How to Draw Comic Style Mouths - Step by Step

1. Introduction Video: Hello everyone. My name is Robert Marzano and I'll be your instructor for this class how to draw comic-style mouth step-by-step, brought to you by Skillshare. In this class, I'm going to teach you how to draw a comic-style mouth, male and female. We'll start off with basic shapes. Then we'll get into creating some different gestural studies of the mouth and filling up the sketchbooks with lots of variety of quick sketches and just loose interpretations, not being so critical in the very beginning and getting a confidence who performs. Then we'll talk about the differences of male or female. How to render them different ways? How to add like crosshatching, things like that. Basic techniques that I've used for years to help me draw miles better and how I draw in my own comics. I'll show you different techniques for rendering so that you don't just have one way of doing it. We'll cover some exercises that really help you explore your ideas and develop your style. I'll do a few different examples of male versus female to hopefully give you some competence in drawing those on your own, then we're going to jump into a bit of a fun project and creates some monster mouth. Essentially it's all the same techniques that leave and get you to something weird and crazy like this, but I like to make it fun and try to show you a nice variety of ideas of what you can really express once you have these base techniques. I'm very excited to be teaching this class. I hope you're excited to learn it. Let's get started. 2. The Basic Shapes of the Mouth: Now I want to show you how to draw a male and female lips of the mouth, and basically to get started, I want to show you a very simplified breakdown. I think it always helps to do this because then when you start the angle and turn these shapes in your mind and on the page you'll have a better foundation to do so with. Essentially what I see when I see the mouth is a stretched out M. I'm going to start with a female lip because it allows me to trace the shape of it more, we're going to talk about that as well. One of the major differences when you're drawing male to female is obviously a few. But if you do this stretched out M, this is representing the top of the lip, I'm going to center this on the screen here. Almost the same thing for the middle. You could really make the argument that it's a straight line across if you are being very simplified, very animated or cartoony or whatever. But I tend to think about it still as the same shape, just more stretched out, more flattened out. There's the middle of that top lip or the separation of the two. Now if this is a closed mouth poles, which is what I want to start with, then we're just going to do this U-shape at the bottom. Notice that I'm starting very angular as well. Angular shapes generally will help you fill out proportions and spot errors from one cemetery and things like that. But it's not always going to do that work for you. You just have to be critical of your work as you draw it. Now what we've got here is this really simplified version of a model that looks very, again cartoony or animated. Then if we go like this, we can get the way the top of the lip converges up and it usually does this horseshoe looking shape right there. Then I like to draw these angles that come in from this top part of the lip like this. Those can really meet down in the middle or off to the side a little more. Then likewise, these angles that come out here, curves, I should say. The reason why I like doing this, because it helps me when I start to again change the direction of the lips. As I draw these on an angle, and we'll do so in a little bit. You'll see where these can benefit us. You could really do this as much as you need if you're trying to really visualize the amount of curvature that you're getting as it goes from point A to point B across like that. The other thing you might see here is wall on the very bottom. You got to think about the skin that goes from underneath the lip to the chin. You're generally going to get another reverse horseshoe or stretched out U-shape, just like that half-moon shape down there. Now there's a bunch of other things as you get into detailing the model, you can get the way the mouth has this little dimple to the side. Sometimes you see that depends on the person and the facial expression. But again, we're going to just work on the simplified shapes for right now, just as a confidence-building process basically. Let's go ahead and take another one, let's move this off to the side. Let's go ahead and do a side shot, and from here, same thing really. It's going to be this M shape, but it's going to be segmented obviously because we're only getting half of it. We have to perceive that were just getting this portion here like that. We also have to imagine the curvature that we're going to get right down the middle line there. That's what we're going to put here. Then again, the half M shape like this. Now notice I naturally brought this line back. If you look at the curve that we have right here, that's what I'm emulating right there. Let me go and put that in right there. You'll notice that on this one I've brought it like this on the illustration. But you could make the argument that it's also just like this. It's wherever you want to put it, wherever you're trying to visualize your shapes in there. But it's probably a little more accurate to bring it from this point to this point. Now as we do the bottom lip, again, we have to imagine the curvature that comes out. Now there's a lot of stuff that happens right here. In fact, I brought that bottom lip out too far. One of the things that I pay special attention to. Again, you're going to get a lot of this knowledge from studying from life, but then using your redraw methods to make it something more animated or stylized, whatever you're really after. But one of the things I always notice is that the lips have this bit of angular shift right there. We'll put the top part of the lip as it connects upwards and obviously, it will start to meet the nose. But we want to get that shift and that angle in there, and then also this part right here is now going to bend backwards. It's going to be a curvature. I'm trying to stay as angular as I can, but you notice I started to curve the bottom lip. Just happens a little bit naturally as you go here, but I do want to keep it as angular as possible so that you can really get a competence with the basic shapes. Let's take this, put that onto layer for ease. Increase the size a little bit. You can see it's pretty simplified. There's not a whole lot to it. Now as you start to render and you start to do a lot more with the expressions and things like that, I would say gets a lot more advanced. Now we're going to do on an angle. Again, we're using the information that we've already established here with these initial two basic sketches to really aid us. Each time you do these studies and you start to make more and more, they should get a bit easier based on your previous drawings. It's why I like to leave a lot of stuff on the page when I'm sketching and studying because comparison can really help you get through any major or minor stumbling blocks. Now at this angle I'm going to use that stretched out M in a basic perspective. If I wanted, I could draw some perspective guides and box, but I don't think it's really that necessary for something as simplified. The main thing to take note of is that based on foreshortening and perspective, this side needs to be more elongated than this side. Even in this very basic line work, you want to get that in early on. Then as we start to add to this would bring that other stretched out M right here. Just so it doesn't look to entirely flat, we need to immediately think about the lines that come out and back like this. Let me show you the other way. This isn't a straight line. If you go real straight, it's not like that. It comes out back down, back out. That's where your bottom lip is going to be, again if we were to draw these lines, then I'm going to bring them in more to a point, like this this and back out. Then for this bottom of the lip. Again, I want to keep it pretty angular. Notice too, I'm purposely trying to make the bottom lip a bit larger than the width or height of the top lip. It's not always the case obviously with every character, but it's generally a rule. You can lean on that a bit, but there are those instances where you want to make the top lip heavier for maybe a more exotic look or just a different type of character. There's our angular one, and you can probably see I'm almost fighting the urge to start detailing it. That's just what happens as you do more and more of these, you start to want to skip steps. But it's good to force yourself to really get back to basics and do as much studying in the rudimentary way that you can. Because this stuff does help you on those harder to draw days or you're just not feel in it or whatever. The basics will help you. Let me soft erase it just a bit and re-sketch through it and just reiterate it. Essentially it's that M shape, and again, I want to keep it very angular for now. Now some of the differences that you're going to see quite a bit and we're going to get into this a bit more as we draw some various mouths. We will also talk about, obviously male versus female. But you might get a more shallow distance here to here. You might get a larger round over from here to here. It just makes it look a bit more exotic and gives a certain feminine quality. There's just lots of variations. Then obviously you might get more of a round over or thicker bottom lip, just different things like that to keep in mind. Obviously we're going to experiment with that more as we go. The other thing is that generally the bottom lip comes up more and meet under that top lip. That's pretty much a given and almost every scenario. But that's something else you want to pay attention to. What will happen generally is it will meet across here or maybe a little bit more inward like this. But you're going to get this round over of the mass of the lip getting a bit larger. You'll see it more from an angular shot, likewise, you're going to see things like the separation as the lip starts to go like this. You're going to get that line that shows you that separation. You're also going to get it over here. We're going to get more into that. That's a little bit more of fleshing it out. Again, I really want this to just be focused on the basic shapes. Practice is doing a variety of angles and really get the feeling down for these basic shapes, and then now we'll move on in details a bit further. 3. Gestures of the Mouth: In this lesson I want to talk to you a little bit more about the gesture of the mouth. A lot of times when we draw parts like noses, eyes, mouths, ears, whatever, I guess not ears, ears don't have much gesture to them really but there is a flow to even the ear and the shapes that within it. With the mouth, there's a lot of shapes and there's a lot of flow and a lot of expression. Gestures are still very important. For instance, if we go to draw and open multiples and we already know our basic shapes kind of those M's. I'm going start with the female mouth just because it allows me to outline and show more of it, but we will get into the male mouth and show the difference there. Just keep in mind that one of the big differences is that they're shaped in a lot of the same ways, but you're just going to outline a lot less specially for the top lip. Like I said, we're going to get into that a bit further but as I started to just draw in this practice mouth, I'm thinking more gesturally than anything. So I'm just trying to get a quick expressiveness and not worrying about it being too correct. I'm more on the end of caricature or animated as the way I'm thinking about it. So for the teeth pushing it back, there's this horseshoe shape and you're going to get some of the tongue right there little curvature for the top teeth like that and then a lot of this could go and shadow. Again, those same curves are there for the top lip being M shape we talked about but as it bends back and pushes back into the faces of the cheeks, tuck back like this, where you have to perceive that. What happens is if you study from life and you start to create a lot of these quick gestural, almost caricature style renditions. You can really log a bunch of these and you can get a better idea for the expression that you're trying to achieve. So obviously, now if we take this from the side which I always recommend, if you're still struggling to perceive something like that, practice your side poses first. I'll just do a smile here with the cheeks going back and laugh lines going back. I'm trying to get very basic with it and not trying to get too awfully advanced at this point. The rendering, all that stuff comes later. I just want to get those basic shapes and keep it very stylized, very loose, something like that. Then if I was to take this now from a side shot or profile and also take note right here that you get that slant and I could probably take that bottom lip back a little bit further. It actually looks like more of a a smart grant or something. But it's good to really show those varieties and do a bunch smoothed things around, try different shapes, experiment. Experimentation as the way that you really get confidence and learn how to draw the stuff and develop your style. So essentially now if I take this from this profile shot and I want to do a bit of front angle shot to what I would consider the same smile. I can just look and pull from that. So sometimes profiles can be a great way to warm up to something you might consider a little bit more advance. So again, I want to just quickly through on those stretched out M shapes, bring them to a point to the sides. Maybe that little dimple right there or puckering of the side of the mouth. Then I'm almost perceiving this little bit more of a downward angle to this. So I could get those lines in there to show that angle early on. I could do a backwards curve like this and this horseshoe shaped that we talked about. Then I could start to bring the teeth. Now one thing I will say about a shot like this, it's always a little bit more convincing or looks a little bit better if you make sure to really tucked those teeth back and inside the lips. There's lot of designs where you'll see it and it's almost there, but the teeth look like they're flat to the lips on the front of it and that's obviously not how does lips are on the outside and you can really see that from this profile shot. So that's what you want to make sure to get into your angled shots like this. One way to really do that is to show the curvature of the lips. Now I notice here too on bringing that lip underneath and insert from the sides of that top lip. Top lip is extending out past that. So that helps to really push that design. I want to get the curvature of that bottom lip. That's what's going to make it look like it's in front of the teeth because the teeth and a basic form or primitive shape or whatever, we're going to look like that. So if the lip looks like that, it's not saying can't look correct but little things like putting that bump here and the bump here are going to start to make you realize that the lips are in front of the teeth and then obviously a little bit of shading to the sides, a little bit of drop shadow, so on and so forth. Just be aware that if you're struggling to make it look like the lips are in front of the teeth you might want to change the shape right here. Play around with a couple of things if you might want to get more of this curvature evident in the lip. I also want to put a little bit more of a drop shadow here, but this is going to be more into the rendering. I don't want get too far ahead of what we're doing here. So at this point I'm really just trying to get it gestural and they'll sense it was more angular. I felt the need to put in some of these lines to really map out the angle. For instance, let me separate this real quick. I want to show you a bit larger here will go and software a system. So obviously this is taking a step past gestural really because when you do a lot of these gesture drawings, you want keep them quick fluid and just get the base information. I do want to elaborate real quick on this just to show you what I'm seeing but I'll still try to keep a pretty basic. So we're going to want a little bit of that curvature when we get that angle from the teeth on the side, a little bit of drop shadow. Make sure it meets up. The way I look at it with the bottom lip as it comes back and up like this, this comes out into the side, talks back into the face that way, but the bottom lip comes up and under. So and obviously, as you start to shade and do things like that, you can really make that more evident. So the main thing I want to show you, and I'm going to go ahead and illustrate this with actually even another color is to really, if you're struggling to make your mouth, especially on angles look as dimensionals as they could take the time to do something like this where you actually draw a line through it, find your center. You see my lips are off there. Let's find this to explain it, but as I render out, I'll need to fix these things so you can see my cemeteries off, my angle to my sides of my lip but the center-line will help you expose that. It'll force you to see a bit more dimensionally about what you're doing. So I always find that to be very helpful. Again, you can take this as far as you need to and keep really trying to push the depth and find the curvature of the mouth. So I'm struggling to perceive where that would be. It might be like that depends on the angle, but I picked what actually start to bend back cause we got to remember as well that as this spins around, it's going to shift. It's going to fan out basically like this. Some point is going to rotate back the other way. So hopefully that helps you to understand how these gestural type sketches can be very important and just the studies in general. So now what we want to do is take this same technique and explore a bunch of different poses and really compare them and learn from them. So we're going to draw some different poses and time lapse and I'll narrate over top. So let's go ahead and do that. So now we're just going to again keep him very gestural, very almost cartoon like and quick. The beauty of drawing quickly is that you get more expressiveness and that's really part of it. That's probably, I would say one of the main parts because it allows you to figure out more style choices if you're being more expressive. The other thing is you just get so many different designs on the page so quickly that you're learning just faster in my opinion, you start to really explore more ideas quickly and you understand more about what you're drawing. So it's is a very important exercise with anything that you do and you've probably heard me reiterate it multiple lessons, but it's very important. I always just find that if I sit down and do this, sometimes it can seem a bit daunting. Other times it can be really fun. It just depends on the subject matter at hand. Every time I walk away with filling more accomplished and learning something about my study. In being that the mouth is so expressive and there's so much variety to it, it really does take those repetition to get that comfort level. The other thing I'll recommend too is you practice drawing from a variety of resources. So you can look at photos for different expressions you can pull from different animated styles that you'd like and learn from those. The other thing that's really important is just to keep a mirror by art table. You can find ones that attach and you're on a swing arm and things like that and that can be very helpful for things like this. You do have to learn to train yourself to draw through what you see and make something more animated and obviously if you're a male, draw female ellipse and if you're a female being able to draw male lips just by studying your own expression. But it can be a huge time saver and that's what professional artists have been doing for years and years. So practice lots of variety in your mouth, sketches and study various expressions and see what you come up with. So that'll complete this lesson. Let's move forward. 4. Male Versus Female Mouths: Now we're going to draw male versus female and talk about some of the differences that I notice when doing that and what you can look forward to really show that and make it more evident in your illustrations. One of the things that I tend to do is always draw the female lips just a little bit more full. Basically wider, thicker how we want to look at that, but with more of a voluptuous look. I think that portrays a feminine quality. Not to say that that is always the case obviously, there's definitely males with full lips and there's definitely females with very thin lips. But the more you can find little cues to show the significance in your drawing and obviously the consistency in which you do it with your illustrations, the more the viewer is just going to look at it and go, "Okay" those are female lips. Those are male lips.'' The reason why it's so important, especially with storytelling, is if you don't have enough of a difference from one to the other, then it makes things like extreme close-up shots a bit harder to understand, and you have to lean on other cues like maybe facial hair or like I'll talk about here shortly, the way that you render differently. It's not just showing male versus female. Ultimately that's the idea behind it, but it also helps you tell the story in ways that are important like close-ups, like expressions, even close-up kissing. You want to really have that difference from the male to the female, so that you know exactly what's going on in the narrative. The thing that really helps with the female lips as well, is just rendering them out. It's actually why I feel like I'm cheating, but I often will just fill them in like you've see me doing here. I'll establish the light source and the glare, perceive at the glare as it generally does, will hit the bottom lip more significantly. If the light source is coming from the top, then the bottom lip is going to catch more light. I'll draw the bigger glare there as you can see. With the male lips, I'll actually just render more of the facial features around the lips themselves. The pockets of the skin are right above the chin. The linework to the side, we're going to have to characterize a little bit of edge and I convey some laugh lines or wrinkles. But I tend to render more outside of the mouth for the male character and then with the female character, I keep a lot of the definition in the illustration inside the lips. Again, it draws your attention to the female mouth, which seems to make more sense. It's just like when a woman puts on lipstick, it makes the lips more pronounced and defined. We want to recreate that with our illustration techniques. It's really easy to do obviously. You see right here defining the light source, making sure to show where it hits just a few little areas so that the lips don't blend together too much when I do the filling here shortly. A little bit of lines underneath. But I'm always real hesitant about using too much linework with anything that I'm trying to convey a permanent quality. Then now obviously I fill this in, and it really starts to take shape as far as the definition. You can see the light source a bit better now. That's just a couple of things that I utilize as really techniques or tactics to show the difference from male to female. Obviously, with your style, this may or may not work. You don't necessarily have to fill in all the lips to make them look female either. You can do with glare lines, you can just do it with line weight around the perimeter of the lips. Lots of different ways to really convey your message there. But again, I find this to not only be easy to do, but very quick and functional. It's something that I can just speed through a scene in a comic or whatever I'm trying to illustrate, but mainly for comics where it allows me to showcase what I'm trying to say really quickly and move on to the next panel. Now just adding in a little bit of render lines to break up the line from being just glare to shadow. Again, these are based on style choices and whatever your concept is for your rendering style. But I generally just use some tapered lines. I tend to always go with the flow of the lip, even though these other lines are going across the other direction. But for the most part, I will try to stay with the actual flow of whatever it is I'm rendering over. Now as I get over to the male lips here, I try to lend a little bit more on using line weight. I'll still do some shading and obviously some shapes of shadows here and there. But if you notice, I use a lot more of the line weight to convey it and not fulfilled in areas, I don't fill in the lips. Again, I render out more of the skin around the mouth. I think that just helps to convey a little bit more of a roughness or male characteristic. The other thing is, I try to generally make the male versions more angular. Even though I use a good amount of curve lines in here, I generally will lean a little bit more on angular lines to help point out that it's a male lip or male lips. Now what this the next example, we'll do a different pose, but we'll try to again convey the difference. But what I would like to illustrate here is that ultimately, they both start the same. What I'm going to do is take this first one, copy it, and flip it. I want to show you how these two that are identical and structure can become male versus female. Essentially, we'll soft-erase it down and redraw over top and utilize the same techniques for making more widened lips for the female. The rest is pretty much the same. You could get away with the same teeth, same tongue, and things like that. I generally will still try to convey a little bit of difference there. Maybe a thinner tongue or bigger teeth and comparison, whatever. But for this part, I'm really just going to focus on the lips and the outer shading. With the male mouth, you can see there I didn't trace the entire perimeter of the lips. Then with the female mouth, I'll jump right into doing the glare lines and shading it in. I'll actually start to play around with the shape just a little bit here. I always experiment, and especially if I'm looking at something that's not exactly convincing to me. But I'm going to redraw anyways. I might as well experiment. Sometimes I even settle back on what I originally had. But I always stress the importance of experimentation as you're doing this, as long, as it's not too overly time-intensive. You can see with filling in the lips, quite a big difference from the male loops now and it's starting to read as male versus female, even though again, we had that same very basic structure to get us started. Then we can add some little effects here. Maybe give a little bit more saliva to the male side, just because again, that comparison is what we're calling for, not that males have more saliva or anything like that. It's just a comparison. That'll complete this lesson. Let's move on to the next and talk about rendering. 5. Rendering the Mouth: In this lesson we're going to talk a little bit more about rendering. What I want to first do is draw a very basic smile, nothing too extreme and make a copy of it. This is a very helpful technique. I think when you're really trying to pinpoint one aspect of your drawing in this case the rendering and what we can come up with that. But instead of drawing a multitude of designs and rendering each one differently, I find it helpful to take the existing sketch and just add those differences to it. Because you're able to see by comparison a little bit better and say, in what way did it really change this particular sketch? We'll take this initial drawing right here and we'll go ahead and copy this and then we'll draw over top of it and explore the different ways we can shade it. If I take this, make it a little bit larger and with the first one, I want to render much in the way that I did on the previous examples. I'm going to use more of a fill technique and then on the bottom I'm going to use a little bit more of a Line way technique and I'll talk about the differences there. For this one, like anything else, I still go through and refine the edges. But I know that a lot of that's going to get covered up when I do the filling of the lips. Essentially I won't be too critical of the line work as much as I would or will be for the other one where it's going to be more about the line way. I just want to establish the glare. Again, I'm picturing that the light source is coming from the top. We're going to get a little bit of edge sliding to the top lip. Again, majority of the light is going to hit that bottom, thicker part of the lip. You can do a lot with your light source and really say a lot about the structure of whatever it is you're drawing because the way the light reacts off it will give the viewer a very good interpretation of how thick it is, how specular. You can actually define a lot of different things with the light source. You can obviously create different mood, things like that. Now what the light source and place, I'll go ahead and fill this in. Again to me, almost seems like a bit of a [inaudible] , but it just works. It's functional so you can quickly get the lips filled in and make them appear a lot more solid on the page. I've assumed you get back through and you ink it and you color it, even takes another level of depth and perception to it. But, you can just really convey a lot with this nice fill-in method. You'll see by comparison when we do the bottom portion of the bottom lips that they're going to have a lot more of an airy fill or light fill because we're not going to be doing so much fill-in. You can actually convey almost a couple different I guess moods, but really styles. It's good to just have a lot of different ways that you would try to accomplish so that you have a multitude of ways that you can create your characters. The other thing is, it provides a different set of opportunities for the color artist. Essentially the one that we're doing up top here not the color artists can't still play around with it. We've predefined a few extra things by being so dark of a fill-in. It pretty much says that it's a very dark color. The colors might roll it that and do a little bit deeper colors in the colorization. With the bottom one here, by doing this line weight fill to it. It almost gives the colors the interpretation that it's a lighter color. Maybe some software pink lips and not real deep red wine color, something like that. Again, it's really neat how the differences and the shading techniques, the rendering can start to give cues on those various things.You'll see here I still try to convey a little bit of the depth of that bottom lip with that line shading and then I quickly jump into, I always think of Chrome when I do this effect. This thick to thin wavy lines. Another thing I always picture is cars. Like whenever I shade a car, I tend to like add these type of lines and so it's really just a way to convey a gloss and a glare. Again, it gives a little bit more of a light airy field to the rendering of those lips by comparison. Now what we're going to do is we're going to draw the male lips and we're going to show some variety there. Again, whenever I draw male lips, I'm thinking more on the side of less line work for the promoter shape of the lips. But more in the idea of rendering. Like, I'm a lot more open to adding little lines and scrapes. I call them scrapes, but they're really just rendering lines or crosshatching. But I'll add a lot more of that feel because it adds texture. It adds a bit more rigidness to the character design. Some a lot more open to that. Like I wouldn't shade under the lip like I did here on a female character and that's how I was really trying to convey age or something else. Maybe a character's lived a hard life and has some rough spots on the face. I might get more into the shading that way. But generally speaking, I try to leave this reserved more for the male and, whatever would be perceived as maybe a tough character or rough warrior type things like that. I'm very much use the cross hatching in the shading to help convey that. Again, that sense of mood. Doing a little bit of cross hatching here and really beating up the line work that displays the pockets of skin that you get right above your chin there. Those little bits of pouches and I'll even do more with the shading of lips. But again, I stay away from detailing to much of the inside of the lips. I also tend to use more line breaks. That's not really a male or female thing, but I do notice that I do it more with particular spots like this one trying not to draw the entire perimeter of each lip. Line breaks come in really handy there. They also give a different feeling of style and I sometimes feel they add a certain amount of confident to the illustration. Almost like you're letting the viewer see into the work a bit and you're so confident with your line making that you don't feel the need to draw every single outline. I think those are helpful. Now with this bottom set, I want to try to make it look a little bit more like I'm doing more with the line way and the shadows and leaning a little bit less on the amount of cross hatching. Again, just trying to create variation from the top idea. Not that it's any better, not that it's significantly different change. But again, experimentation, exploration of your own work can really help you to problem-solve and figure out some neat things and make some style choices. I also decided to go back to the top sat, go well, I don't want to fully shade that top lip N, but what if I use some very light lines to convey the shading because again, there's a plane change there with that top lip, the top lip is going to get less light than the bottom lip. Even though I didn't want to shade that entirely like I did the female lips. I was able to convey that with just some light chicken scratch lines. Now at the bottom, I also want to show a little bit of what you could do with facial hair. I will say this is just some stippling. It looks like the characters a bit scruffy, a five o'clock shadow or whatever. But essentially, you can also do a lot with that for male characters, obviously you can trim out the face which is really nice. You can add another layer of depth and texture is just great for that. Like textures are fantastic for pointing the viewer in certain areas of your work adding contrast to the overall piece. A lot of times we get in the habit of just making everything monotone and to evenly distributed with our line work and even our shadows. Texture can be a nice way to break that up and it's pretty easy to do. Hopefully this gives you an idea for how you can really employ this type of technique and basically, the main takeaway from this one is to draw. It could even be one design if you want to do male versus female, it's always great to explore the differences there, but it can really just be one design and you copy it however many times six,10, whatever it is, basically until you feel comfortable with whatever it is you're after. But then just trying one particular difference and whatever it is you're exploring, whether it be the shading, whether it be the, just the way the light source reacts off the objects, the way that you cross hatch them, the way that you use line weight, the more that you learn to be specific with what you're studying, I think the more that you get out of it. Because it's very easy to just sit down and just draw and expect to get better and although we will get better through that process, very much so but when your specific about it, you can really target what you need to get better at. That's very important, I think for comics, because there's so much going on, you got buildings, you have cars, you got people get different character types. You got villains and heroes and you name it, it's in there. Essentially if you don't learn to maybe target specific elements of your work, then you might just pinball around until you get it right. I'm a big advocate for working on your weakest subject. Basically the weakest subject that's the most important to what you need to improve upon. For instance, for drawing characters and it just sticks out like a sore thumb that you can't draw lips, then that's what you need to focus on. Techniques like this can be very great for that because you can pinpoint exactly what you need to know. That also helps you get out there and find the right resources. If you know that you need to get better at drawing expressions, then you start to pay more attention when you see expressions done correctly and you pull from that. Hopefully that helps you out with that, that'll complete this lesson. We'll now head over to the next lesson and press on. 6. Drawing Monster Mouths: Now, in this example, I want to show you that a lot of the same things that we've talked about can actually be used to do any type of mouth really. We're going to start with the basic shapes and rough out something obviously a little more monstrous. You can already see with the pointed teeth. Even the wide expression links that. But really that could have been a regular mouth in just a screaming pose. Notice I'm defining the center, I'm trying to make sure that as I get real wild with this, and I start to add in all these detail, that I have some idea of my symmetry and my foreshortening. Even though you can see that the bottom lip and the bottom teeth are a little bit off from the top, I'll try to correct some of that. Sometimes when I do something that's a little bit more animated, or monstrous in this case, I'll let some of that just slide. Not that it's a good habit to get into, but it doesn't always have to be perfectly symmetrical and perfectly correct. I always find that with more style and more expressiveness, you'll see a little bit more skew in those areas. Likewise, the face is never perfectly symmetrical. Anyways, as you start to draw things that are more fantasy based, it does make sense that you can let a little bit of that go. Just make sure that you don't do it in the sake of just being lazy and not wanting to correct your work. As I start to soft erase, now notice I do flip down or back and forth. That's another way to spot flaws in the symmetry, and just ultimately really spot flaws in the work. I don't know that's even just symmetry, but a line, I don't want to say a line, but I guess it's the same symmetry, but essentially just even a balance and a feel for what you're drawing. Proportions is another good one that you seem to spot by flipping it. I really recommend doing that if you're not working digitally, I've said this many times before, you just use a mirror. That's what old school artists do. When I say old school, traditional or whatever, they have always employed mirrors to really check errors in their work. I think some artists don't need it as much, but I find that I do need it in my work, so I find it to be helpful, and I think a lot of artists do need it. So try that if you ever feel like you have a little bit of a problem giving some of those things correcting your work. Now as I start to draw and more my refined line work, I try to incorporate more line weight, and you see now I'm starting to incorporate more of the shapes of shadows and even jumping into the rendering. This is the part where I've got a pretty firm idea of what I want to see on the page. Even though I'm still manipulating things and moving them around, I'm already getting to the part where I'm refining the work in adding and shading and texture, and trying to really push a feeling of eeriness and creepiness to the mouth. Again, all the same techniques that were employed earlier on, for drawing the mouth, is still here and evident. But now I'm letting things like style choices and texturing and shading takeover, and really just doodling. I always try to tell young artists this when they ask how I come up with ideas for this stage of the artwork. I'm essentially just doodling I'm using what I know about light and shadow and about rendering, to aid me and come up with more refined concepts as I go. But I'm really just doodling and having fun with it. I use a lot of line breaks so that I'm not tracing every shape even as it pertains to wrinkles or textures of the lip. If you look real closer, there's lots of little line breaks. Some of it it's just basic shadows and trying to keep a light source of mind in being imaginative with that, but it's really nothing groundbreaking, it's really nothing too advanced. Its just a series of techniques that coupled together make it look like you have lots of neat ideas. Now, obviously, by studying from other artists life, whatever, and noticing little things, you might study tree bark and notice a certain pattern that looks really neat, and you might incorporate that into some kind of creature design or even a wrinkle and a fade. It's just you never know when something's going to inspire you or lend itself to something else that you draw. That's why doing sketches and drawing just a multitude of things is so important because they all connect at some point. Sometimes it's very obvious, and other times it's a little bit more subconscious. So just create lots of sketches, study lots of different aspects of things like texture, wrinkles, folds. A good one to combine actually is folds that you learn from drapery, and then you'll start to even employ some of that into wrinkles. It's really getting this idea that, imagining things lifting up off the page, and rounding over, and then trying to bring that out with your shading and your rendering. Obviously, doing this, saliva adds another effect, and again, just layering things at this point, because I want it to be very evident that it's something creature based and fantasy based and not just a really poorly drawn mouth. Now this one, it'll be a lot more evident even in the early on Sketch, it's something very monstrous and not human-like by any means. Again, this is always important to do because by drawing by comparison, we're able to really explore ideas and shift things. Now, obviously, you could look at different reptiles, and this could probably have some resemblance to some crocodile or alligator type teeth or something that's out there. We all pull from some form of life and nature in some way. But I try to also change things enough where it just looks fantasy based. You'll notice here as I start to refine the wrinkles, I'm trying to go outside of the teeth and again do something that's a little bit just closer to eeriness and creepiness. Remember that you're going to get all the knowledge you need from wrinkles, from a lot of things really. Reptiles have some really great wrinkles. Even just elderly portraiture. If you find those really cool portraits that photographers will take where they're trying to capture a sense of ruggedness, like an old clines wood shot or somebody that has the cool wrinkles to their face. Obviously, it's a lot different than what I'm doing here, but what I'm saying is a lot of the same information is still there. You just have to shift it and make it more weird and strange like what we're trying to do here. But you'll get that knowledge of the way wrinkles work from studying most types of portraits and trying to recreate them. There's just so much good information in there. Like I think a big part of getting wrinkles right, is realizing that they don't just all go in one direction or they're not so even, and again, there's no sense of cemetery when it comes to those. In fact, they crisscross too. So they overlap. When you start to realize that, you start to try to implement that even into your fantasy based art or whatever, you start to try to get little hints of that. But you're really only going to learn that I think by truly studying those subtleties in life that we often overlook, and then we go to draw it and we say, "well, it just doesn't look right, I'm just not getting it right". Generally, if you're not getting something right, it just means you need to study it a bit more and also get in the habit of looking past the superficial or the epidermis, the exterior layer of things. Sometimes you have to dig deeper. That's why anatomy is so important in drawing things in layers, and realizing what might be under the surface can really help you to have a confidence with it, and then draw it more effectively. It's also why when young artists will show me their work and say, "I can't seem to get this right or that right, whatever the subject is". I'll look at their sketchbooks or their portfolio and often times, it's just their sketchbooks I want to see because I'll be able to tell if they're not really delving deep enough into the study. They're just maybe drawing again just from the mind or just a very superficial side of it. Unfortunately, art can be hard work. It's the studying portion is very important, and that's how you're going to grow. So you have to really get in there and try to find out what you can about the underlying structure. Just like when you go to draw people, you draw people better after you've drawn a lot of skeletal structure. It just makes you understand the body and the way it moves a bit better. Hopefully, this has been informative for you, and this texturing, and this rendering has shown you a thing or two. I'd love to know what you think. Some more lessons are on the way. I thank you very much for watching. So fill up those sketchbooks, and remember to keep drawing, keep having fun, and bye for now.