Drawing the Mouth

The mouth can be very expressive on the face. So when you caricature it try and capture it's unique expressiveness. I think the mouth can be "cartooned" more than the eyes or the nose and you'll still be able to maintain the likeness of your subject. If you mess up the eyes or nose too much it's easier to lose the likeness than if you mess up the mouth. You can draw the mouth at a really crazy angle and still manage to keep the likeness of your subject.

Now let's draw her smile

Let's draw the woman's mouth now. We'll draw the contour of the upper lip, then the curve of the smile, then add the bottom lip. Then we'll fill in the smile by adding teeth.

Do you notice that her smile is a bit crooked, that the right corner is higher up than the left? Keep that in mind as you draw the mouth. DRAW WHAT YOU SEE. Put your pencil vertically on the right corner of her mouth. See where you pencil falls on the eye? It's about in the middle of the eye. This means that the corner of her smile should line up with the middle of her eye on your drawing. Make the same vertical measurement for the left side of her mouth. That corner only comes to about the first third of the left eye. What we're going to do in this caricature is make her nose and chin look a bit big. We can do both things by making her mouth a bit small and sliding it up a bit on her face.

First line of the mouth. With verticals to show alignment.

Finished mouth contour.

Measure the space between her nose and the bottom of her top lip. Did you measure it to be about half an eye? We'll make it less to make it look like it's closer to her nose. Put your pencil vertically on your drawing at about a third of the left eye. Sight down your pencil to just below the nose. That's about where you'll draw the first line of the mouth. Because we're going to make her mouth smaller than it actually is, we'll draw the shorter than we measured it to be. Start to draw a line that starts parallel with the edge of her left nose lobe. Draw a line that curves up just like the contour of the top of her mouth. Stop the line just past her nose, don't go to parallel with the middle of her eye.

Now draw a line under that line that curves around and connects to the top line at the ends. This will represent the bottom of her smile. Now draw another curved line under that one that connects to the ends of the smile, this will be the bottom of her lip. Look at her smile in the photo and see that her lower lip is just slightly thicker than the opening her mouth is making. When you draw these two lines, space them so that the bottom lip will be slightly thicker than the opening of the mouth. As you look at the photo to the right, can you see that drawing the mouth smaller than it really is makes the nose look larger than it really is?