Let’s be real. Nailing a drawing of biting lips is basically the final boss of portrait art. You’ve probably been there: you spend three hours on a sketch, but instead of looking like a sultry, expressive moment, it looks like your subject has a painful dental emergency or a swollen allergic reaction. It’s frustrating.
Lips are fleshy, weird, and highly mobile. When you add the element of teeth pressing into that soft tissue, the physics of the face change completely. Most people fail because they try to draw what they think a bite looks like rather than what’s actually happening to the skin.
The Anatomy of the Squish
The biggest mistake? Treating the lip like a solid object. It’s not. It’s more like a water balloon. When teeth press down on the lower lip, the volume doesn't just disappear; it gets displaced. You'll see the lip bulging out around the edges of the teeth.
Think about the "vermilion border"—that’s the technical term for the line where your lip meets your skin. In a drawing of biting lips, that border shouldn't be a sharp, static line. It curves and stretches. If the teeth are digging in, the skin above or below will pull taut. You’ll see tiny tension lines. Artists like J.D. Hillberry often talk about the importance of "trompe l'oeil" or fooling the eye; you do this by capturing how one material (hard enamel) interacts with another (soft flesh).
If you draw a straight line for the lip while teeth are overlapping it, you’ve already lost the battle. The lip needs to look compressed.
Lighting is Honestly Everything
You can’t just outline a lip and call it a day. Lips are wet. That means highlights are sharp and high-contrast. When someone bites their lip, moisture often pools near the point of contact.
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- Specular highlights: These are those tiny, bright white spots. They happen because of saliva and the natural oils on the skin.
- The "Shadow Gap": There is almost always a tiny, dark shadow right where the tooth meets the lip. Without this, the tooth looks like it’s floating in front of the face rather than sinking into it.
Most beginners make the teeth too white. Real teeth have shadows. If a lip is hanging over them, they should be darker at the top. Use a 2B or 4B pencil to really get those deep crevices in the corners of the mouth. If everything is the same shade of grey, the drawing will look flat and lifeless.
Why the "Grid Method" Might Be Sabotaging You
We’ve all used grids. They’re great for proportions. But for something as fluid as a drawing of biting lips, grids can make your work look stiff. The mouth is the most expressive part of the face besides the eyes. If you’re too focused on matching coordinates, you miss the "gesture."
Try sketching the "flow" first. Use long, sweeping lines to indicate the stretch of the orbicularis oris (the muscle around the mouth). Honestly, if you don't understand how that muscle bunches up, your drawing will always look like a sticker slapped onto a face.
The tension usually starts at the "commissures"—the corners of the mouth. When biting down, one corner might be pulled higher than the other. Asymmetry is your friend. Perfect symmetry in a lip bite looks robotic and unnatural. Real humans are messy.
The Teeth Trap
Let’s talk about the teeth. Please, for the love of art, do not draw individual boxes for every tooth. It looks like a picket fence. In a natural drawing of biting lips, you usually only see the front two incisors clearly. The rest should fade into shadow or be suggested by soft shapes.
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Focus on the "incisal edge"—the biting edge of the tooth. This is what’s actually doing the work. It should be crisp. But the vertical lines between teeth? Keep them faint. Your brain fills in the gaps. If you draw dark lines between every tooth, it looks like the person has gaps or, worse, something stuck in their teeth.
Skin Texture and Micro-Wrinkles
Lips have a very specific texture. They aren't smooth like a plastic ball. They have vertical grooves. When the lip is bitten and stretched, these grooves change.
- On the side being bitten, the grooves will be compressed and closer together.
- On the opposite side, where the skin is stretched, those lines might almost disappear or become long and thin.
Pro tip: Use a kneaded eraser to "draw" the highlights back in. Instead of just leaving white paper, shade the whole lip lightly and then dabs away the graphite to create those fleshy ridges. It looks way more realistic than trying to draw around the white spots.
Common Blunders to Avoid
I see this a lot: people forget the "wet line." This is the transition between the dry part of your lip and the moist inner part. When biting, the inner mucosa is often pulled outward. This area is shinier and smoother.
Another thing is the chin. A lot of people focus so hard on the drawing of biting lips that they forget the chin has to move too. If you bite your lower lip, your chin usually moves up and slightly forward. The skin on the chin might even "dimple" (sometimes called "peach pit" chin). If you leave the chin perfectly smooth while the mouth is doing gymnastics, the anatomy feels broken.
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Practical Steps to Level Up Your Sketching
If you want to actually get good at this, stop drawing from your imagination. Your brain is a liar; it simplifies things into symbols. You need a reference.
- Take a Selfie: Seriously. Grab your phone, go to a window with good side-lighting, and bite your lip. Look at where the shadows fall. Notice how your nostril might flare slightly on one side.
- The "Upside Down" Trick: If you’re struggling with a reference photo, turn both the photo and your drawing upside down. This forces your brain to see shapes and values instead of "a mouth."
- Work Big: It’s hard to get the detail of a lip bite in a 2-inch sketch. Double the size. It gives you room to render the subtle transitions between the tooth and the skin.
- Value Control: Use a range of pencils. You need a 4H for the subtle skin tones and an 8B for the dark "void" inside the mouth. Most people stay in the HB-2B range, which is why their drawings look washed out.
The secret to a great drawing of biting lips isn't some magical talent. It’s just observation. It’s noticing that tiny sliver of reflected light on the bottom of the lip. It’s realizing that the shadow under the lip is actually a "core shadow" with a bit of "reflected light" from the neck.
Spend time on the corners. The way the upper lip overlaps the lower lip at the edges tells the whole story of the depth. If you get those overlaps right, the rest of the drawing will fall into place. Keep the edges soft where the skin turns away from the light and sharp where the tooth meets the lip. That contrast is what creates the "pop" that makes people stop scrolling on Instagram.
Start with a light H pencil for the outline, focusing purely on the distorted shapes. Once the "squish" looks right, move into your mid-tones, saving the darkest shadows and brightest highlights for the very end to avoid smudging your work.