How to Draw Lips in 4 Different Ways: Step-by-Step
Overview:
This is a complete guide on How to Draw Lips (the Mouth)
- In this guide you’ll learn:
- The Front View of the Lips
- The Side View of the Lips
- The ¾ View of the Lips
- And the Front View with Visible Teeth
How to Draw a Mouth – Introduction
One of the most important features of portrait drawing is drawing the outline of the lips. Our mouths are a really cool part of our emotional expressions and helps us how to define a portrait.
Whenever you’re drawing lips, you want to make sure that your lips are placed at the right angle.
We first saw how to draw the front view of the lips when we were talking about portrait drawing and how to draw a face.
You can draw this traditionally (with a pen or pencil) or with whatever smart drawing device you have!
Let’s get started.
Chapter 1: How to Draw Lips – The Front View
We’re going to start with a very simple front view of the lips. If you checked out our how to draw a face blog, then you’ve probably already seen this.
You can go ahead and skip to the next chapter or you can continue with us and refresh your memory.
For the front view we’re going to show you 2 different ways that you can start out.
Step 1: The 3 Balls OR 1 Heart and 2 Balls
First, draw 3 balls to form a triangle shape – or draw 1 heart, and right below the heart, draw 2 balls right next to each other.
You can do either or, most people find that the 1 heart and 2 balls method is easier to remember than the 3 balls method.
Step 2: Outline the Top of the Lips
Now draw an oval for each side of the top lip to figure out how long or how big you want the lips to be.
Step 3: Define the Shape
Create the shape you want for your lips and shading points of the mouth. Also, don’t worry if it’s perfect or not, you can adjust wherever you’d like in the next step!
Step 4: Where to Shade and Highlight
Figure out where exactly the shadows and highlights define the lips. Take your time with this step because it’s important to know how to shade correctly!
Step 5: Finish the Details
Add shadows and highlights where necessary on your drawing, and voilà!
You made it! You now know how to draw the front view of the lips in 2 different starting ways, good job!
Chapter 2: How to Draw the Lips – The Side View
Now we’re going to go in more detail of how to draw the lips at a complete side view. This is probably the easiest view in my opinion, so let’s get started!
Step 1: 60 Degree Angle and Balls
I like starting with a 60-ish degree angle slant when drawing the side view of the lips.
Draw a decent slant and place 2 balls: one at the top and one at the bottom. Then add the small oval to get the top lip shape.
Step 2: Outline the Shape
Now we just outline the shape of the lips, you can erase the slant here if you’d like since we will be shading and highlighting afterwards.
Step 3: Mark Your Shadows and Highlights
Shade your shadows and highlights in the correct areas to define the lips a little bit more to give it that realistic look.
Step 4: Finishing Details
Finish the details that you’d like to add and now you have successfully learned how to draw lips from the side view!
Chapter 3: How to Draw the Lips – ¾ View
Now we’re going to talk about the third way of how to draw a mouth – the 3/4 view.
Because you can turn your head in either the right or left direction, you can draw the 3/4 view on the right side or the left side. If you’re struggling with the positioning of the lips or head, no worries, we talked about how to draw the head in any position in our previous blog.
For this tutorial we’re going to draw this on the left side (i.e. positioning your head almost all the way to the right side).
Step 1: Draw a Cross and 1 Ball in Each Section
First, we’re going to draw a cross and a ball in each corner of the cross. Don’t worry, it doesn’t have to be a perfect circle.
Step 2: Draw the Ovals
Next, we’re going to draw 2 ovals, but only on the right side (top and bottom).
Step 3: Outline the Shape
After the ovals, we’re going to now outline the shape.
Remember which direction we’re turning the head. Don’t worry, we’ll show you finished lips on both sides of the 3/4 view.
Step 4: Add Shadows and Highlights
Now add your shadows and highlights to your lips. You can remove the cross if you’d like as well.
Step 5: The Finishing Details
Now add the finishing details, and you finally made a ¾ view of the lips (the head turning to the right).
You can also make a ¾ view with turning the head to the left also, just flip everything around!
Chapter 4: How to Draw the Lips – Front View with Visible Teeth
This is probably one of the more difficult ways to draw the mouth, but that’s okay! Just start drawing, you can always find your strengths and weaknesses and work on them as you like.
For now, we’ll just show you the front view on how to draw the lips with visible teeth.
Step 1: 4 Balls
This is kind of the same step as drawing the front view of the lips, but this time we’re going to draw 4 balls instead of 3.
Draw 2 balls first, make some space, then draw 2 balls on the bottom but make them slightly bigger.
Step 2: 2 Ovals
Next, we’re going to draw 2 ovals on both the top right and left sides.
Step 3: Outline the Lip Shape
Now we’re going to outline the lip shape. Make sure you leave space between the top lip and bottom lip so you can draw the teeth.
Step 4: Outline the Teeth Shape
Draw 5 lines to begin outlining the teeth shape.
Start out with the first one being right down the middle of the entire lip shape, then draw the rest of the 4 lines so we can guess where the teeth shape will be.
Step 5: Define the Teeth Shape
This is the step where we start to define the shape. Notice how the teeth are not complete squares – teeth are not perfect!
I’d like to point out that reference pictures really do help when it comes to drawing lips. Sometimes it’s hard drawing from memory alone and it’s just a lot easier to copy what you see if you’re just starting out.
Step 6: Shade Highlights and Shadows
Now we’re going to add the shading and highlighting points to the lips and teeth as well.
It’s a common mistake to think that the teeth are completely white and do not have any shadows or dark points.
Step 7: Finishing Details
Finally, you have successfully learned how to draw a mouth with visible teeth!
Now We Want to Hear from You!
Hopefully, you learned something new today.
Or maybe you just wanted to see how to draw lips in different angles.
Either way, let us know how we did right now in the comments below.
