How to Draw + Shade Lips in Pencil

Hey! I'm Darlene and you're watching a Rapid Fire Art tutorial. In this video, I'll show you how to draw and shade realistic lips. Before you start this video, I would recommend you watch a tutorial on lighting if you're not familiar with that subject. I'll link to it down below. I'm going to use an HB pencil for the construction lines and lighter areas of shading. I'll use a 5B pencil for shading darker areas and a kneadable eraser. This eraser is great because you don't have to rub and you can also mold it into any shape to erase more precisely. You can also use a hard eraser, but I much prefer a kneadable one. I'm also going to use a soft tissue for blending and a smooth drawing paper. All tools slash recommendations will be linked up in the description. Let's start with an HB pencil for the construction process. For all of the construction lines, try to keep your lines very light so the outlines will blend in with your shading. This method is different from my original triangle method. It's a lot more simple. Just start with a line. It can curve up, down, or even look like a wave. Depending on the shape you draw, you'll get a different mouth shape. I have another video on that and I'll link to it down below if you want to check it out. The next step is to locate the very center and draw a curve. On both sides, draw a tick that slants in any direction you want. These are the corners of the mouth. Make sure they're spaced evenly apart. I'm just using my pencil as a measuring tool. After that, connect the dots using a wavy line of your choice. This is the opening of the mouth. I'm trying to match the left side so one side of the mouth isn't higher than the other. You can also use the line we drew in step 1 as a reference. We won't need this line anymore, so let's erase that. The next step is to draw the top lip. We're going to draw from the center and work our way out. So, locate the center, and let's draw the cupid's bow. I'm drawing a wide V shape, but you can also draw a U shape or something closer to a flat line. You can draw this higher or lower for a thinner or thicker top lip. Regarding the width of the cupid's bow, I wouldn't make it any wider than a third of the overall mouth. Once you're done, just connect it to the corners of the mouth. Making sure these peaks are level. I'm trying to mirror the left side so the mouth appears symmetrical. For the bottom lip, we're also going to start drawing from the center and work our way out. Again, the thickness of the lip is determined by the distance from the opening of the mouth. If you want to draw a mouth that has dark lipstick, or full lips that curve or curl out to a large extent, continue drawing this outline to the very corners of the mouth. If not, you can stop part way. Make sure to also feather your strokes out at the end. The next step is to shade. Before we do, make sure your construction lines are very light. I'm keeping them dark so you can clearly see what's going on. Let's shade a light layer of graphite over the entire area so it's clearly a different shade from the rest of the paper. Now I want to lay down a smooth solid layer of graphite to start. To shade a large area such as this, I'm going to use the hatching method where all the strokes go in one direction. First, make sure a large area of your lead is exposed. Hold the pencil using an overhand grip like this to get thick lines, which are great for shading smoothly. The closer your strokes, the better. A regular writing grip will make it difficult to shade smoothly because the lines come out thinner, which can make your shading look scratchy. These strokes will also be more difficult to blend. To shade a large area such as this, decrease the movement in your fingers and wrist, and instead use your elbow and shoulder to achieve a larger range of motion while shading. For even thicker lines, you might want to consider stripping off some of that wood to expose even more lead. You can do that by using a knife or box cutting knife. Anytime you lose your grip or put your pencil down, remember to do a test scribble to make sure your lines are just as thick and smooth before shading your drawing again. The slower you move across the page, the better because you'll have less gaps. I do have a few gaps across my drawing, so I'm just going to go over it again. This base layer ensures that our drawing will not be the same shade as the paper. This is important because we want the drawing to pop out. Let's blend all of our shading so it's nice and smooth. Just grab a soft tissue and wrap it around your finger. Lightly blend the graphite out. Since we shaded flatly, I'm just blending in random directions. What we're doing right now is just filling in those tiny valleys in the paper so our drawing looks less grainy or pixely. If you're getting dark blotches everywhere, use a clean spot on your tissue to continue blending. The next step is to plan your lighting. How many light sources do you want and where should they come from? I'm going to have a single light source shining down from the top right side. In general, areas that are facing the light directly will be lightest and areas facing away will be darkest. In this case, with the light shining down from above, the top of each lip will appear lighter than the bottom part. It might help to think of the mouth from the profile view. For example, my drawing might look like this from the side. With the light shining down at this angle, the brightest zones might appear here, where the surface of the lip faces the light directly. And as the surface of each lip curves away from the light source, it'll become darker and darker. I'm going to use this information to shade my drawing. Now, we also need to account for reflections and cast shadows, but I'll get into those a little bit later. To learn more about light, click on the tutorial in the top corner of this video or in the description. Decide on where you want the shiniest areas of the lip to be and then outline those areas so that you can avoid shading them in. I'm using short strokes that follow the contour of the lip so that when the drawing is completely shaded, these outlines will naturally just blend right in. Again, my light source is coming from the top right, so I'll extend my highlight a little more to the right. Yours might be different depending on where your light source is coming from. Okay, let's do some more shading. This time, instead of using the hatching technique, I'm going to do some contouring. These are lines that wrap around the form of your subject. When drawing lips, they can also double as wrinkles. Using contour lines, let's give the bottom lip some texture. I'm just aiming for a pretty uniform value. As I work my way towards the center of the lip, my contour lines will become more straight and vice versa. Depending on how you draw your contour lines, you can get a completely different lip shape. I'm purposefully using the pointy tip of my HB pencil to create many thin lines, but you can try thicker lines if you want. Just going back and forth, building the layers of graphite up a little bit at a time, making sure my contour lines create a lip shape that I'm satisfied with. I'm quite happy with the overall shape, so now it's time to add some darker values along the bottom area of the lip so it looks as though the surface is curving away from the light source. Although this area is in shadow, I'm going to avoid shading too dark just to account for any reflected light that may bounce up from the chin. Perhaps there are wrinkles that you want to shade darker to give the lip a more bumpy texture. For those of you who only have an HB pencil on hand, you can continue shading darker to give your drawing a more 3D form, but I do recommend using a softer pencil such as a 5B. Because it's a lot softer, dark values are a lot easier to achieve without straining your hand. Of course, if you don't want your drawing to be too dark, an HB pencil may be all that you need. I'm going to shade this area directly under the top lip darker because it's covered in a cast shadow. A cast shadow forms when an object blocks light from reaching another. For this part, I'm going to switch to a 5B pencil. Draw a very clean line around the boundary between the top and bottom lip. You can go lighter if you don't want your shadows to be as dark. Shade the cast shadow lighter gradually as you work your way down. When shading a narrow section like this, you might find it easier to shade from side to side instead of up and down. I don't want to make the cast shadow that thick because the thicker it is, the more the top lip will stick out. Here's a clear example of what I mean from the side view. The more the top lip sticks out, the more light is being blocked from reaching the bottom lip, which could translate to a larger cast shadow. If you need to blend your shading and you don't want to soften out that clean edge, try using a different blending technique. Fold your tissue lengthwise several times to build up thickness. Use one hand to clamp the top edge. Fold the tissue in to get a sharp corner. Fold it in again, wrapping the tissue tightly around itself. And then again. You should now have a hard pointy tip to do some precision blending with. Clamp your tissue tightly so it doesn't become loose. Then use the very tip to blend along the top edge of your shadow. With some of that graphite stuck to the tissue, we can also use it similarly to how we'd use a pencil. Just be careful when working in lighter areas because the amount of graphite that gets transferred to the drawing is not always predictable, so it's very easy to mark up the drawing. If you're using very light strokes, that should be just fine. So when using tissues to blend, it might pick up too much graphite and lighten areas of your drawing that you might not necessarily want lightened, such as these. So after I blend, I like to go in and shade those areas again to smooth it out. Having a sharp pencil for this step really helps to speed things up. If you notice any other inconsistencies, like these black dots or random dark blotches that you don't want, roll your kneadable eraser to a very fine tip and just dab those away lightly. You can also use a hard eraser. You'll probably have to cut it though to get a nice sharp edge to work with. Keep in mind that it will be a little more difficult to do just because there's rubbing involved. By the way, I'm not trying to achieve perfection in any way. I'm just removing very obvious flaws to achieve a smoother drawing. Since I'm using the eraser already, let's brighten up those highlights that we outlined earlier. If you like how yours looks right now, feel free to skip this step. Instead of using a pointy tip, let's flatten out a small portion of the eraser so we can erase long strokes. Dab or drag the eraser along the pre-marked highlight zones. After a few strokes, you'll notice the eraser become less effective at removing graphite. At this point, just fold it in on itself to get a clean spot. Then pinch the eraser and continue erasing. Don't forget to follow the contour of the lip. You can mold the eraser in different ways to get a variety of shapes. Let's add a few extra highlights along the sides. I erased a little bit too much, but nothing I can't undo with a pencil. Let's do a few over here. Okay, I think I'm done with this lip for now. Maybe I'll go back and darken the bottom portion a little bit more, but let's work on the top lip before we call it complete. So the first step is to determine the shape that you want using contour lines. You can draw the contour lines in your head or straight on top of your drawing. I'm going to go for a more flat shape. Once you've decided on your lip shape, you can plan out the lighting some more. Where the lip curves away from the light, I'm going to gradually shade it darker. You can draw a series of lines to remember where that zone is. I call this shadow lining. Using faint contour lines to outline an area in preparation for shading. These should disappear once the lip is fully shaded in. You can also make a note of this in your head instead of drawing it. So we've outlined the areas that we want to shade darkest and the shiniest. Using an HB pencil, I drew additional contour lines to add more texture to the lip surface. Along the bottom edge, I looked for the most prominent wrinkles and created a pattern. Like this. So the wrinkles appear as though they're bunched up. A plump lip might look smoother. These wrinkles can be as deep, thick, or as frequent as you want. Just play around with different combinations to see what looks good to you. Continue adding texture and shading the top lip based on how you want to shape it. While you're shading, don't forget to account for reflected light. I shaded this area a little bit lighter to account for reflections that hit the bottom lip and bounce back up. Use an eraser to create some shiny highlights along the zones that you've marked out earlier. Up to this point, with all the shading that I've done, the outline that I drew around the very top of the lip has partially blended right in. Except for this part here. There's a very obvious outline which makes the lip look less realistic. So I'm just going to lighten this with my eraser significantly so it's not as obvious. Another option is to shade the rest of the mouth or surrounding skin, making sure all the outlines are fully blended in. Around the corners of the mouth, I use a tissue to smudge the graphite in a circular motion, creating an airbrush effect, which made the edges look more natural. Now this following step is optional. I'm just adding a cast shadow directly below the bottom lip using my 5B pencil to make the drawing look a little more interesting. This shadow can be as light or as dark as you want it to be. Since my light source is on the right side, this cast shadow should be positioned to the left. I'm shading lighter as I move away from the lip, towards the chin. Use a tissue to blend the graphite out, making your shading smoother. The less grainy the drawing is, the more realistic it will look. If your drawing doesn't pop out as much as you'd like, try brightening zones that face the light and or darken zones that are turned away. If you enjoyed this video, please hit the like button. If you want to make a request, drop it down in the comments, and don't forget to subscribe to my channel. Hit the bell icon to get notified when a new video comes out. Thanks for watching!