Many contemporary illustrators don't devote much effort to capturing facial expressions. They either rely on a "photo-illustration" to do the heavy lifting, or they draw a simplified face and write in the desired expression.
Here, famed illustrator Seymour Chwast shows us the expression of someone "overcome with emotion" in a 2010 illustration for Dante's Divine Comedy:
And you'd never recognize these facial expressions from Reuben award winner Roz Chast if she didn't label them for us: irony, sarcasm and passive aggression.
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So I find it instructive that every collection of reference clippings I've ever seen from artists working earlier in the 20th century included a substantial file of faces with a wide range of expressions.
These files of facial expressions show us how crucial these artists believed expressions were to their work.
From the wildest extremes...
...to subtlest smirk:
These artists felt it important to understand how facial expressions worked.
You also discover many pictures of the faces of pretty girls. Those expressions include 47 varieties of demurely lowered eyelids:
That tells you something about the era too.
But in this post I'd rather focus on examples of the more fun animated faces I found.
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