Captain Awesome and the Spacecapades

I'm working on getting decent at drawing faces, just as much as bodies.

The challenge with that meme was more or less "Hey, self. Can you actually draw each of the five main characters showing six different emotions? Prove it." So, on the surface, there was the temptation to do things like only draw Eberk once and copy-paste it for comedic effect. But much more insidious and difficult to subdue is the desire not to draw something "ugly", even if it makes sense.

What I learned: Getting over the idiotic belief that characters must always look 'pretty' makes them prettier/cuter/more attractive overall. I've always found Gwenn to be adorable, but that "panic" expression where she's clawing at her own face and making with the big ugly melodrama? I love it.

I have trouble acknowledging these things. I've noted before that I'm uncomfortable with my own fascination with violence in fiction, and to some degree that extends to a discomfort or dissatisfaction with the glorification of violence, madness, mayhem, destruction and chaos in fiction by other authors, even authors I'm actually friends with. Rather than get to the heart of my discomfort I sometimes find myself making judgmental statements to myself like "there's that childish obsession with social dysfunction again" or "pfft; they only like it because it's 'cool', I bet" and other things that are stupid for me to think of other people since I'm sure I'm no better. Drawing stuff like Faure's 'panic' expression, however, really pushes me to acknowledge what it is that intrigues me about violence in fiction: it's often portrayed in a way that carefully avoids letting the character look ugly. A character who's being tortured in a visually pleasing way is a lot less unsettling than a character who is actually being tortured.

If I'm going to put these things in, I want to treat them realistically-- as much to remind myself that it is mindless and self-indulgent to torment my poor characters for NO reason other than my own curiosity about the human psyche, or something. A story that is all about how much the characters suffer is just as boring as a story that is all about how perfect and idyllic the characters' romance is. The in-between is what makes me like the stories I read, so I really ought to make the effort to remember my characters will not be pretty 100% of the time-- and that's okay, I'll still find them to be adorable, or attractive, or cool, or funny. More than anything, I feel like I need to get the hang of letting go that "but it doesn't look perfect!" mentality that makes me erase my doofy expressions, sometimes.

Those doofy expressions just brought these characters to life. And also, I'm really, really glad I went to the trouble of drawing all of Eberk's expressions, because some of them came out far better than I'd have anticipated!