How to Draw Natural Lips for Men and Glossy Lips for Women

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Lips are a useful feature for conveying a rich range of character expressions. In this article, we will learn how to give women’s lips some extra shine when they’re wearing lip colour or gloss, and also how to depict men’s lips.

How to Draw Lips with Lip Stick or Gloss

When drawing a character with makeup products like lipstick or gloss applied, blurring the outline of the lipstick makes it look more natural and pretty.

If the outline of the lips is too distinct, it can look like the makeup was applied too thickly or messily, as if the product has gone outside the line of the lips – almost like clown makeup! So we want to avoid this.

Lips with lipstick can be depicted more naturally by subtly blending the colours and varying the shades.

Tips

Draw a thin crescent shape for the lower lip, leaving the fullest part in the centre fully coloured and blurring and blending out the edges

The upper lip should be thinner than the lower lip. Start by creating a gentle curve in the middle and then blend it out.

To finish, add a little arch-shaped highlight in the centre of the lower lip, following the curve of the lips, to give a glossy shine.

Drawing Men’s Lips – Shading Without Lipstick

When drawing men’s lips, we want to add some shading to make the lips look more defined, but we want to avoid making this shading look like makeup (unless the character actually is wearing lipstick, of course!)

When we want to depict a man’s lips without lipstick or product applied, we need to use some shading, but be very careful and sparing with it. Adding a tiny bit of red/pink shading just to the small boundary area between the upper and lower lips will prevent it from looking like lipstick. For the area under the bottom lip, we do want to shade this area to give the lips some fullness and dimension, but rather than totally filling in the lip, we should just add a small, subtle shadow under the lips.