. There are closed smiles, open smiles, grinning happy smiles, etc.

The wider the smile, the harder the cheeks will have to stretch. As a result, you will see angular corners of the mouth. Conversely, the laughter type smiles will have rounder corners like the example we just did.

Even the eyes will change. More happier expressions will push the eye bags upwards. So use this knowledge to your benefit to create the perfect smile you need for your character.

Go ahead and play with the expressions till you are fully comfortable with drawing happy faces. Use what you know about perspective and challenge yourself to drawing happy faces in many different postures. But above all, keep practicing as much as possible to improve your basic artistic foundations!

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