Mouth drawn as a flat line with teeth outlined one by one
“The mouth I drew looks like a dark slit filled with individual gravestone teeth.”
What is happening
The mouth is rendered with a dark, continuous horizontal line separating the lips, and the teeth are outlined individually like white bricks. This creates a harsh, cartoonish grimace rather than a soft, natural expression.
Beginners treat the mouth as two flat strips enclosing individual white objects. In nature, the lips are fleshy, rounded cushions with soft edges, and the teeth form a single dental arch that sits in soft shadow under the upper lip. Drawing every single tooth edge creates intense, unwanted contrast where tone should be delicate.
The 30-second test
Squint at the mouth area; if the gaps between the teeth are darker and sharper than the shadow under the lower lip, the teeth are over-outlined.
How to fix it
- Erase the harsh individual outlines separating the teeth.
- Treat the visible teeth as a single unified shape of light or middle grey, not pure white.
- Replace the hard mouth line with three soft dark accents: the two outer corners and the central dip of the upper lip.
- Apply a soft shadow value over the upper teeth cast by the upper lip.
- Define the edges between teeth using only tiny, delicate changes in tone at the gums, not dark vertical lines.
Can it be saved? Partly
Carefully lift the dark outlines between the teeth with a fine-pointed putty eraser, then glaze a pale, even graphite tone over the whole dental arch.
Drill: Dental Arch Block-in
About 15 minutes. You need:
- Smooth drawing paper
- HB and 2B pencils
Draw a curved cylinder section representing the teeth as one solid horseshoe. Lay a light shadow across the top half and indicate individual tooth positions only with soft notches at the bottom edge.
Background reading
General teaching sites on this subject. They are a reading list, not page-level citations for this advice.
The advice is a generated synthesis of common teaching practice and has not been checked line by line against any source; treat times and difficulty as estimates.