How to Draw Scared Cartoon Expressions

Video Transcript

"Next we're going to cover a scared expression. Perhaps your cartoon character's walking home late at night and sees something like this flying out of the sky. The expression he or she would probably make would be...! Starting as always with the eyes; you're going to notice something different right away. I'm going to draw the eyes a little more big and they're going to be misshapen. Have you ever been really scared and one eye is opening wider than the other one? That's what our character's doing here. Now for the pupils, we're likewise going to draw them a little off kilter, plus we're going to draw these extra lines here which is going to show more of a spasm. Their eyebrows are going to be turned upwards, absolutely askew. Their nostrils are going to flare a little bit. Their mouth is going to be open really wide. See here like a long swoosh, backfilling it in, then you come up that way. You're going to have some teeth in here, and they're going to be high up. You want to make sure and have the mouth be pretty wide. If anything, you want room for a tongue in there. Next we're going to put in the ears again, same distance, going from the eyes down to the nose, doing the same distance over here. You can draw the ears slightly bigger if you like. And of course the other fun thing you can do is you can draw their hair standing straight up, which is pretty easy to do, regardless of their haircut. The sides of their face are bunched up. Do the jaw line coming back around, their chin. Now other affects you can add to this are several. You can draw a couple of just like sweat tears coming off of them, they're nervous, they're sweating. You can also draw a bunch of squiggly lines bordering your face like this. Do enough of these, what this does, this denotes shivering. Now you should never do it where it's becoming a solid line around, rather, they should be used, I probably do about five to six around an entire head, less if the hair or the head is smaller. And of course you can do other things like draw in some more like shock lines and the like just to show more startlement for you're a cartoon character."