How to Draw the Faces of Worriers

Consider using this face as a model.

Worry is one of the most basic of all human emotion. Everyone suffers from it, but most people learn to detach from their worry because it doesn't actually make their situation any better. However, there are also chronic worriers. These are people who worry about so much that it begins to affect their health. Chronic anxiety attributed to worry can be a contributing factor in fatigue, headaches, hypertension, heart attacks, and reduced immune function. The world wide prevalence of worry makes it a popular subject of artists. To capture worry on the faces of their subjects, artists must have a basic understanding of anatomy.

Instructions

1. Begin by drawing the basic features of the face. Make sure all of the features are properly proportioned (e.g. the width of the mouth, the spacing of the eyes, the length of the nose.) These will be your basic jumping-off point as you add worry to the face.

2. Begin with the cheeks after outlining the face. The cheeks will be tensed and therefore slightly smaller than the neutral face which you have outlined. The muscles for the cheeks are on the inside, so think of the tensed cheek muscles as sucking the cheeks in ever so slightly.

3. Move on to the lips. You will again want to convey tension in the lips, which means making them thinner and smaller than the neutral face. The corners of the mouth also tend to point downward in a worried expression. This is not as extreme as a complete frown, it's just a suggestion of a frown.

4. Adjust the eyes so that they sag and droop a bit. With a smile, the eyes tend to be big and bright, but with a worried expression the eyelids come down a bit further and the muscles at the temples are not pulled tight. This causes the eyes to droop ever so slightly.

5. Add worry lines to the face. These appear around the eyes in the form of crows feet, around the corners of the mouth, and on the forehead. The age of the character will determine how severe these lines are. For example, an older person will have more pronounced worry lines than a younger person. However, a young person will have worry lines however slight.

Tips & Warnings

• Decide whether your subject has been a worrier his/her whole life or if he/she is worried about a specific incident. People who have worried their whole lives have more pronounced worry lines.

• Remember to tweak the drawing constantly by playing with the proportions, etc.

References

• Happy Living: The Anatomy of Worry