How to Create an Expression Sheet for a Character You’ve Designed

An expression sheet is a way to get to know your character and show how they express themselves

Designing a new character is not an easy task: you have an idea, you look for reference images, you sketch several versions... When you finally get to a satisfactory point, you have to work out how to convey emotion through their facial expressions and body language.

To do so, Caio Martins (@caiorfmartins) recommends creating an expression sheet. This sheet will allow you to understand how your character behaves and looks from different angles in different moods.

To create your expression sheet, sketch your character in several different poses. This will help you discover other aspects of your character's personality. Imagine what they look like from behind, sitting, or showing their profile when irritated, surprised, or happy!

This technique is useful for fine-tuning details. Ask yourself, what does my character's hair look like from behind? What about their accessories, such as their glasses and backpack?

The next step is to draw the character experiencing the same emotion in front view, three-quarter view, and side/profile view. It is important to imagine what your character looks like when they turn 360 degrees and then translate that onto paper.

An expression sheet serves as a guide for art directors, who usually ask to see a character’s mood range during the early stages of character development.

An expression sheet is part of a model sheet, a document containing all the necessary information about a character in a comic, animation, or video game. They also detail the clothes and accessories that the character will wear, the colors that should be applied to the different parts of the drawing, and other important details that define the character’s personality. In some cases, character designers will have also developed a guide to drawing the character in proportion.

Do you want to learn how to inject life into your characters? Check out Caio Martins’ course, Character Design for Animation with Photoshop. You’ll discover how to create a character, starting with an idea right through to completing a model sheet.

English version by @eloiseedgington.

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