How to Draw Cartoon Lips
For Your Characters

Cartoon lips can sometimes be a little bit tricky. You may feel like you need to draw more, when actually what you might really need is to draw less - so resist the urge to get over-complicated and just let things flow. Are you ready?

Female lips are more challenging to draw than men's lips because they have more definition. Let's start with a woman's lip - if you can master this then drawing for men should be no problem.

The top lip should hang over the bottom lip, and this should be visible from any angle like the front or side. Look at the examples below. Really pay attention to how the upper cartoon lip appears over the bottom one. It would be a good idea to give yourself some time to study the shapes and construction of the lips until they start to become easy for you.

Examples of Female Cartoon Lip Drawings

How to Draw the Female Lips and Mouth:

1 - I usually start with the upper outline of the top lip.

2 - From there it's on to the lower part of the upper lip. The middle part of this line may have a small bump, but it's not always necessary to draw this part - it's up to you to decide how you want your character to look.

3 - To finish off I usually add one of two lines to the bottom of the lip. One style of line is your basic curve. The other type of line comes down at an angle, then flattens out across the middle, and finally angles back up to meet the upper lip.

Examples of Male Lips

Drawing Male Lips:

1 - I usually start off with step #2 from the female construction. Depending on the style of character you can leave out the bump in the middle of this line. Experiment and see what works for you.

2 - Add a small curve to indicate the bottom of the lower lip. Notice that this line does not connect to the line that you drew in step 1. For more Information:

Learning to draw the lips and mouth is only one small part of drawing a complete cartoon character face. In order to let the expression of the character shine you're going to need to combine that mouth with some cartoon eyes. There's also another lesson in the drawing portraits section of the site on the drawing lips lesson page.