Free Template to Create Manga Facial Expressions

Bring your characters to life using the vivid, emotive expressions characteristic of the manga drawing style

Creating an impactful manga character means paying attention to the smallest details. Eyes, hair, and clothing are often distinctive features that make a protagonist stand out, but in order to truly convey their personality, it’s essential to also portray their feelings through strong facial and bodily expressions.

Manga artist and storyteller Natalia Batista (@nataliasmanga) has been illustrating manga characters inspired by her passion for female empowerment for over a decade. In that time, she has illustrated over 1,600 pages of manga, many published as books or part of comic anthologies. Mjau! and Sword Princess Amaltea, her most well-known works, are published in Sweden, the US, and elsewhere. The worlds she has created in her art vary from fantasy and action to romance and comedy.

Such a variety of genres requires characters to explore a full range of emotion. Here, Natalia shares a free template to help you create fresh and original manga facial expressions that will connect with readers, along with some illustrated examples.

Why is expression so important in manga?

A lot of plot and character development gets shown through facial expressions in manga, and there are several reasons for this. Due to the handheld size of the printed comics, facial features can appear small on the page, so need to express as much as possible. Sometimes as an artist, you might be trying to illustrate an emotion with only eyes, eyebrows, and a mouth—the nose and other features are often not drawn.

Also, manga doesn’t tend to have tons of text on each page, so expressions need to reveal as much as the words do. This is frequently for dramatic or comedic effect—any manga reader will recognize the exaggerated tears, popping veins, and classic sweatdrop effect.

In her course, Natalia stresses the importance of having several manga volumes close by when you’re working, especially as you design new characters. Different artists will bring their own unique styles to the table, expressing their character’s feelings in ways you may not have seen before. Take a look at where they stick to the most popular techniques, and where they diverge. Once you’ve learned the "rules", it’s easier to notice where you and other artists break them, and how that can lead to new possibilities.

Creating your own expressions

When looking through another manga artist’s work, you may see expressions that you love, which really capture the emotion a character is feeling. But as important as inspiration is, you’ll also want to put your own spin on each emotion to reflect your style.

To try this out, Natalia provides a worksheet that includes a large table, with eye types along the top row, and mouths down the first column. Drawn in a simple style, showing only the most important lines, they resemble emojis. In each square of the table, you can then combine the different eyes and mouths you encounter or invent, and see how they play together. You can test how a specific character’s eyes look with different mouths, or you could make it up and get experimental, inventing more unusual expressions.

When you have filled up your table, or simply found a combination you love, try drawing it out in full on a character, including all the facial features and details. Think about how the expression might change or distort the face, and you can end up with realistic-looking emotions, that all started from simple emojis.

Download the Manga Facial Expressions Template and Examples

After clicking on the button below, you will find a ZIP file in the Downloads folder on your computer titled Free Manga Facial Expressions Template and Examples by Natalia Batista. Inside, you can learn more about Natalia and her course, and get started creating your own expressions for a manga character.

If you want to learn more about this content, you can sign up for Natalia’s course, The Art of Manga: Drawing Unique Characters. And, to keep learning, explore all of Domestika's online manga courses.

For more free resources exclusively for the Domestika community, check out the Downloads tag on our blog.

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