The Good Life

One of the hills I'll die on is a mood board can and should be more than expression practice. Just because something doesn't have a background, or isn't full body doesn't mean it doesn't accomplish as much. A picture crammed, cropped, and zoomed to be repurposed for Discord won't work the same as a dedicated profile picture piece. I'm saying this as someone who only started taking art seriously when I made profile pictures for my friends. I felt like I was crafting glasses, or maybe I mean windows? for the rest of the world to see my friend the way I see them.

So, allow me to share you a few of my favourite mood boards from the one hundred and eighty seven saved in my Hydrus Network. I also dug up the original links, so each image is clickable.

One of my favourite strengths of a good mood board is they highlight a singular mood really well via repeating an expression and pose.This repetition is sorta like animation: you're unrolling a film tape to look at the frames left to right and noticing small changes.

The expressions don't randomly change - the OC doesn't go from happy to sad to angry without context. While these focus on a single mood, the variety of poses gives us inferences into WHY this character has this mood. That's not to say characters can't have a variety of expressions, but they need to inform us about the character.

Context doesn't just come from having a background though - dynamic poses can be your context. In the following images there's only a white background but we can understand why the character is making these expressions via their body language.

The bunny one reminds me of Calvin and Hobbes riding their wagon, haha. These wouldn't work as profile pictures obviously, but I hope you get what I mean. Motion corresponds to likeability just like intent does; these emotions are not random! The mind fills in their next action, and gets attached.

But we can draw the character's ability to act and transform through headshots. Some mood boards might be formatted like a random collection of doodles or a character design sheet - but don't be fooled, they have the same purpose. You might not understand all or any of the references in the Vinesauce (first) mood board, but you will learn something about him through it.

The entity mood board really helps to sell the transformation of the character. I especially love how her default look is the largest, but as the poses gets smaller and our eye wanders we see her other side. I don't think it's a mistake the only red in the piece draws us away from the eldritch abominations below for a brief moment. Great composition.

Mood boards are also special because of this composition and framing. For example, these headshots have an internal logic for pushing up against and interacting with eachother.

We understand the character dynamics in the first one, and the second is a really well landed joke. It's so expressive, and they're just Mii eyes. A friend of mine likes to tease me for overusing "Mii Eyes"... I actually started my doodle by mimicking the squishing Miis piece.

Usually when I draw I have a clear intent, but with the Daydream series this is purposefully bad art (and writing). It's unapologetically simple, because I want to get faster and make my art about parts of my life. I want to be able to make art for when someone says stupid in VC. I saw a woman yelling on a window "LET YOUR DAUGHTER AND WIFE IN!!!!" on Friday, and I feel like I should've sketched it. I mean the police probably did that for me. Uh. Anyways, I love how effective the Vinesauce drawing is. I wasn't really trying to do much with mine; I was going to draw each type of Tami personality squishing and stressing out the centre one. Pushing and pulling on them with their desires like a reverse black hole. But when I converted to digital I didn't want the layers to affect one another. It's nice to see professional, elegant Tami alongside peaceful and sleepy Tami alongside Northernlion eye contact 2 Tami. They're all in harmony with eachother.

I'm not sure why I kept the others black and white and only colored the middle. Or kept it the centre; I moved all the others a lot and there's a few I didn't end up keeping. Maybe I should've made the working Tami the centre one? I mean it's been going well the past 2 weeks. It's who I'm going to be the rest of my life, right? Hopefully I'll never have to look for another job. I mean, maybe I have to find something new in 6 months. But it's who I'll be for the next while. And it's not all consuming; I got to draw a full piece in my evenings. I'm good at what I do; I never seem to make the wrong choice. I really try to make bad art but it still takes weeks between them; others can do them in a few minutes.

And what Tamis do I draw? But I shouldn't keep the ditsy and confused Tami right? I mean, the Tamis have to merge eventually, right? How am I going to draw artist and working Tami together. There should be context for why Tami gets so sad. And what would even make Tami happy now? A lot of the motifs I used before don't feel right with Tami anymore. I can't keep the Tamis going in different ways forever; it's not manageable. I can't draw a mood board everytime; I'll have to pick a Tami to flesh out. And what type of motion would Tami be doing? What's their inertia, what is the energy. Which side would people want to see? Should I draw the older types of Tami where she's always cute and smiling, or the newer ones with the darker entropic sodes covering the sides of her face? I don't know why but I drew Tami with a scratch on her arm. It felt right. I doodle Tami a lot when I'm bored and she's always so sad.

Or should I just scrap Tami altogether? Maybe they can be done. I can make a new OC for the new me. But I really like Tami.

Anyways that's my thoughts on mood boards :) @ me on Bluesky if you need references!!