As part of my daily sketch practice in 2015 I started a set of cartoon face expressions. It became a collection of 48 emotions, concepts, and a bonus page of 9 angles of a cartoon skull.

Some are direct emotions like happy, sad, and rage. Other are more actions, concepts, and situations like eating, too full, discourage, and encourage.

In each case I can look at an expression and think of other ways to convey that same concept or how the example I drew could be used in other situations. The concept of proud looks like a self looking pride and today when I read "pride" I expected to see a pride-in-someone-else like the look on Noriyuki "Pat" Morita's face at the end of Karate Kid.

Thinking of drawing a character as an act of communicating and how only using a few elements can convey so much, makes cartooning feel like a super power to me.

• tilt of the head
• eyes
• mouth
• cheek muscles
• eyebrows

Body posture, props, and other composition elements would add a lot of richness to this exploration. Something to consider for future direction of this project.

I'm thinking of making a zine PDF or maybe zip download of separate elements to be a useful reference, tool to learn and explore, or way to create character faces for documentation. Which of those options sounds most useful to you?