Caricature Study Part 1: facial expressions

As you may have gathered from my recent posts (Amy Winehouse, Jack Lemon, politician) I've been dabbling in caricature lately. Aside from being a lot of fun, this is helping me improve my ability to capture the essence of a character. By making a close study of people's unique visual traits, I hope to improve my work as a character designer and cartoonist.

A big part of capturing someone's character is their expression, so a couple of weekends ago, at the drawing school, I decided to spend some time studying exactly that. Here are some of the sketches I made of our life model's facial expressions. She was constantly looking around, chatting away, so I had to draw fast and constantly reposition myself so I could see as much of her face as possible: