here’s a thing i did way back in february for a cyberguro anthology which sadly didn’t happen. i touched it up a lil bit bcs apparently looking back at a piece after a few months makes you see All Mistakes.
hey! i had a great day, i saw kubo and the two strings finally! it was rly sweet.
thank you!! ah, i’m always bad at answering these ‘’how do you draw x?’’ questions bcs i usually don’t know how to step-by-step describe something that i do based on feeling and thought process that’s hard to put down in words… so it ends up in a ramble..
i guess key is to look at a lot of real human faces and training your eye to see that one or couple features that is like, super interesting and unique to that face, connecting this feature to a geometric shape (or rather think abt boiling it down to a simple geometric figure) and exaggerating it a lil bit? i guess? i mean i think that’s what i do.
might sound a bit weird but sometimes you can draw someone’s face/appearance so that their personality shines thru. that rly helps to make something more appealing and interesting looking. imo, anyway. you can put in a lot of info abt the character as a person just in their outlook. don’t be shy to really just use.. geometric shapes to draw a face, i guess is what im saying.
this is a good blog w tonnes of good ol faces of varying ages and races and at first glance it’s like ‘’ok this is just a bunch of regular looking ppl’’ but the exercise is to spend a little time looking at each individual face and find that specific feature, or the different way how they are arranged on their face that is unique to them! draw from these! train your hand and your eye.
another good way how to think about making characters’ faces look different from one another is to draw like, a handful of them in grayscale without hair or accessories and STILL make them look recognizable and distinct from one another. this is a nice way to check for sameface, if you’re doubting that in your art. try this and then look where you need to go from there, what to change up and stuff.
pretty ok! you can still tell who is who even when they are stripped of their unique hairstyles, accessories and even scars n freckles.
now i could have made a much worse example, where the only way how to tell which character is which just by their haircolour or who has glasses. this isn’t, like, too bad BUT it’s still essentially the same face dressing up as different characters, you know? here you should start thinkin abt different shapes for different features so it’s not the same thing over and over again. don’t be afraid to experiment and move away from shyness to draw ‘’ugly’’.
i hope any of this is useful, and i hope i understood your question to begin with haha.
i think a good tip is to learn the different kinds of teeth our mouths hold and then build off of that formula for squish n stretch for cartooning.
if you wanna draw good monster mouths (or just.. people mouths too), look at actual animal mouths (or people mouths) and what sorta teeth they have and also for what purposes and why specific teeth are designed the way they are in nature. cause i mean… you could always just draw a jagged line for teeth (ie ‘’shark teeth’’) but imo it’s always just… extra nice looking and cool if you actually draw stuff so it makes sense! it shows!
this is a rly good post imo! covers the basics and has nice examples.
another tip is that sometimes simple stuff works best. that’s why i draw just a ‘’slab’’ of white for teeth most of the time, cause especially for people, if you draw every single tooth really detailed, it most often just turns out looking sorta creepy! unless im going for the creepy, i usually leave the teeth in pretty simple, big shapes.
imperfections are interesting! draw that crooked or gapped teeth mouth. missing teeth also add character. there’s… a lot of fun you can have w teeth design alone lol.
tips for drawing mouths tho…. hmmmm… well. i guess it’s more of a style quirk more than anything but i like to draw mouths that are… more like a hole in the face or something that breaks the face shape rather than just a projection on the surface of the face? if that makes sense lol. i like to draw mouths that the face has to adjust to rather than drawing all sorts of expressions on top of a never changing face shape.
my point being something like this. i feel like this is a ‘’it’s my style’’ kind of a situation so, whatever i guess. it’s not like i choose to use ‘’correct’’ perspective myself most of the time lol. also…. i like to push stuff.. pushing expressions to the extremes doesn’t Always work but boy howdy are they fun to draw lmao..
as to why i draw mouths like i do, my absolute favorite part abt them is that lil shape that they do and i exaggerate it lmao… so i guess my tip here is……… u guessed it………. look at a bunch of photos of people.
iiiii hope any of this is helpful, i feel like i could ramble and preach abt how much teeth give to a character and how fun and important is like… mouth acting or whatever lmao so i will just stop for now. writing down tips is always kinda… very tricky. also art is kinda? subjective? so. take whatever advice you will from this.
Inspiration Haven 