Lip art: it’s like nail art for your face. Full of glitz, glitter, cartoon characters, famous works of art, and ombre, lip art has garnered widespread attention as a vehicle for cosmetic creativity. And since we’ve never met a vehicle for creativity we didn’t like, we’re here to talk to you about how you can try lip art for yourself—without cracking a single tube of lipstick.
The secret ingredients are an elite squad of PicMonkey’s photo editing and touch up tools. Today, we’ll talk about four of them:
Lip Tint
Graphics
Textures
Draw
Lip Tint
Lip Tint is a glorious tool for getting fierce lip color anytime, anyplace. But with a little imagineering, Lip Tint can be used to create amazing digital lip art.
The key to its success is twofold: first off, Lip Tint’s Intensity and Tone sliders give you oodles of control over exactly what shade your color turns out. Second, Lip Tint is partially transparent, so you don’t lose the texture of your lips when you pile it on.
If you’re a lip art novice, try using Lip Tint to paint lips a single color, or stripes of alternating colors. But if you’re feeling more adventurous, don’t forget about Brush size. Turn your brush itty-bitty, and it works beautifully as a drawing tool.
Graphics
We love that our graphics look amazing when they’re way-way-humongo-huge, but we’re equally in love with how they look when they’re tiny. If you want to create a lip art look that’s tremendously detailed even at smaller sizes, try a graphic. Or two, or three, or ten—there’s room at this party for everybody.
Speaking of room for everybody, don’t forget that you can open your own images as graphics at the top of the Graphic tab. So if your inspiration lies beyond our graphic library, open up a graphic of your own, or some free icons, or maybe some public domain art. (See how we’ve always got your back?)
Pro tip: Experiment with transparency and blend modes. The Fade slider changes your graphic’s transparency: the more transparency, the more you can discern realistic details like lip texture. Blend modes are also a big help in the reality department: their magical color math adds dimension to your image by getting the shades in your pic mixing and mingling.
Textures
Using textures to create gawww-geous lip art is super-easy. Your go-to technique starts out as a double exposure, but takes a turn:
Head to the Textures tab and select your fave. (We picked Papyrus for the image above, plus a little blend mode action.)
Adjust the fade, saturation, blend modes, and what have you.
Now you have a double exposure! But to turn it into lip art, head for the Paint palette and start erasing. You want to erase the texture from every part of your image except, you guessed it, the lips.
Pro tip: To get the most out of blend modes, unleash the power of Lip Tint. Try painting lips white, black, or another solid color and select a blend mode from there. As ever, we can’t tell you exactly how to use blend modes (the specific result depends on the hues being combined), but play around and see what wonders result.
Don’t forget that you can open any of you own images as a PicMonkey texture. So pull up that trendy, scintillating gold glitter image you’ve got sitting on your desktop and up your lip art game!
What? You don’t have any gold glitter images? Well maybe you should fix that with a free stock photo from our list of high-quality resources. (We’ve always. Got. Your back.)
Draw
Last but not least, the Draw tool. Located in the Effects tab, we’ll call Draw the extreme matte lipstick of the digital lip art world. Pick any color in the universe, adjust the brush size, and go to town!
We can’t wait to see what you guys do with your newfound powers. Enjoy your cosmetic bliss!
