How to Draw Lips for Beginners

Hey, I'm Darlene and you're watching a Rapid Fire Art tutorial. In this video, I'm going to show you my method to draw a bunch of different lips just by using a single triangle to start. In the second half of the video, I'll also show you how to draw it on a few faces. And we'll play a game of lip swapping too. So let's begin. First, start with an isosceles triangle. The base will be the shortest, while the other two sides are the same in length. Near the top, draw a shallow U shape. This is the cupid's bow. Halfway down, draw a long horizontal line. Draw the corners of the mouth by making two small ticks. Make sure the distance on each side of the mouth is the same. You can use your ruler or your pencil and finger to measure and compare. Now we're going to draw the top lip by connecting the cupid's bow to each tick. Let's draw the bottom lip at the triangle's base. I'm not going to connect it to the corners of the mouth because I think it's better for shading. If you want to draw the full thing, keep your lines very light, like this example. This way, when you shade, the outlines aren't so obvious. To finish it off, draw the opening of the mouth along the horizontal line. Start in the middle, and work your way out, giving it a wave-like shape. These are fairly large lips. Let's draw another set that's much thinner. Here's a same-sized triangle. Now let's place the cupid's bow really low this time. You can make some small changes in each step to get some really unique shapes. These lips are slightly downturned. The ticks are also pointing downwards. Okay, let's draw an open mouth. Same triangle here. Put the cupid's bow really high this time. We want to give it more height. I'm drawing my line halfway down again. It's pretty similar in length to the first example. And then just connect the dots. This is what it'll look like to draw straight lines, and it's not very realistic, so try to make it have some type of curve to it. Draw the top lip well above the horizontal line, so the mouth looks open. Down here, we'll draw the bottom lip using a more simple, less detailed line. Alright, let's speed the rest of this video up so we can explore 7 more unique lips. Using an upward curve instead of a straight one, you can draw a smile. To draw a smirk, draw an upward curve but shift it more to one side, so one side of the mouth is longer than the other. Don't forget to shift the bottom lip to the right as well. When drawing a big smile or smirk, smooth out your curves so they're more shallow because the skin is being pulled and stretched by the facial muscles. I'm going to draw another smirk, but this time the mouth will be slightly open. Just draw the top lip above the line where the bottom lip will be drawn. Okay, let's try something a little different. So far, we've been splitting the space in half, which makes the top and bottom lip the same size. Let's nudge this line up a little bit to make the bottom lip larger in comparison to the top. If you want to draw a larger top lip, reverse this so the line is lower. Okay, so this is how big I want the bottom lip to be. So I'm going to draw a line near the top. Alright, now they're significantly different. To draw an underbite where the bottom lip comes forward, you can draw two long bumps like this. To bring the top lip forward, drawing an overbite, start in the middle with a U shape and then follow it up with a wavy line. How about a frown? Draw a curve that droops down really low. Feel free to take this even further, making the shape more extreme or even try using different shapes. Stretch your imagination to put some fun into your practice sessions. Take it easy and don't be afraid to draw something really wacky and wild. If you want to draw really narrow lips or turn it into a pout, shorten your horizontal line like crazy. Okay, for the last one, let's do the opposite of this and draw a really long line for a big wide mouth. So those are just 10 examples, but it's really limitless. So pull out your sketchbook and see what unique combinations you can come up with. Feel free to send me your results because I love receiving artwork from you guys. Okay, let's move on to those faces now. First draw a face. If you want to learn how, check out my other tutorial above. So here I have a circle and a line at the bottom for the chin. The distance between the chin and the circle is roughly half the size of the circle. Now I'm breaking the face up into sections lengthwise. One line going through the center, and then split the bottom section of the face in half and then in half again. Do the same thing for the top if you want to draw hair. Alright, on the eye line, I'm splitting the face widthwise into 5 equal sections. If you want to learn how to draw eyes and noses, links are down in the description. Directly underneath the nose, draw your triangle, letting it rest on the line labeled lips. Place the cupid's bow a fair distance from the nose. Then draw two vertical lines coming down from the center of each eye. These mark the boundaries for the lips. I like to draw my lips well within these boundaries. And that's how I draw lips on faces. The nose actually could be a little bit lower, so let me fix that. Okay, that's much better. Alright I'm going to do two more examples and then we'll do some lip switching. It's really fun, so stick with me here. I'm just going to quickly blast through these here. This one's got a frown with sad eyebrows. And we're going to give this one an open mouth. Alright, lip switch time. Let's erase the lips off of this girl and find her a more suitable pair. I'm going to try these really small ones here. It kind of looks like she's pouting and it's not really natural. Like it doesn't fit her face. So let's give her a smirk. Remember to shift the curve so one side is shorter than the other. Okay, this one makes her face look really deceiving. So let's try a new look. How about the one where the bottom lip is bigger than the top? Okay I'm going to give her an underbite too. And I think we have a winner. Let's erase all these guidelines to bring out that beautiful face. Okay I'm not done guys. I'm just going to quickly show you how to shade. Okay the first step is to define where the light is coming from. After that, outline the areas that will be the lightest. I'm using a technique I call shadow lining. So if your shading method is hatching like I'm doing here, just hatch your way along these areas. After that, shade the darker areas. So the benefit of this technique is that when you shade, your outlines will blend perfectly in with your shading. Pretty neat eh? Try to use an overhand grip on the pencil for thicker strokes. These strokes will be a lot easier to blend. You can darken areas that are really facing away from the light. And also cast shadows. By the way, I used an HB pencil for the lighter areas and a 2B for the darker areas. If you want to see a more in depth tutorial that's much more realistic, let me know in the comments below. I'm going to use that like button to gauge your interest. So if this is something you want to see, hit that like button and if it gets 200 likes, I'll make that shading tutorial for you guys. To make the bottom lip look rounder, add some darker values so the bottom looks like it's curving away more and more. If you want, you can use an HB pencil to fill in the lightest areas and then go over it with a kneaded eraser to bring out the highlights. If you want to see more videos like this, hit that subscribe button and the bell beside it so you know exactly when a video is released. Thanks to all my patrons for supporting my work. And special shout out to Wendy Nelson for requesting this video. There are so many tutorials on my to-do list and I can only tackle them one at a time. As a patron, you can vote for the tutorials I do next. If you want to vote for the next video topic or just want to help contribute, you can go to patreon.com slash rapidfireart or click the orange icon up in the left.