Thanks for checking out my latest tutorial. Like promised, I will now be looking at the iris. The iris ended up taking up the entire guide because I didn’t take into consideration how very complex the iris can be.
Irises are where the eyes can get really fun and captivating. If you don’t believe me, just look at the iris of a friend. Irises have all sorts of colors within them with little lines of color. These lines exist because the iris actually has the ability to widen or close in order to get more light in dark areas. Eyes also have a shininess to them, making them even reflective under the right lighting conditions. Neat to look at, but tough to draw. That is, until you get used to it.
With cartoon eyes, you can completely skip the iris and just draw circles with dots in them. If you’re lazy, you can even just draw dots. These are great for simplistic cartoons and save enormous amounts of time. But artists who want to draw eyes that are prettier try to capture the enormous amounts of color found in the eyes. Blending a variety of shades and colors works fine for cartoon eyes, but to achieve the realistic look, much greater care must be taken.

For both realistic and cartoon eyes, the pupil is usually the easiest part. For stylistic reasons, some cartoon artists completely omit the pupil altogether. But most of the eyes I’ve seen have pupils in them. All that’s needed is a simple black circle in each eye. Make sure that this circle is symmetrically drawn.

Thus ends the easy part. Next, we’re going to add the shading found at the top part of the eye. This is done by covering the top part of the iris with black. Make sure to leave some space between the pupil and the black because you will want to make the roundness of the pupil obvious.

Next, we’re going to take part of the black and erase it. Choose the color you want to make your eye and find a good, solid representation of that color. We’re going to be drawing over the black with the color you’ve chosen for the eye. Be sure to leave small lines of black behind after covering most of the shading.

Next, we’re going to take those parts and smudge them upwards. Why in the world would we do that? Because in real life, shading doesn’t start and stop abruptly. By throwing in a little black in gradually, the shift from brown to darker brown to black will seem more realistic. (At least I hope so)

Now it’s time to add those neat folds I’ve been rambling about above. This can be done by drawing lines that extend from the pupil to the outer edges of the iris. For these lines, pick colors that are lighter than the base color for the iris.

Next, draw a squiggly line that moves through every single one of the lines you just drew, using the same shade that you used to draw the lines.

Start smudging the lines, moving your smudging tool from the pupil to the outer edge of the eye. Do this carefully and slowly so that you can change any mistakes you made. You want the lines to sorta merge with the pupil very faintly.

To add to the gradual shift from the top shading to the bottom shading, you can use a burn tool in Adobe Photoshop CS4in order to go over the top part of the iris. This program can also be used to create the highlight effect using the dodge tool as seen on the bottom part of the iris. You can then adjust the eye with the hue/saturation feature and use the blur tool in order to make some aspects of the iris appear more seamless.

The final part is the glare. Glares can be really sophisticated, but for now, let’s just add a simple white circle. Place one or two white circles of different sizes on the eye and blur them in order to make them seem like they’re actually a part of the eye. This glare really helps make the eye appear more round.

This iris is all well and good, but what if you do not have the time to detail the iris. Or what if realistic eyes just aren’t your style and you want to create beautiful cartoonish eyes. Creating pretty cartoon eyes starts with finding an attractive color. There’s no hard, fast rules for selecting the right color so you’re going to have to trust your gut instinct. I felt like using a dark blue.

Next, pick a darker color and create a trapezoid going over the top part of the eye. Then pick a lighter color and create another trapezoid near the bottom of the eye. Finish up by drawing a curving line near the bottom of the line with the lightest color. That’s four colors total. Then blur the edges where different colors meet. One way to do this is to use a selection tool and select a particular section of the eye to run the Gaussian blur filter on if you’re using Photoshop. Otherwise, you can use a blending stick or tissue to blend the edges together so that they come together seamlessly.

That’s it for this one. Good riddance, it’s getting late. There’s a couple of odds and ends when it comes to the eyes that I haven’t covered yet and they’ll all be thrown into one big super tutorial which will come out eventually. Until then, I’ll be covering a completely different topic: shading.

Alex

I know… I didn’t draw their feet. I really hate drawing feet. I’m not too good at it and I never know what angle to draw the feet at. Maybe eventually I’ll learn how to draw them.

I still need to name the character on the left. Maybe I’ll do that right now. Um… Pan… Pangan… Panganiban! Gani for short. He’s a character I kept envisioning in my head but I couldn’t get him from my mind to the screen until now. Does he look how I envisioned him now? Who cares?

I’m starting to feel restless about the ratios and after I finish the next how to draw guide, time to master the anatomy of the limbs, folds, shading and fine itty-gritty details. For now, let’s finish the tutorials on how to draw different ratios.

How to Draw a 1:7 Ratio Character

Start these characters off by drawing the circles. Draw 7 circles on top of each other for the one character and draw 8 circles for the other character. Then start figuring out where the shoulders, hips, arms and legs will be. For the character who is 7 circles tall, I placed the shoulders near the top middle of the second circle from the top. I had his hands reach the top middle of the circle in the middle, which was also where I put his hips. Of course, the feet are at the bottom. As for the 1:8 character, I decided to have fun and go overboard with the size of the shoulders and muscles. His shoulders could be found in the middle of the second circle from the top. His hips were placed in the middle of the 5th circle from the top. Wow, maybe I got a little excessive there.

When learning how to draw, sometimes its easier to start off with pencil on paper rather than going digital.

In the spirit of continuing chronological order, let’s do the 1:7 figure first. Determine the direction that you want the face to go. Wherever the face is turned, draw the eye farther away from the camera smaller than the eye closer to the camera. For the nose, figure out how much of the nose you want to show. The nose can really strongly define how the character’s face looks. Spend plenty of time on the face because despite how you draw the rest of the body, the face will define the character. Bodies with some mistakes can be forgiven.

For the body, it helps to draw the entire body before adding clothes. That doesn’t mean that the character needs to be drawn completely nude, but rather that you should draw the outline of the character before adding each detail. For this character, I researched different tribal clothing styles and tried to use colors from animals that are found in the character’s locale. The skin draped across the character’s chest is from a spotted deer hide. I’m not sure what the thing is tied to the center of the skirt but it looked interesting on a different tribal outfit and I felt it added some culture to his otherwise very practical outfit.

Go off and choose a color for your character’s clothes. There’s really no tricks when learning how to draw colored characters that I know of. When designing the clothes, I first intended to use colors from animals that could be found in the Philippines. I used the Philippine spotted deer for the fabric wrapped around his body and then inputted that color into the color scheme generator. The other colors were chosen using this generator. Of course, you don’t have to use the color scheme generator. But I wanted the character to have colors that worked well together.

Choose a skin color. Luckily for me, I noticed that one of the colors that popped up on the color scheme generator looked like a really convincing dark skin tone. I only lightened it slightly so that the lines could be visible. As for the hair, I tried to use a color that was almost black but not so dark that the lines separating the hair weren’t visible.

Here came the fun part for me. Adding the spots for the spotted deer hide and the pattern for the piece of fabric in the front. For the fabric in the front, I kept the design simple and used a color that was compatible with the color of the green fabric. For the spots, I added varying sized dots and blurred them out. Okay, I actually used brushes from here. For the blurring, you can use a kleenex to rub the edges of the spots in order to make them blurry. If you’re using a graphics program, you can use the blur tool.

Next, I got really experimental. I decided to give the character a good amount of shading, but I’m not sure how it turned out. The light is coming from the left, so most of the shading is from the right. I didn’t want there to be too much shading on his face, since I didn’t want to obscure the features. In addition to the light source, one of the things to pay attention to when shading is where the dips in the muscles are. On the neck, I paid more attention to the muscles than on the rest of the body, creating really defined shadows under his chin. I created these shadows on Photoshop by creating a new layer and drawing black on the areas that I wanted shaded while setting the opacity on the layer to 50%. Maybe it needs to be lower.

I used less pictures in this one. Do you prefer that I use a gazillion pictures showing each feature being drawn or a few pictures submitted at milestones? I guess maybe I should break things down with each feature when I’m trying to demonstrate how to draw a very specific thing. Hmm.

The next tutorial will be coming really fast. I already drew and wrote the tutorial and all I have to do is type it up. Until then…

Best of luck in your endeavors,

Alex

For this how to draw guide, I will use the 1:5 ratio. This is not a good ratio for drawing chibi but rather for drawing an adolescent or short adult. The following character will be drawn.

After that, I’ll be covering how all the other different ratios can be used. Of course, she doesn’t exactly have a 1:5 ratio, but when I originally drew her with a perfect 1:5 ratio, she looked really weird.

How to Draw the First Circle

Draw five circles that are the same size and stack on top of each other. On the top circle, draw two horizontal lines that curve slightly upwards. These lines will represent the eyebrows. Draw two lines that slant upwards and towards each other, with their opposite ends touching the eyebrows.

For the eyes, draw lines that travel horizontally and curve upwards. Each of these lines travel downwards and wrap around at the points of the lines that are the farthest away from each other, forming almost half circles. The half circles form full polygons by forming points as the open ends of the half-circles close. Within these closed polygons, draw curving horizontal lines that curve upwards. These lines are near the top of the polygons. This will separate these eyes into two different sections. In the lower section of each eye, draw a vertical line and have that line curve to the right.

Noses are very tricky organs to learn how to draw. Some cartoon artists completely omit the nose or try to draw minimalistic elements of the nose, since the nose is difficult to draw attractively. I try to draw the areas that are the most shaded. Also, I read that with characters with some ethnic backgrounds, the nose needs to be more emphasized. For this face, most of the shading will be on the left side. So draw two vertical lines that curve to the right slightly. For the nose, draw a vertical line that curves to the left. When you reach the bottom of this line, have the line travel horizontally to the right while durving upwards. Reverse the direction of the curve where you want the middle of the nose to be and then reverse the curve again. Finish the other side of the nose with a line that travels horizontally and curves to the right.

Draw two curving horizontal lines that connect together. These lines will curve upwards. Then draw one horizontal line that curves downwards. These lines will connect at the ends, forming a polygon. In the middle of this polygon, draw a horizontal line that curves downwards slightly.

Ears can be as simple or as complex as you want to make them. Gosh, you don’t even have to draw them. In this case, I’m just going to draw a simple curve.

Since the head is tilted a bit to the right, the shape of the edge of the face will look different for each side. One side will be a gradually curving line where the line curves downwards and to the right. On the right side, draw a line that travels upwards while curving somewhat downward. At some point, this line will curve sharply outwards before returning to the path where it was originally traveling. This is the cheekbone, a feature that some people have more pronounced than others.

To draw the hair on the forehead, draw two waving lines that are close together, eventually meeting at one point.

To the right of the strand you just drew, draw several curving lines that travel to the right and curve downwards and to the left.

On the other side of the head, draw a similar strand of hair that consists of two lines that wave and connect together.

At some point on the strand of hair, draw a line that travels downwards with the line curving downwards and to the right.

Attached to the curving line, draw another strand that curves downwards around the ear. Again, this is two lines that connect together at a point.

Draw a line that travels upwards and waves. This waving can be slight or pronounced.

On the right side of the head, draw several more strands that are clumped on top of each other.

Finally draw the top of the head. Do not draw a perfect curve unless you are drawing a cartoonish character. Most people have imperfectly shaped heads and the top of the hair often consists of different clumps, which will cause the hair to not be perfectly symmetrical.

Draw lines that connect to the bottom of the head. Since the head is turned a particular way, the part of the neck that is farther away from the direction that the head is turned will appear more curving, while the other side of the neck will appear slightly closer to the center of the head.

In the next post, I will draw out the rest of the body as it covers the rest of the circles. In that post or the post afterwards, I will add color and shading. Then I’ll be drawing the 1:6, 1:7 and 1:8 ratios. If you would like any particular characters drawn using these ratios, email me at sketchinghouse@gmail.com. I’m going to try to talk Marisol into doing a how to draw chibi characters, since I have no experience drawing those types of characters at all.

See y’all next week,

Alex

Assorted Brush #1

This brush is made up of small circles that are strung together. When drawing in a line, this brush creates what looks like a slinky, cord or some type of microbe. If you scribble the lines together, it forms a black splotch with little renegade circles all around it. If you use the mouse to make single clicks, this brush will create tiny circles. This can serve as an alternative to using the ellipses tool. All you have to do is resize the brush using “[“ or “]” in order to get the right sized circle. However, the lines will be blurry. This might not work if you are searching for more fine lines.

Assorted Brush #2

Assorted brush #2 is just like brush one except that this circle has two circles instead of one with one circle contained within the other circle like a bulls-eye. The result is a darker line and little individual circles that look like tiny bulls-eyes. Like the other brush, as you increase the size of this brush the lines get blurry.

Assorted Brush #3

This brush is made up of a bunch of X’s stringed together. This brush has all sorts of uses ranging from texturizing a picture to creating something that looks like a metal fence. Individually, this brush can really create interesting texture when the brush is scribbled in one location, though scribbling too much will only create a black blotch. Making singular clicks of the mouse will create little X’s that could be used for stars. If you enlarge the X, the X becomes more blurry and the X appears as if its made out of blotches that start off larger in the middle and get smaller towards the tips of the X’s.

Assorted Brush #4

This brush is a diagonal pound symbol. But when used for drawing lines, it creates a line that has a rough edge and a thick black line in the middle. This creates nice little edges on the lines that are great for texture. I like how the text looked when I wrote it. When the brush is drawn over itself, it creates very thickly black blotches with rough edges, which reminds me of some paint mediums. Placed individually, this brush creates a sharp that gets progressively more blurry the more you increase the size.

Assorted Brush #5

I like this brush a lot. The lines created by this brush have very scratchy edges that look manmade at the same time because they are so uniform. This might be a useful brush for drawing the silhouette of an animal such as a caterpillar. The edges of the brush are reminiscent of fur. If clicked individually with a mouse, this brush leaves nice little gridlines that can have different applications.

Assorted Brush #6

Do you want a lizard, a fuzz ball, or a spiral? This really awesome brush creates the illusion of scales with drawn in a straight line and creates what looks like a ball of fur when the brush is draw over itself. When clicked individually, this brush creates a little spiral. Let your imagination run wild with this brush.

Assorted Brush #7

Made from diamonds. Not sure if a diamond is an artist’s best friend. This brush can create lines that look like they have bad quality. This brush might be useful in some way, but I can’t really think of any uses right now.

Assorted Brush #8

Looking to create lace? This brush brush is for you. This brush allows you to draw lines that look like laces. A very fun brush to use, but I cannot think of any applications beyond creating lacy material. But that’s good enough to make it useful.

Assorted Brush #9

I guess this is a cool brush. At a smaller size, this brush creates lines with really interesting edges. Make the lines larger and they start to remind me of centipedes. The symbol used to create this brush is kinda strange. I don’t really find the blotch in the middle really interesting.

Assorted Brush #10

I like this brush overall, though I don’t like the blurriness of it when you create larger sized strokes. This brush gets thicker as you travel horizontally and thinner as you travel vertically. The brush creates a 3D look that reminds me of the ribbon brush. The splotch is kinda boring and the individual mouse clicks created little marks that could be flames in the right picture.

Assorted Brush #11

Even though the shape of this brush is way different, this brush is like the opposite of brush #10 in effect. Lines get thicker as you travel vertically and thinner as you travel horizontally. The brush is kinda shaped like a genie lamp. I like how the left side of the brush seems to fade.

Assorted Brush #12

This is a cool brush but I’m not sure what it would be useful for except for really neat font. The lines sorta make me think of the edge of a rock, but that might just be my eyes playing tricks on me.

Assorted Brush #13

I almost skipped this one. This brush might be useful for texture, but it mostly only creates what looks like railroad tracks. But it’s a little too much on the blurry side.

That’s it for the first half. There’s a bunch more brushes in the assorted brush section like the star brush and the black widow brush. I’ll hit those tomorrow.

Alex

Start by drawing a curving line that slants towards the head.

On the part of the ear that’s farther away from the head, draw the line as a curve that suddenly goes into a slant that moves towards the head.

Draw a line that starts near the bottom middle near the edge of the ear. This line will travel along the outer edge of the ear until you reach the top corner closest to the head. Then the line will curve downwards and away from the head until it stops.

Where the last line you drew ends, place your drawing tool slightly above the end and draw a curving line that travels downwards. Continue until you draw a half circle.

The next part looks sorta like an upside down S that is a little more elongated and attached to the half circle you drew.

At this point, draw another S that is right-side up and attaches at the bottom to the line that you just drew.

Now locate the inner curving line and draw two curving lines that travel downwards and attach at the tip like a triangle or a strand of hair.

Finish by drawing a line that travels near the inner line that you just drew on the outer side on the inner side of the ear (good thing there’s pictures, this is confusing). At the bottom of the ear, draw a small curving line that curves upwards.

Next, let’s try another type of ear (woo!). Start off by drawing a curving line that looks like a hook. The line will be curving towards wherever the head is supposed to be.

Wherever you want the bottom of your ear to be, draw a line that curves downwards.

On the side of the ear that is away from the head, draw a slightly curving line that connects both of the other lines.

Draw a curving line within the hook part of the line and have that line travel along the outside part of your line until you stop somewhere near the top.

Where the last line ended, move up a little and draw a line that travels downwards and curves, attaching to the outer part of the ear. This line will travel down, slant downwards and to the left and then slant more steeply until it touches the outer part of the ear.

Now head over to the other part of the ear and draw two lines, one that curves upwards and one that curves downwards. These lines will be curving away from each other. The bottom line will slant downwards more and father out than the upper curve.

From where you left off, draw a line that travels downwards and curves towards the character’s head.

From this point, draw a similar curving line that sorta forms a small M but stops early and slants more towards the head.

The next part’s incredibly difficult to describe. Yeah, the ear is kinda tricky. Luckily, most people aren’t experts in what an ear looks like and most people won’t notice if there are minor errors in the ear. Of course, if you’re trying to get the ear really right, you’ll need to draw from an art model.

Now, let’s draw the ear that’s really difficult to see. The ear that is drawn from the back. Start by drawing a slightly curving line.

Draw a second line that makes a pass at the first line. This line travels more downwards and is even less curved.

At the bottom of the last line that you drew, draw a second line that curves in the other direction.

At the bottom of this line, draw a small curving line that travels away from where the ear connects to the side of the head and curves downwards. Then draw a line that travels directly upwards.

Where you left off at the straight line, draw a second line that curves upwards and away from the ear.

Draw a slightly curving line that connects the two lines that are traveling somewhat vertically up. Draw a line that hangs freely to the left of the ear. Find the bottom of the ear and draw a line that curves away from the ear and upwards.

Start off by drawing a head. Theoretically, you could just draw the arm. But arms are hard to draw if you aren’t seeing them in proportion to the rest of the body and you might as well get more practice with figure drawing. So draw a circle.

Now, figure out proportions. We’re not going to draw out the entire body, but it helps to get the entire body down when drawing a picture if you have enough room. Bodies are typically seven and a half to 8 and a half heads long. If you are drawing a live model, you can then get the proportions right by using the head as a frame of reference. All you have to do is simply stretch your arm out and close your non-dominant eye, which is the eye in which objects move when you close your other eye.

Once I have the heads all drawn out, I find it easy to create markers at different places on the body in order to know where I’m at. For instance, I know that the breastbone is slightly above the third circle. So draw the whole body out. I didn’t try to draw a perfect body because I want to focus more on the arms, the whole point of this blog post.

When hung straight, the arms usually stretch far enough that the hands are level with the point at which the legs spread apart. You might want to draw these first since then you’ll know where to go with your arms. For this tutorial, do not worry too much about the hands, since we’re not focusing on hand art.

Next, draw the circles where the elbows are supposed to be at. These circles are slightly above the point where the torso and hips meet.

The rest of the arms you can draw in any order. For the outer part of the arms connected to the shoulders, draw the lines with a slight curve. With the human body, everything has a curve in it. So be sure to always include that.

Next, draw the armpits. Why? Because the armpits will connect to the inner part of the arms. Armpits are really simple curving lines that aren’t even noticeable when the arms are close to the body. However, if the arms are raised above the head, the armpits will change greatly. However, this will be covered in a different tutorial.

The elbows, when the arms are straight, have slight curves inwards.

I think the way the arm is drawn works for most drawings. But you might want to get even more realistic with the form of the arm. I decided to redraw the left arm and focus on that solely. The left arm is turned with the top part of the forearm facing outwards. What this is going to create is an arm that has the inner part bulging while the outer part is somewhat flat.

If the arm is twisted in the right way, the outer part will have the bump where the elbow is found visible. From the elbow to the deltoids, there’s a curving line like that shown in the picture that almost goes within the arm, thus the line drawn inside the arm.

For the inner part, there will be more of a bulge if the arm is twisted with the bicep facing the person’s side. The deltoid overlaps the bicep in a way, so more muscular characters with a low body fat index might have a slight fold in the inner arm as well as the outer arm.

Some people find arms easy to draw while others find it wildly hard (like me). One tip for drawing the arm also fits for drawing really anything else. If you get to a part where you’re having trouble drawing, just draw it really slowly. Take your sweet time and focus fully on what the arm should look like.

Another tip for drawing arms is to simplify. This is an especially good idea whenever you draw cartoons. In fact, with cartoon art, there is no limit to how simplified your line drawing can be. Keep the arm as simplified as possible until you have the arm that you’re looking for. Then, you can start adding details and making the arm as you see fit. Just remember that arms are never straight and always have at least some minor curves.

Once you start drawing arms frequently, you will start to notice that arms really only are made of circles. You can really draw an arm in any position as long as you visualize the circles in the arm.

Drawing arms straight isn’t too tough, but what really gets tricky is when you try to draw arms in different positions. That asks for a whole different tutorial for a different day. For now, just practice getting the proportions right and finding the muscles that are found inside the arms.

Hmm, the arms are out of proportion. Make sure that the upper and lower arm are of equal length. Also, make sure that the fingers touch the mid thigh (as quoted by the lovely Marisol! Hi Alex! I took over your post! I’m posting about arms too in a little while).

Alex

So the first thing I did, I went back to the background layer, finding a good brush that I could use to shape clouds and the sky, I picked these colors, though you could use anything you want.

Now, just take that same brush and start blending, you’ll notice how the background starts to look a little more like a scenery, here I can almost see clouds developing, which is just what I want.

Now I changed the adjustment and hue a bit so now it’s a darker blue, which I like, it blends in better this way. I grabbed a light  color blue and a small hard brush and started making the linings of the clouds, highlights give them that depth and definition.

Now to make the moon! The moon is just about the easiest step ever! Take a large soft brush and with a pale blueish gray color, make a circle, the shape of the moon. Then, take a light blue color, a little smaller brush, not too small, just a smidge smaller than the one you had and make the center of the moon for the glow. I make a custom brush for the craters, but usually I add a dark shade and make the little marks in there. After you’ve done that, duplicate the layer, gaussian blur the layer, and pick a mode that bests suits you, I tend to like Overlay.

And here, I added more highlights to the clouds, taking the dodge tool over them, making the reflection of the moon more prominent. Also, I added the little bit of background in the far off, the church which is basically a silhouette with a light blue lighting. So there, all you do is make a solid dark shape of the building, then where the light hits, add the highlight of that color, in this case blue. That’s all there is to it! Now, you could leave the entire picture like this and it’ll be fine, you’re done! But, if you’re me, and feel like it could use an extra something, try to flatten the image, duplicate it, blur, gaussian blur to 3.0 or something, and change the layer to Overlay or anything else you like. The end result may look like this:

Tada! I used overlay as my option, and though it really takes away from the detail, since everything was so dark, it really enhanced the mood and feel of the picture. I love how it made the background really bright and dark at the same time, that’s a pretty sky isn’t it? Look how smooth the skin turned out! The church in the back also looks creepy and mysterious, just how I wanted! Well that’s it for this tutorial series, maybe I’ll do another one within these next days I’m off.

So there you have it folks! From skin, to hair, to clothes to background! Hope you enjoyed. Now I’m off to sulk a bit and drown myself in music. Sayounara!

-Tala

EXPRESSIONLESS/STRAIGHT LIPS

The expressionless look is not really expressionless. This look is sorta like our default faces. There’s no smile, no frown– just straight.

1) Draw a straight line.

2) At the center of the straight line, draw two sets of circles: two on top of the line, two at the bottom of the line. The two bottom circles should be slightly larger than the circles on top.

3) Starting at the center of the top two circles, draw a curved line that goes up over the circles, and down toward the center line. Repeat this step for the bottom. Slightly erase the circles.

4) Shade the entire lip area with a midtone. Then, shade the center line in a dark tone. Wherever you want dark shadows, shade these areas dark as well. If needed, refer to the shading tutorial for help. Now, take your eraser and add light sources. This will make the lips look wet. Blend your shading with a tortillion–blendy stick.

5) Add some curved lines. These lines should start at the top and bottom of the lips and resemble pumpkin lines. Blend with the blendy stick.

Here are the straight line lips. Cool, huh? Now let’s move on to something a little more challenging.

FROWNING

For frowning, I have prepared two examples: one that is an all-the-way frown, and another that is a halfway frown, or somewhat smirkish.

Frown One– Complete Frown

1) Draw a line that has edges that are bent down.

2) As with the straight-line lips, add two small circles that are next to each other centered above the line. Repeat this step for the button of the line.

3) Starting at the center of the top two circles, draw a curved line that goes up over the circles, and down toward the center line. Repeat this step for the bottom. Slightly erase the circles.

4) Shade the entire lip area with a midtone. Then, shade the center line in a dark tone. Wherever you want dark shadows, shade these areas dark as well. Take your eraser and add light sources. This will make the lips look wet. Blend your shading with a blendy stick.

5) Add some curved lines. These lines should start at the top and bottom of the lips and resemble pumpkin lines. Blend with the blendy stick.

The Somewhat Frown

This frown is somewhat different than the previous frown, but the later steps are the same.

1) Create a line that looks like a horizontal bow (as in bow and arrow). You will draw one slightly upward facing arc that is connected to another slightly upward facing arc as shown in the image I have provided.

2) Draw two circles that are centered above the line; draw two more circles centered below the line. In this case, draw the two upper circles on the upper portion of the arcs as shown in the image provided.

3) Starting at the center of the top two circles, draw a curved line that goes up over the circles, and down toward the center line. Repeat this step for the bottom. Slightly erase the circles.

4) Shade the entire lip area with a midtone. Then, shade the center line in a dark tone. Wherever you want dark shadows, shade these areas dark as well. Take your eraser and add light sources. This will make the lips look wet. Blend your shading with a blendy stick.

5) Add some curved lines. These lines should start at the top and bottom of the lips and resemble pumpkin lines. Blend with the blendy stick.

Okay, now the last three lips were easy. How about something that is a bit more of a challenge? How about an open-mouthed smile complete with teeth? Scary, huh? Not really.

OPEN-MOUTHED SMILE

1) Create a line that looks like a bird flying. This line will consist of two slightly upward facing arcs, with the left side looking smaller than right. Next, connect the “bird wing” line with a downward facing arc, leaving enough space between the lines so you can create the teeth in a later step.

2) As with the other lips, add two circles to the upper lipe line (the “bird wings”), and two circles to the lower lip line (the lower arc). The circles on the left should be slightly smaller than the circles on the right so you can create the illusion of perspective. I say illusion because I have poor depth perception and if people look at my drawing sometimes, they say my shading and depth is questionable at times. But I try, so I work with illusions.

3) Starting at the center of the top two circles, draw a curved line that goes up over the circles, and down toward the center line. Repeat this step for the bottom. Slightly erase the circles.

Now, we’re going to add teeth. Start at the center of the upper lip and draw little rectangles going from the center to the right, getting smaller as you go right; repeat this for the left. Do not make the teeth lines strong, instead press lightly. If your lines are too strong, your teeth look strange, too “gappy,” or  “fenced.” We don’t want picket fence mouth.

Above your teeth, add gum lines. These gum lines are small triangles with their points facing down.

4) Shade the entire lip area with a midtone. Then, shade the center line in a dark tone. Wherever you want dark shadows, shade these areas dark as well. Take your eraser and add light sources. This will make the lips look wet. Lightly shade the teeth in order to show separation and depth. Blend your shading with a blendy stick.

5) Add some curved lines. These lines should start at the top and bottom of the lips and resemble pumpkin lines. Blend with the blendy stick.

Lips are not that difficult to draw. All you need is some lines, some circles, and a blendy stick. I would also like to extend thanks to Carrie Stuart Parks, author of Drawing Realistic Faces. Without that book, this tutorial would not have been possible. I would also like to thank the makers of the electric eraser. That is an artist’s dream come true! I highly recommend all artists get one of those puppies, they clean images up nicely!

Happy drawing!

Love always,

Marisol