Q:hey spoon i've been meaning to ask you anything you know about cyclopian emotions. like...how to draw them. it's kind of hard for me to get it down with that big one eye, and i wondered if you had any pointers or places i could look to help me out.

rhobi

DERP sorry for the late response

Naturally, body language is important in every case, but… heck, a large eye has a lot of potential for emoting that isn’t feasible (then again a giant eyeball isn’t very realistic to begin with), like, say pupil or iris size changing depending on mood! Since the eye is very large, you can even work with intricate patterns in the eye.

BUT YEAH, knowing how to draw expressions in general definitely helps even with a one-eyed critter.

I think my favourite kind of cyclops is somewhat cartoonish to allow for more flexible expressions as well as avoiding uncanny valley. Generally I try to treat a cyclopian eye as a symmetrical thing, combining two hypothetical eyes, BUT depending on the angle, I’ll treat the eye as either a left or a right eye to add expressiveness (with an angry eye it might be a little confusing… so I just take this kind of approach:

)

Oh, and then there’s the eyebrow.

Depending on what you’re going for, it may or may not work with a character design. Also, when looking to add expressiveness, I tend to draw some temporary eyebrows on characters who normally don’t have them. 8I Then there’s other design aspects like …noses? Hmmm I’m yet to work with those (with exception of Noin)

Really, it depends on the level of detail and what kind of stylistic approach you’re taking with the character design.

If there are some nicer cyclops drawing resources, that’d be super xD;