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Hi, I’m Liana Finck,
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and today I’m gonna show you how to draw feelings.
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I was just curious whether you found that
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drawing cartoons about human emotions,
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therapeutic or cathartic in some way.
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I think I might have stronger and more changeable feelings
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than we’re supposed to have.
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Like, when I talk to people,
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what I’m really thinking about is like, aah.
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So the cartoons are about what I’m really thinking about
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and it’s cathartic to like admit it,
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and it’s also cathartic to know that
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other people get the cartoons which means I’m not alone.
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[Emma] The first cartoon.
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[Liana] There are two adults,
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one of them has a child behind him with a knife in his back
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and the other one doesn’t see the knife,
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and obliviously says,–
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[Emma] Why are people with kids,
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always telling everyone else to have kids?
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But that’s the truth.
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I’ve been asking my friends with kids
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if they think I should have kids,
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and they’re always like, Oh my God, it’s so horrible.
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Like I hate it so much.
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And then they’re like, Oh, you should totally do it.
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And it’s like, they don’t remember that they just said
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right before they said the good thing.[laughs]
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Now, it is always like, Yeah, I was in labor
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for 32 hours and I love me baby so much.
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And you’re like, wait what? [laughs]
01:25
Do you make the faces like into a mirror
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in order to see them and draw them?
01:29
[Liana] I make the expressions when I draw them.
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Do the face for me of the guy with the dagger in his back.
01:34
Wait, let me look at him, one sec.
01:40
Okay, did you see it?
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[Emma] [laughs] Yeah.
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Now I’m doing the kid.
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The other gut is just neutral and has like fat arms,
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Then the dog, the most elegant character of all.
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[Liana] I almost never know what kind of face I draw
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unless I have a joke in mind, which I don’t right now.
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Seems to be a relatively narrow face
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with a kind of square chin,
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some thin angry looking eyes.
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Angry looking eyes dictate a bit of a frown for the mouth.
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Does this face want a nose?
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Sure, how about a long thin nose.
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Maybe a jelled, baldy, calmed back hair.
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Eyebrows, let’s give it some tricky eyebrows.
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This is gonna be a happy face.
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I think I’m gonna do a three quarter view.
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The mouth looks like it’s kind of smugly,
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holding in a laugh in a nice way,
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smug in a nice way.
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And yeah, I really don’t know what kind of eye to do
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I just did a round circle.
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I think I’ll put the eyeball looking to the side
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to be like, can you believe I’m holding this secret?
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I don’t know, yeah.
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It’s not that happy, but it is what it is.
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I’m gonna start with curly hair,
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and now I’m gonna draw,
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I think very small features can be very funny in a cartoon.
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They like represent the face has not much to say.
03:26
It’s a cartoon about the evolution of man,
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but mine is reverse and they’re going back into the water
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and it’s called Going Back For The Holidays.
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It’s melancholy. [laughs]
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It’s about reverting to your childhood self
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First of all, these creatures, [laughs]
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did you get fact checked on these?
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Was it fact checked like, what stage of evolution
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is this monkey goat?
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I would love to be fact checked on my evolution
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I have always a lot of trouble figuring out the stages.
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I think that progression of expressions
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on these creatures faces is pretty interesting too.
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Just talking about like sort of micro [laughs] impression.
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Well, I guess it reflects how I feel about,
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one, how I feel about men and humans like neutral.
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I don’t get it, whatever, not interested.
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Two, how I feel about brutes.
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I find them fascinating.
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I think they’re always mad and they’re always oblivious,
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and I think it’s really funny.
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And then the smiles is how I feel that animals
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just that they’re always smiling.
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They’re just always singing a little song.
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I find the animals always very endearing and wonderful.
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So, now I’m gonna draw a creature.
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So I’m just gonna draw a blob.
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That’s fun I guess.
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I think this is why I have writer’s block a lot.
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I’m very judgmental of what I draw,
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unless there’s a real reason to do it.
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I have drawn a blob,
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it has an arm, it has an eye,
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it’s not great, but there it is.
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Now, we’re gonna do a dog.
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Dogs are a joy for me.
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Start with the line leading from the eye to the nose.
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Then I drew kind of a round dot on the nose.
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Now I’m gonna draw the sensitive mouth.
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Now I’m gonna draw an eye.
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Now I’m gonna draw the forehead leading into the ear.
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Now I’m gonna draw the neck to chest,
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to leg, to foot, a nice waist, back leg, foot,
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it’s gonna have a tail that’s pointing down.
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Yeah, this Dog is kind of a different shape
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than I thought it would be.
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It’s a little thicker, but you know what?
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Now we’re gonna do a cat.
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So this cat looks not at all like a cat.
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It looks a bit like a cat I had in my dream the other night.
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It has very long rabbit ears.
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It has big rabbit eyes.
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I’ll give it a rabbit mouth.
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I’ll give it a rabbit body.
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And maybe some whiskers.
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The cat that was in my dream the other night.
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This is a woman sitting on a couch
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that for some reason looks just like my couch
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and she’s turned away from the man who’s standing
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in the corner of the room.
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And then he’s like, Look,
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if you want me to intuit and empathize with your feelings,
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just tell me what they are and how to react to them.
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Total, total fiction.[laughs]
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I didn’t need any explainer for that one.
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Either it needs no explaining because you get it
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or you will never understand it,
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so it’s not worth explaining.
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I love that she has almost no expression on her face,
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that it’s basically just an oval.
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I feel like the impulse to go totally blank
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when someone is saying something that drives you nuts,
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She’s left her body.
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Yeah, she’s like floating above.
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How do you decide how many components
07:00
are necessary when you’re drawing a domestic space?
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Because this cartoon isn’t about the turnip art
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or the precarious wineglass,
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but they feel sort of very important.
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Well, not distracting from the central conflict.
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I think those were actually put in intentionally
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to distract anyone who wondered
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if this was autobiographical
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cause I don’t have a lamp
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and I don’t have a picture of a turnip
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and I don’t put cups on my couch.
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Yeah, that glass stresses me out so much [laughs]
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it just like ratchets up the drama of this cartoon.
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Having the wine on the couch
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is her claiming this tiny bit of like rebellious freedom.
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And I’m glad she gets to do that.
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He just represents the like, I don’t get feelings.
07:49
I don’t think a lot of men and straight couples take on,
07:53
and they can do better.
07:56
Do you draw mean people and nice people differently?
08:00
TMI, I have had eating disorders in my life,
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so I think something that isn’t good
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for people who are at risk of developing an eating disorder
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is that drawings of good people
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are always drawn as skinny people.
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Like it’s horrible.
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So, I have drawn my people in bad and good,
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and that’s kind of a conscious decision that I think
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was the right decision,
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’cause I think it echoes something I feel deeply.
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What advice do you have
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for people who are trying to sort of mind their own life
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or feelings and relationships for cartoons?
08:35
Cause it seems like a tricky balancing act.
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If you’re having trouble landing on something
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that’s worth saying,
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I find free writing slash free drawing to be the best tool.
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You just clear an hour of your day or certain amount of time
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and you just sit there and you draw
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and good things eventually starts to come out.
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You can tell what’s good
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by whether it makes you feel something.
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So first we’ll start with my body type.
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There is boobs, arm and it’s neither thin nor fat
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I gave it a mouth, I give it eyes,
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an amorphous female form.
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Now, for a fat person.
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A head, body, it’s a man.
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Legs, arms, and similar to how I draw myself.
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I care much more about expression
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than about the differences in how to draw people.
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Looks like a nice guy.
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Now for a skinny person.
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Drawing kind of a knife like face,
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large nose, eyes, mouth, and hair.
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Let’s give it a kind of loose fashiony tank top,
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bell bottoms, some clavicle, arms, very bad arms,
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Now that you’ve taken my class, you too can draw
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because I am obviously the kind of person
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who knows exactly how she does things
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and can explain that to other people.
