With my rat design finalised I turned next to his expression sheet. I knew I only needed three main expressions beyond his neutral; fear, shock and squeezed.

I started researching expression sheets of various cartoons. I focused on shows that matched my art style and contained good reference of screaming characters.

Eventually I honed in on Spongebob Squarepants (1999), mostly because the style matched my rat design and mostly because I was able to find a surplus of reference from deviantart.

Before I began I also followed Stephen Silver’s advice on doing expression sheets, he reconmends taking a neautral expression of your character, turning down the opcacity and then drawing over it. This helps you keep the same head shape and gives you a guide to work off of.

I focused a lot on the shape of the mouth in regards to the rats silhouette and the slight variations in his eyes to convey different emotions. If he was sacred his eyes would become oval shaped, bulging out from the top to empathsis his fear. When he was being squeezed his eyes would become more circular to show the pressure he was experiencing. Again placement of his pupils would change his fear expression, closer together gave the impression he was looking at something directly while far apart gave the impression he was delirious with fear.

I liked how all these expressions turned out. I had a hell of a lot of fun designing them, especially when I started to push the expressions in the later sections and really exaggerate his mouth.

In the end I chose number 2 for my shocked. 5 for my fearful and 8 for my squeezed.