I love writing and hence use words to express myself. How do I make my drawings be expressive enough that the audience feels the emotion without any dialogue?

The first thing that you can already do in the writing phase to prepare for expressive drawings, is to be descriptive about what you eventually would like to see on the screen. This applies both to the character itself and the world / other characters they interact with.

As far as drawing goes: don’t worry, your drawings don’t have to be beautiful and therefore you don’t have to be the best draftsperson. The most important thing about drawing for story is clarity; what exactly is it that you want to tell in your shot, and does this image convey it well?

If you want to convey emotions in expressive ways, here’s two things that can get you started; facial expressions and body language.
- As for facial expression, brows and eyes can say a lot, even if your characters aren’t talking! Review some of your favorite films with little to no dialogue and see how they do this.
- Body language is great to show broader gestures. This works well together with clear silhouettes.

When looking for reference for facial expressions, one common approach is to Google images that should be representing that specific expression you’re looking for. However, something that we’re missing here is context. To what situation is the character responding to? My advice would be to look up movie scenes in which a character responds to a situation with the expression you’re looking for, to see both the moving gesture and the context.

One of my favorite non-dialogue movies is the first half of Wall-E. The protagonist almost doesn’t speak and isn’t even human, but through facial expressions and body language, we know exactly what he’s thinking and doing.

Besides practicing a lot, another way to get more expressive drawings is to take a look at industry storyboard artists to see how they draw their characters / scenes. You can then try to emulate their way of drawing and learn from it.
- For example, on Disney+, almost every animated movie has an ‘Extra’ tab in which you can see deleted (storyboard) scenes