Fear and Loathing in a Nashville garage

As I mentioned earlier in last 2 months I've had the good fortune to have had some great critiques by art directors at some well known publishing houses. Arguably the best critique was with Laurent Linn, an art director at Henry Holt. While all the crits said essentially the same thing, Mr. Linn said it with the most clarity: tell more of the story in your work, "trade looks for work that evokes drama, that says there's a story going on here." Some of the ways he suggested highlighting this was through the obvious - color, tone, shadow (more on that later) - but he also said to pay special attention to the expressions on the characters faces. While happy is great, angry and sad are more interesting than happy. I actually love doing expressions and used to be very good at it..... until I got started doing a bunch of happy work! Don't get me wrong, I love my happy pieces (and the jobs that come with them) but I think my lack of practice with different expressions of late has resulted in some bland expressions over all. So one of the goals is to bring back some excitement, and fear and loathing, to the faces of my characters. Sounds like fun!