Drawing EPIC Eyes in Procreate

1. Intro: Hey guys, thank you so much for your interest in my class. My name is Dave Reed. I live in Brooklyn, New York and I've been drawing forever. And one thing that it's made my artwork stand out and made people really gravitate to it, is the eyes. You have to know how to draw eyes. If you can make your characters with big, bright, beautiful, dynamic eyes, then people are going to love you work. People are just drawn to I is just how, just how humans are like people with beautiful eyes. The same thing goes with characters, with animals. If you know how to, if you, if you have a handle on iss, then it's going to be that much better. So I'm excited to teach you in this class everything that I know about drawing, i's, these are the way, but I draw eyes for all my characters, all my animations. So you can use this for animation. I'm going to show you each layer, each step, and we're gonna get to drawing some really amazing, magnificent, big, beautiful dynamic. I's for all your artwork doesn't matter if you're a beginner or an expert. You can always learn something new. And I'm gonna go step-by-step and we'll go slow. I'm going to make it easy. And yeah, so that's enough talking for the intro. You can you can look at my work, I'm Drug Free, Dave, if you want to see who I am, what I do, what I'm about, but you probably, you probably already know this. So let's move on to the class project is way too long winded. Next video is going to be the class project. And I'll see you in the next video. 2. Class Project: Alright, class project. So the class project for this class is just for you to design two or three different beautiful, big, bright eyes. And once we get done with everything, you're going to know how to change the eye color, had add texture to the eye. There's so many things that you're going to be able to do. And we're gonna go through at all. I'm going to show you everything I know about eyes. There's three resources that I want you to download that it'll make the class that much easier. But the first thing is the procreate file. So I'm going to include in this my color palette, so you don't have to pick colors. You can just use the same exact colors that I'm using for this tutorial. And also an image of the eyeball finished a flat and also all the layers of the eye. So if you want to go look at each individual layer just because they might be helpful for you. I'm going to, I'm going to provide that in the procreate file. Also, as always, you can download my brush packets called faves. That way you can follow along and use this same exact brushes that I'm using in this tutorial. And every time I use a different brush, I'm gonna list it on the bottom of the screen, except for the brushes that we use all the time. I'm definitely gonna say it that way. It'll be really easy to follow. So you won't get lost. You won't have to figure out the brushes. It'll just be right there for you. Easy, simple inbox. Okay, so let's move on to the next video is going to be having a ball because that's when we get to doing the eyeball and making this sphere. And then we're gonna get into some fun and really, really work these eyes. And you're gonna have some really cool eyes. And I can't wait. Let's get started. Let's get started. And my my normal life, I'm super cheesy and I'm really sorry that you have to see it here. 3. Having a Ball: For this lesson, I'm just gonna go over how you can create this high. It's not as complicated as it looks because it's all just layers on top of each other. But once you kind of have a handle of it, it's really not difficult. And you'll be able to do it for all of your characters going forward, or at least your characters that you're close enough to where the eyes can really make an impact. The first thing that we're gonna do is we're gonna take like an off-white color, like a base rate of off-white. And if you downloaded my brushes, this will be really easy because then you can just use solid circle. Okay, so we have our solid circle. So this is going to be the eyeball. So the first thing you wanna do is we're gonna take this layer, tap it, and hit OK. Now the next thing you wanna do is you want to go from this beige color down to like, you know, somewhere around here. So you wanna make it a little bit darker and a little bit more saturated. So a little bit more yellow as well. So for the brush, RED is going to use soft brush one. I don't want it too big. So you can lower the opacity of soft press one to about 55%. You don't want it too big, you want it around there is good, maybe even a little smaller. So what we're gonna do now, since this layer is alpha locked, the only thing that will color on is inside this circle. So we're gonna take our slightly more brown. And really lightly. We're going to go around the edges. And I'm hardly touching the canvas. You really don't want to press too hard. Just in general, I see a lot of people just fly in through nibs and you cannot engrave on the iPad. So I'm gonna make this a little bigger. So you just wanna go really soft around and you wish when you want to make one side darker. So what I'm doing is I'm I'm putting a lot of the darkness over here. And then the opposite, this is going to stay light. So I'm gonna go around there just to give it some some color. But mostly I'm going to concentrate on the bottom. And a little bit in the middle. The key with a nice greeting is you just don't want to, you don't want to see it. You don't want to see any of the lines. You just want it to be values. So this is looking pretty good so far. Make it a little bit darker on this side. And now I'm going to take, I'm just gonna go a little bit darker and I'm just going to really, really dark in the bottom. So this will be like the light is hitting on the top. The light is hitting here. So this bottom part of the sphere, it's going to be dark little bit in the middle. And if you do it, if it winds up that it's not that clean in the middle. Just take your smudge brush. You can do the same soft brush but smudge and just make it kinda big and then just kinda smudge it around. Just kinda smooth out. Just so it all looks like a value. You just don't want to, you don't want it to be splotchy. So this looks pretty good so far. So the next thing you wanna do is since we want to really make it look engaging in 3D, we're going to add a light around here. So we're gonna take the original, the original cream color. And then we're gonna take soft brush one. We're gonna make it a little smaller. And then we're just gonna, we're just gonna make the original color around the edge. So this kind of shows like a bounce light, sort of from like the, from the atmosphere. Gives it that nice 3D look because even if it's dark, there's still light hitting it from other from other points in the room. So little little technical, but it's just one of those things where it looks good. Some people who might not know why it's needed, but it always looks good. Okay, so that's pretty good. So this kinda just kinda makes it look nice and 3D nice and spherical. 4. Iris Color & Pupil: Okay, so the next thing we wanna do is we're gonna duplicate that layer n. Remember this layer is alpha locked, so then we're just going to go to black. So we're going to tap the layer and then we're gonna hit fill layer. So now we have two circles, the one that we just colored in and this one that's black. Okay, so what we wanna do now is this black is going to be the basis of her eye. So we're going to shrink it. I think that's a good size. So we'll just shrink it and sort of put it in the middle. Doesn't have to be perfect, but just try to eyeball it. No pun intended and get it in the circle or get it in the middle. Okay, so this is going to be the base point of r i. So what we wanna do is duplicate that again. And then we choose your color. You can choose any color that you want. I'm gonna choose orange for this. So I have my orange and I'm just going to drag it over. So now we have three circles. We have the original one, black and the orange. So for this one we're just going to shrink it just a little bit. And I think that's pretty good trying to get its center. Okay, so we're gonna take this orange circle. We're going to tap it and we're going to take off. And then we're going to go to a magic wand Gaussian blur layer. And doesn't have to be to this one or this one were going to blur a quite a bit. So that looks pretty good. So we'll stick with that. So the next thing we're gonna do is we're gonna take this black is black circle and we're gonna duplicate that again. And then we're going to drag it above the orange circle. And then we're gonna go to our selection tool. And then we're gonna make that smaller. That's going to be our pupil. And then we'll sort of get that in the middle. And it looks pretty good. Okay, so far, so good. So the next thing we wanna do is we're gonna go underneath this layer. So we're gonna take, we're going to touch the orange, the orange layer and then we're gonna make a layer above. So now we're underneath the pupil in over the iris were over the orange. So then we're gonna go to white. Soft brush. Same thing is before. You just want a nice hint of white coming out underneath the iris. So I'm kinda just doing a circular motion just so the edges of the soft brush sort of come out. So and it's better to not really try to don't try to make, don't try to make the brush do the line works, do the line work. And I, that kinda doesn't make sense, but essentially I'm staying the center of my Apple Pencil. My Apple Pencil is staying inside black because I really just want the outside gradient to make the, to make the color. And again, I'm going really, really lightly. I'm gonna make it slightly bigger because I really want to work that gradient. And I don't want, I don't want to see a line. I want it to be smooth going into the orange. Okay, so that looks pretty good. So now we have that nice a nice white coming out. And you can adjust it if you think it's too much. We think it's too much. You can always, you can always lower it like that. Or you can just take your eraser and you can sort of erase it back. But you just essentially just want it to be smooth. 5. Darkness & Light: Okay, so the next thing we're gonna do is we're going to tap on this black, the first black circle that we made. We're going to tap on that. We're gonna go select the opener layers back up. We're gonna make a new layer over the orange, and that black circle will still be selected. Okay, so what we're gonna do now is we're gonna go to the original orange color. I'm just going to bring it down not to black but really dark. And we're gonna make that layer multiply layer. Ok, so now what we're gonna do is we're gonna go to our brushes and we're gonna go to eye shadow iris. We're gonna click that. And if you don't have my brushes, just use, you can use any brush, but you want to bound thirty-five percent opacity. So we're going to choose eye shadow iris. We're gonna make sure we're on the layer above the orange. And since this part of the eyeball is dark and this part is light, we're gonna make the shadow along this ridge. So what I'm gonna do is nice big stroke like that. I'm going to hold it. Sometimes it doesn't it doesn't do the the little Hold thing a which I love and see if it doesn't. Now, there we go. So we'll do that. And I like it to be perfect. So sometimes I just kind of do it over and over again until it until it's perfect. Okay, so that's pretty good. So essentially, what I'm doing here is since the light is hitting here, the light is coming from this way. This is dark. This ridge is giving off this shadow. So that's what, that's what this is. This is a shadow from this rich. Okay, so the next thing we're gonna do is we're going to alpha lock. Alpha lock the orange. So whatever color you have, you want to alpha log that. You want to go to that color. And then you wanna make it darker. Sometimes you can kinda change it up a little bit. I'm gonna go a little more red, a little darker, and a little more red. And this layer is alpha locked. So I'm gonna go to soft brush one, make the brush kind of big. So since we have the shadow here, this would mean that this part of the eye is going to be a little bit darker. So now I'm just going to dark in this part of the eye a little bit. I'm going to sort of stick to the edge. I kinda wanna make the whole thing dark, but I'm, I'm always gonna make them the outside edge a little darker. And again, I'm, I'm pressing is really softly because you really want it to be a nice smooth gradient. And also the capacity on my soft brushes is low. So I have to keep going over it rather than just making a dark. Making it dark every time I go over it. And it looks good. So I'm pretty happy with that so far. Alright, so the next thing we're gonna do is this where it gets kind of fun. So what we're gonna do is I'm going to select this black circle again, the original black circle. So I'm gonna select that and then I'm gonna make a new layer above the white. So I'm gonna make a layer above that. I'm going to change that layer to add. So now we have a new ad layer underneath the pupil. I'm gonna go to white. Actually, you know what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna go to orange and then I'm gonna bring it up to just so it's sort of like a light orange, which I have here. And you can hopefully figure out how to, how to share my palette. But so whatever color you chose, if you chose a blue, just go to a light blue color you chose, you just wanna do a lighter color. So we have our add layer, we have are lighter color for our brush. We're gonna take the same one soft brush. So since the light is hitting here in the shadow is here, but it's going through and it's going to make a nice little shine right here. So what I'm gonna do is really lightly, I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna make that glare. And it's beautiful with the add layer because you have that sort of residual color along with that really bright hotspot. Okay, I think that looks really good. Okay, so now we have our highlight. So correspond with this is the light hitting it right about here. 6. Surface Highlights: So the next thing we're gonna do is I'm gonna make a layer above everything else, make a new layer. And I'm gonna go to white. And I'm gonna take, I'm gonna go with, I have a brush called shadow 30. It's essentially just a hard brush, but at 30% opacity. So I'm gonna go with shadow 30. And I'm gonna make the brush kinda big. And I'm gonna do nice Jelly Bean. As long as it color covers the lower, the lower part of the pupil. And you can get is as smooth as you can. Sometimes you might have to, sometimes you might have to go back over it a couple of times in order to get that jelly beans smooth. And there's probably easier ways to do it like I can probably do it at full opacity and then just lower the opacity of the layer. But there's always, there's always an, a numerous amount of ways to do things. Okay, so we have that glare there. And the next thing we're gonna do is we're gonna take a couple of ways that you can actually do this. So I'm going to try graffiti brush the first time, which is just a hard brush. And you can always you can always make your glare like that. You can always have the hard the hard brush and you can move it to where you like it, where it looks good, where it looks best. But generally you just want it. So if the light was hitting here, then it goes through and shining there. So you want it sort of in this, in this general area. But what I like to do is take this brush called i glare texture, and we're using white again. So what I like to do is I like to just add this white here. So we have a more solid in the middle, but then on the outside I sort of just get real loose with it. And what that does is it gives the, it gives the impression that there's texture on the surface of the eye. And I think it looks, I think it looks really nice. So I use this brush most of the time and just really gives the impression that the light is hitting it. And you're seeing little bumps from the surface, from the surface of the eye. And another thing you can do. And then another little extra is you can take, you can take a harder brush and you can sort of do a shape like that, sort of like the procreate shape. And then you can take your soft brush. You can sort of aware or erase away some. And then you can take a different eraser. I'm gonna use sketch master eraser. And you can, you can make some lines through it, and then you can sort of you can erase more until it looks, until it looks natural. Just erase away some more. And that really gives it the look, those that it's a glare or something like that on the eye. So we'll stick with that for now. And what I just did with the eraser and we use sketch master again, as you can really, can really make some lines through it. And these are just random lines that I'm putting through this. And what this does is it gives the impression that it's a, that something is being reflected in there. So now that I've made all those reflection lines, I'm going to take the eraser and I'm just gonna make it a little softer, a little more natural. I'm gonna make the edges a little softer. Just so it's not so jarring because you kinda want it to be subtle. You don't, you don't want them to, you don't want the details to be seen that, that much you want economy and make it subtle. So it just looks like there's a, there's a reflection. Okay, so I'm gonna go back to my mother, back to my favorite highlight up here. I glare texture to lower the opacity so I can kinda get a little more texture. Yeah, I just love the way it looks. 7. A Kiss of Red: So the next thing we're gonna do, and this is just one of the bits of detail that I like to add in. So we're going to select the original circle or eyeball. I'm gonna make a new layer above that. The reason why I selected it is just so I don't go outside of this circle. So then we're gonna go to a red, a little bit dark, a little bit on the darker side. Soft brush. And lower the opacity to about 40%. And you just really want to use, really want to feel a little bit of red. And again, I'm hardly touching the iPad screen. Just enough. Just enough. So you feel a little bit of redness around that. I just kinda gives it some, give it some life. Ok, I think that's good. Really soft. There's a lot of things a lot of things we really don't want certain details to stand out, but you want them to be there. Okay? So another thing that I'm gonna do here is I'll do it on the same layer. I'm gonna go, I'm gonna go with white. And I'm just going to add a little bit of white here. Just a little touch of y. And I'll go underneath the red and I'll add a little bit more. And this is essentially just, just kinda stressing that this part of the eye is getting a little bit more light. So that's kind of like an extra. You don't really have to do that. I just want to make sure you get your money's worth. Get every single little detail. Okay, I think that looks that looks great. 8. Eye Color & Texture: Once you, once you've got this system, I mean, you can always use it. You can use it for any colour. I, the reason why that I do everything in layers and why it's a good practice to use to do everything in layers is because you can go back to this orange color. This is my, one of my favorite things to do. And then you can cycle through to any color that you want your eye to be. So you can really, you can really choose any color that you want. Another thing that you can do is you can select this orange layer. I'm gonna make a layer above it. And lets take like, we'll take like a nice kind of greenish blue. And we'll use the same brush, soft brush one. And we'll just brush1 some of this green. So you can get that nice to tone, which I really love. And you can put some cool effects on it if you want to. You can go with smudge reviews, graffiti breasts for smudge. If you want to. If you want to add some texture like that, you can always do that. It's pretty cool. So all I'm doing is just, just smudging, just kind of smudging these lines to kinda get that. Look. You can also use the eraser. And you can use any brush I'll use sketch master and you can sort of, you can sort of erase back, erase back the color. And this is all just to kind of add, add texture if you want it. So I'm just using any, you can use any brush to use any of these textures. But that's a cool little effect that you can do. I think that looks beautiful. I might just have to screenshot that. I can do it. I think that looks good. So let me share this. This might just be the might just be our icon or a thumbnail. So I'll just save it for now. Okay, so another cool trick that I like to do is same thing. I'm going to select this layer. I'm gonna make a layer above it. And now let's say we choose a light blue. So let's say we want to use, we want to, we want to give this some sort of texture to the eyeball. So let's try out. We'll try out newsprint first. We'll make, we'll make newsprint small. So let's see how this looks. So we have the orange selected, so that's the only thing that we're gonna get colored in. So that's an interesting, that's an interesting texture. You can play around with the, they can play around with the layer modes. And sometimes you get some really beautiful effects. Like like this is just playing around with some of the layer modes. This is lighten. Screen colored eyes. It looks beautiful. And the reason why I play around with these is I'm not that great with color. Sometimes this does the work for me. I think that's beautiful. That's creepy. So I'm gonna select the orange again. And I make a new layer. We get rid of this one. So I'll make a new layer and let's see what other, let's see what other texture we want to use. Inking, drawing, sketching. Sketching is good, so we'll try, we'll try soft pest l. So let's see what happens now. Okay, I think that looks pretty cool. Try out some other layer modes. And it looks really nice. We'll try hue saturation and see what we can get. Interesting. Really nice. It's like a, it looks like a frog. Frogs I. So those are just some of the several things that you can do as options. 9. Fiber Striations: Okay, so another really cool thing that you can do. So we're going to select, so we're gonna select our orange layer again. And then we're going to make a new layer. And let's choose, choose kind of a yellow, a yellow color. And then we'll choose a light pen. So let's see what that looks like. So I'm just kinda just doing random light pen strokes. Again, really light. And kind of wispy. Light pen is one of my favorite brushes to work with. You can get so many cool effects with light pen. Some of them are a little more erratic. You can do that. It looks kinda fun. You can always play around with the layer modes and see if you get anything else that's interesting. That looks more yellow. Another thing you can do is you can change the color. You can change the color. Let's see if we can get something a little. Alex, weird with the blue, looks kinda cool with the pink. Keep that. And then you can increase the saturation, sort of change the colors up. It looks pretty cool. So let's try another, will try one more texture and then we'll call it a day. I've selected the orange again, I made a new texture, a new layer. Ok, so let's do honey eater. Let's see how that looks. Okay, and we make that smaller. Okay, that looks really cool. So we're gonna try honey eater. Honey eater looks really cool. Alright, so that's a really cool design. Of course, you can always make it, you can make it as opaque. If it's, if that's a little too much, you can make it opaque. And you can alpha, lock it. And then you can change up the colors. Let's say you wanted to do a nice pink, hot pink. Go back to our soft brush. Can add some at some hot pink to maybe add about a green, dark green, and a nice dark green. Let's try a blow. Very nice. Blue in there to suit, looks like full up. We'll change the hue, saturation, kinda make it more saturated. So really wild and, and that's pretty wild. Can try out different colors. Really wacky. The last thing that I, that I should've done earlier, which I don't think that I did. Which doesn't really, I mean, this just looks great. But I usually always also i Gaussian blur the the pupil which I didn't I didn't do. Muster forgot that step. You take it off alpha lock. That'll help. Here we go. So that's just usually another step that I do, but there's endless things that you can do with it. If you draw eyes, please let me know so I can see them. If you're doing characters that close up, eyes are always going to be more engaging. And so he's going to be, it's always a great thing to just have your character have wonderful eyes. To really, really engaging all the posts I make on Instagram. If, if I'm showing a character that's cute and he has big eyes and eyes like this. I mean, people just gravitate to it. So it's definitely a good practice to have to just know how to do. So just do them over and over again so I can do these eyes like in my sleep because I've just done them so much. You can, Another thing you can do is you can make a bunch of them really big and then you can just use them in the future. And just the last little thing, because I like to do a lot of animating. So another, another trick that you can do if you're, if you're going to wind up animating or you think you're going to animate, or you think you, your character isn't looking straight. What you do is you take so you don't want to take the eyeball layer, but you take all the layers above it until you get to this. You don't want to take the glaciers. So you wanna take the pupil layer and every layer in between. So you wanna take those. You can merge them. And then you can do your select, your, your select tool, free form. And you make it like that. And then you character, and then the eye is looking in one direction or the other. Some things and some things you might have to get rid of, like, I shouldn't have brought, like I might have to erase away this, this extra bit here. But I mean, you really, you get the point really. You can bring it over and not, not bring the, the red. But essentially, if you want to make the I look in in a certain direction, that's all you have to do. You just take it free form. And just and if I was animating, I would just add the front frame and then I would add this frame. And it would just look like the characters looking into in a different direction. 10. Thank you! : See, I told you, I told you you'd be able to mix really beautiful dynamic eyes and say, look what you did. I'm really excited to see what you do with it. Keep practicing, just keep practicing, make it your own. If there's certain things that, there are certain things that are going to change when you do this over and over again. Because it's going to become your system, it's going to become a URI. So just keep playing with it, keep experimenting. I keep changing colors, keep changing textures. There's, there's so much that you can do and I'm really, really excited to see it. I'm on Instagram and drug free, Dave, I'm on YouTube as drug free Dave, I have a private Facebook group with all tutorials and things like that. You can add me there. Please just reach out, tag me. I can't wait to see what you do. I can't wait to see all your exciting ideas and all your big beautiful eyes looking at me, if you use them for it, using, for your characters, using for anything you wanna do. But please posted here on unskilled share and posted on social media because I wanna see what you're going to make. I'm not sure what the next class is going to be, but I have a bunch of ideas because I've been really having a good time and it really seems like you guys are really getting some value added these videos. So until next time, keep drawing. And I'll see you in the next video.