Lips are the feature most people draw flat. The outline comes out uneven, the shading looks gray, and the whole thing sits on the paper like a sticker. Every one of those problems has the same small fix, and this walkthrough goes through them one at a time.
The video is Silvie Mahdal's, the most-watched lips tutorial on YouTube. She draws each stage twice, side by side: the mistake on the left and the correction on the right. That is why most of the step images below show two mouths. Look at the right one.
What you need
Four graphite pencils, HB, 3B, 4B and 6B, a soft brush or blending stump, and an eraser with a sharp edge. Smooth paper. That is the whole kit, and everything on it costs a few dollars.
The three mistakes and the three fixes
No guidelines. Freehand outlines come out lopsided. Six light marks on a centre line fix the proportions before you draw a single curve.
Hard pencils. An H or HB cannot reach the dark values a mouth needs, so the shading stays gray. Move to a 3B for the first layer and softer from there.
Finger blending. Skin oil sinks into the paper and every later layer goes patchy. A brush, a tissue or a blending stump does the same job cleanly.
How to draw a mouth that looks three-dimensional
Think of the lips as two rounded forms stacked with the light coming from above. That means a shadow under each form, the darkest line where they meet, and a highlight on the upper surface of the lower lip. Every step from the first layer of shading to the final eraser lift follows that map. Get the map in your head first and the pencil work becomes almost mechanical.
Where it goes wrong
The outline shows through the shading. It was drawn too dark. Start lighter than feels useful.
The texture looks like a barcode. Too many lines. Three or four, each with its own small shadow, is enough.
It still looks flat. Not enough contrast. The centre line should be the darkest mark on the page and the lower-lip highlight should be bare paper.
The rest of the face
The same map of forms and light works on every feature. Eyes and the face as a whole both start from proportion guidelines before any shading, and hair is the same layered graphite approach on a much larger area. If the pencil grades and the light-source idea are new, how to draw covers both from scratch.
