How to Draw Expressions With Two Lines and Two Dashes

People get stuck on expressions because they think the whole face has to be sad. Sad head, sad hair, sad ears.

It doesn't. On a simple face, nearly every feeling you'll ever need comes out of two things: how the mouth line curves, and which way the two brow dashes tilt. Two dials — three or four positions each.

Dial one: the mouth

One line. Not lips, not teeth. Where the ends of that line sit relative to its middle is the whole message.

The tilt is the one everyone misses. Take a mouth line that's dead straight but sloped, one corner higher, no curve at all. That's smug. Or sceptical, or trying not to laugh, depending how far you push it. Probably the most useful mouth here, and the one people are least likely to reach for.

Dial two: the brows

Now hold the mouth completely still and change only the angle of two short dashes.

The rule is just which end goes down. Inner ends (the ones nearer the nose) pointing down gives you anger, concentration, suspicion. Inner ends raised gives you worry, pleading, sympathy. Both level and lifted high off the eyes gives you surprise.

It's also the first thing to try when a face isn't working. Your instinct will be to redo the mouth. The mouth is usually fine. Change the brows instead: two strokes, and it fixes it more often than the mouth does.

The nine cells

Three mouths times three brow angles. Every one of these is legible on a face made of dots and lines:

• Up + level. Plain happy.
• Up + raised. Delighted, or surprised in a good way.
• Up + down. Mischief. The most fun cell on the grid.
• Flat + level. Deadpan, and badly underused.
• Flat + raised. Polite alarm. The video call face.
• Flat + down. Annoyance, recognised instantly by everyone.
• Down + level. Plain sad.
• Down + raised. Real distress, or pleading.
• Down + down. Anger, uncomplicated.

The third dial, used sparingly

Eyes are two dots and should mostly stay that way. But they have three positions worth knowing, and each one overrides everything below it.

One warning, because it ruins a lot of otherwise good faces: don't draw eyelashes, irises and highlights on a face this simple. Detail in the eyes fights everything else and the face ends up looking unfinished, not fancy.

If you want a face to feel more carefully made, put the extra strokes into the hair.

There's a fourth dial nobody talks about, and it's the head tilt. You can't tilt the head on our wall, because the blank face is fixed. That's on purpose: it keeps a wall of faces looking like one wall instead of a scatter. But everything you draw on it can lean. Slide both eyes and the mouth a few percent to one side and the face looks like it's turning away, or listening, or unconvinced. It's subtle and easy to overdo, so treat it as seasoning — one small offset, applied to the whole face at once, never to individual features.

Practise in sets, not singles

You learn from the comparison, not the individual face. Draw the same person pleased, then annoyed, then worried. The gap between those three is the lesson.

Our open wall works for this. Tag a set with the same hashtag and they all end up on one tag wall, so your three sit next to other people's go at the same feeling. Watching someone else's replay is worth more than looking at their finished face, because you catch the moment they committed to where the mouth was going.