How to Draw the Mouth on a Cartoon Character

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Danny Page and I'm here on behalf of Expert Village. In this series I'm going to teach you how to draw basic cartoon characters. Alright, next up on our face is the mouth. Now a lot of folks have a hard time with the mouth simply because they are not exactly sure what the final expression of their character is going to be. But we already sort of pre-determined this character, he's a bit more relaxed, straight face, so we're not going to do anything overly crazy, however, on our experiment page we can, if we so desire, mess with different mouths that you know you might want to try. I mean there's the standard, give it a little line for the mouth, a little underneath line for the lip and then just a little corner to give it a little bit of sheik definition. That's something you might throw under a, you know, a standard mouth. However, you might decide you want to give the character a big cheesy grin in which case you might decide to give a big wide grin there, lip definition, see how I'm doing that there, you got nose and some people really like to go in to create the detail with the teeth. I would say only add a lot of intricate detail in any given part if you really want to call attention to it. If you want this guy's grin overall to be the focal point, don't go to crazy with the teeth, just show them where the beginning and the edges are. But if really want to make this guy look like a freaking loon, then you know you draw the big ole' teeth in there and try to draw a lot of attention to it. Maybe he's you know, like insanely pissed off about something, so you really want to call attention to his growl. That's how we might do something like that, see. That really calls attention to his angry expression. Now a few seconds ago that was a cheesy grin, now it's a growl. See how just a slight change in the way you do it created, you know, changed the whole character. So going back to our boy here, for the purposes of this drawing, we?re just going to keep it simple. And it's a good thing to do if you're just starting out learning the rough shapes and looks of characters. So we're just going to give him a little bit of definition, a little bit of lip right there, but nothing too crazy. Just a standard straight expression and honestly if you crafting your character for the first time, you really want to give him the most basic look that he'll ever have, because you know they'll be plenty of time later to get in sort of a crazy expressions and you go back to your other page and experiment obviously with different looks and things, but while you just kind of getting started the straight face is the best way to go. Get the character down on paper first, then give him lots of personality later and figure out what his whole thing is going to be."