GIANT MOUTH...post

My two favorite things to draw are mouths and legs, but for some reason I feel a little funny talking about them here! I can't tell if I'm giving away "secrets," or just stating the obvious! Anyhow, since people have asked for it and I'm always obsessing over them, here is the mouth post!

There are a few things I always look at first when drawing someone's mouth...does she have that little "lip bulb" on the top lip (I can't remember who coined that phrase, but it's a good one!), or is there just a little hole? Does the mouth point down or up when making a nuetral expression? Is the top lip bigger, or the bottom one?
(Also, I REALLY like overbites and underbites, and I'm not going to even get started on teeth here...)

All those things change how a person makes expressions, too. I've really been wanting to do some photo experiments- I want to take pictures of all my girlfriends making the same mouths shapes, and compare them all to one another. This would be great for animating lip synch, and just comparing the vastness of human shapes in general. Maybe I'll do a post about that later, and people can help me out with supplying pictures!

Here's a funny observation about mouth construction- you know when you're constructing a drawing, and you draw the center line, and you draw the eyes and nose and chin and whatever all lining up accordingly? The mouth doesn't fit on that line! It actually sticks out, like a weird human muzzle. I tried to draw it here, in sort of an exaggerated way:
My friend Robert Cory pointed this out to me a long time ago, but he used a much more vulgar way of describing this phenomenon. Maybe sometime he'll get a blog and describe it in his own terms for you!

Here's another one: in a three quarter view of a mouth, the part of the lips that are farther away from you are thicker. This is kind of hard to draw without making the face look like there are nasty worms on it. John K. is really good at it though. His bad catholic school girl drawings influenced me a whole lot. I tried to draw some here:
Well, I can't really think of much else to say! It's one thing to make observations and attempt to put it on paper, but then trying to describe it in words is even harder! So...here are some faces that I drew tonight while becoming completely fixated on drawing weird human orifices!
I know someone's going to call me "weird" for this!