Days 69 to 70 – Facial Expressions, Encoding and Autism 1#2

So in the last few days I’ve been working on drawing facial expressions in manga.   It’s something I’ve been avoiding for years.  When I paint or draw people I like to draw them with a plain face – no particular expression.  If I can,  I prefer even more to paint people with masks on.  This is because  (1) I think masks are really cool and (2) I don’t have to engage with any facial expressions at all.

Facial expressions are one of those things which I find really confusing because of the autism.  I can’t decode what all of them mean, especially at the time.  If I could constantly record the expressions people make and then go back and analyse what I see with the help of someone who can read this stuff, I think I could come up with an algorhythm to predict facial expressions, but I can’t record people like that.

 

To learn other bits of social interaction I have in the past recorded many complete series’ of an Australian programme called ‘Nothing to Declare’.  It’s about the Aussie border protection services.  I have used this programme to learn a lot about social interaction.  I like it because the customs chaps say straight-out what they see in a person’s behaviour and what that means to them.  They also model an assertive but fair and compassionate approach to interaction which fits with my faith and values.  Once they’ve explained a bit of behaviour and ‘decoded’ it for me I can spin the recording back a bit and watch it over and over until I can remember it.  Then when I see behaviour that fits what the customs people described, I can think about using some of their responses.  It has helped me to deal with more difficult situations a bit better.

 

 

So, anyway,  given all of this, I certainly felt a certain amount of trepidation in trying to draw twelve different facial expressions.  Firstly I drew the 12 expressions which Mark Crilley has in his first ‘How to Draw Manga book’  (it’s the book on the left in the picture above.)

Here are the pictures:

I drew them in pencil, then inked them with my multiliners and then added shading in pencil.