Emotion Thesaurus

Sources,

I like books. If I want to explore a new topic, I am looking for books at Amazon. One of my discoverings is the book of Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi: The Emotion Thesaurus – A Writer’s Guide to Character Expression.

True. It is about writing of feeling and not drawing, but that is OK to get an overview.

You may want to describe your inside by using words that go beyondbasic descriptions like sad and happy. Maybe your character is sad. Then you can lookup „sadness“.

You will find a few pages about this emotion. There is a definition that tells what this emotion is about. There will be physical and mental features you want to consider. There are transitions to similar emotions and usable verbs.

For „sadness“, we get…

  • Physical signals: a puffy face or eyes that appear red
  • Internal sensations: a runny nose
  • Mental responses: difficulty responding to questions
  • Acute responses: crying
  • Signs of suppression: biting the lip
  • Escalates to: nostalgia
  • Deescalates to: wistful
  • Verbs: moan

In this blog I will use the book to describe each emotion using my drawing abilities.

Let‘s draw: first day

Drawings

I started with drawing humans of course. There is no better start than a complex pose of a human. No pain, no gain. Right?

First master piece

But let me show the first trials. I got the image from an app named ArtPose Pro.

Garrr.. I am a bit disappointed. I thought it would be easy. What went wrong, huh?

Lucky me: my sister is a motion designer, so she should know how to draw. It took even not a second to show me how it can be done better.

She has spotted the absence of simple shapes. One of the first things an artist does, is to break the subject of interest into basic geometry shapes.

Second run

Let’s choose a simpler subject. Here we go again…

You see the difference? Instead of get the entire object in the first run, I create basic intermediate shapes.

Daily practice

Another hint of my sister is doing practice. You can read all books of the world about drawing. If you have no practice, it will be harder.

It is a learning process for your hands and your experience about human anatomy.