Face Acting. Next crucial animation principle was understanding emotion and how to translate it onto the face. once again, we were given a plain simple model, with no particular design characteristics so that nothing will distract us from focusing on the face itself. I chose one of the available stimuli, which is character reading the book and reacting to it.
First it was important to understand the spectre of emotions and what are the main emotions. Obviously, humans are a lot more complicated to be only showing one emotion, so we usually end to combine two or more. But knowing the basic expressions can help us mix and match positions of face features to show more complex emotions.
After this, I sketched out the keyframes of how the character would react to a book. I didn’t find this exercise too hard as I find it to be one of my strengths when it comes to portraying emotion in illustration. However I took it upon myself to switch from already familiar software like TV Paint, to Photoshop, to further my skills in it.
