You may get asked this a lot, so please excuse my ignorance - but how do you go about constructing character expressions and body language and such? Thanks!

Besides The Basics (construction of heads and skulls and muscles and skeletons and how they move), I’ll go over some things I’ve been trying to work on myself lately:

1. Treat expressions as a single gesture of the face/head, as opposed to a head and then individual features dumped on a plate and arranged into an expression.

First, just get down the big shapes of your expression, just like you would for a pose.  

So say I wanna do a low angle angry pose.  I know the features are gonna be all mashed down at the bottom because of perspective.

 Scribble it down

start to put on features

fix stuff

put on more stuff

fix stuff again

erasing and flipping and stuff a whole bunch until you are happy with it or stop caring

Whole head is a gesture!

2. Just like a facial expression, jot down where the important parts of an entire pose goes first.  You can force the rest of the body to fit the pose.

So here I knew I wanted the shoulders tilted a certain direction, and te hand to be in that particular position in front of her face. 

That’s the simplest explanation I got.  Don’t be afraid to push and pull faces and bodies around! Worry about being “on model” last!