Drawing Faces Like Mo Willems

Learning about expressing emotion from Waiting Is Not Easy!

I’ve got twin toddlers, which means I’ve got lots of children’s books lying around. One of our favorite authors is Mo Willems, whose work I’ve shared once before within this publication.

Here I’d like to share how I used Waiting Is Not Easy! to practice drawing emotions.

If the following sketches look rough and lo-fi, that’s because they are! I used my favorite new tool reMarkable for this practice, which lowers the barrier to making marks on a page while still providing the benefits of a digital tool.

At first I thought that it would be just about the facial expressions, but I quickly realized how important body posture is too:

The labels that you see below each person are ones that I came up with, and I can tell that with a few of these I didn’t quite hit the mark with my drawing (co-conspiring and pleading, for example) which speaks to the nuance that we bring to reading facial expressions.

My goal is to be able to capture these complex emotions or expressions in as few lines as possible, so I left out Gerald’s ears and nose, and reduced his body to sticks. So now you can’t even tell that he’s an elephant! But for the purposes of this practice activity, that’s okay.

As I continued my practice, I found it helpful to draw the face much larger, which allowed me to draw the eyes larger as well, while also including other elements within the face without it feeling cluttered.

The increase in size continued onto the third and final page of practice.

Here are some things that I noticed from this exercise:

• Drawing the entire body (not just the face) helps to convey an emotion or expression

• Drawing the head large makes it easier to more accurately draw the eyes, mouth, and other features without it feeling cluttered

• Drawing the eyes large makes it easier to get the location and size of the iris correct

• I like the effect of drawing an open mouth as a filled-in shape as opposed to just an outline (see distress and fed up above, among others).

• Drawing a bit of the eyelid can help with certain expressions (see over it).

• Drawing the brow as a single line can be more expressive for certain emotions than drawing individual eyebrows (see I give up, over it, and fed up).

What I appreciate about Willems’ work is the balance of simplicity and nuance, which is the combination that I’m trying to bring into this even more stripped down style of stick figures for the purpose of visual note-taking.

I’ve never felt great about my ability to draw people. A little while back I thought that star people would become my go-to, but I’ve lost interest in that approach.

For the time being I’ll see if I continue to enjoy this approach of drawing large heads with nuanced facial expressions on stick figures in a specific posture. It feels like you can get a lot across here, with a minimum number of lines, which is always my goal.

And when in doubt, I can just reach for another Mo Willems book off the shelf and see what his characters can teach me.