How to Draw Anime Eyes - For Beginners

1. How to Draw Anime Eyes: Hey guys, what's up? How's it going today? I'm gonna go over how to draw an anime. I, this is going to be very simple and for beginners. So if you're a complete beginner and you've never drawn anything in your life is going to be perfect for you. What I want you to do is I want you to kinda concentrate with me and go through the lessons could be very simple. So let's get started with what is in the course. The course is relatively short. Right off the bat, I'm gonna go through the tools that I suggest you use. You don't have to use. This stuff is just stuff I like to use and I think it's relatively inexpensive, but it's up to you. Then after that, I'm going to go through the control of your hand. So when you learn control better in drawing, it's gonna make all your drawing across the board better, not just eyes is gonna make everything you do better from now forever. So I'm going to teach you a few exercises that I think are going to really, really boost you even if you're an intermediate, you're gonna really, really see your improvement from just these exercises I'm gonna show. Then after that, I'm going to go through the structure of a real, I think Lewis structures and kinda show you how that applies to animate. Then I'm gonna go through a demonstration, the main inch, a lot of the course. And just kind of going through demonstrating what I talked about, how applying that to the demonstration. And at the very end, I'm going to go through just some parting advice that I think will stick with you and kind of boost your art journey in general. So that's it. It's relatively short lesson. So if you do this, you're gonna find that you get so much better at drawing that you never thought you could do, honestly. So let's get started. 2. Supplies to use: All right, let me go over the tools really quickly then I'm going to be using, so I'm going to be using different types of pens. You don't need these type of pens by the way, I'm just kinda, kinda let you know what I'm going to use these or literally just a suggestion you don't need to use this. You can use any tool you want for this entire lesson. But like I said, I will go over what I'm going to be using. As far as pencil goes, I am literally going to be using just a normal graphite pencil. It doesn't matter, you probably have this lying around, so don't worry about that. You can use a pencil. You can also use a pen like I'm going to use a lot of these, these are microns, these are pig microns. They're kinda pricey. I do like them though. And the idea about the pen is that like when you touch the paper, it'll like it should leave like a noticeable it'll leave a mark, but you don't have to push down on it the way you would a ballpoint pen, like a ballpoint pen. You have to push down and over and over and over to get a mark. These pigments you can just kinda like lay it flat and it has a very thin straight line, you know, and there's not a lot of pressure sensitivity as far as the thickness of the line. You don't have to push down harder and get thicker line out of it. You can just push down as hard as you want or as light as you want and you'll get that same line. And that's kinda why I think people like these sigmas. And like I said, you can get them completely fine. You don't have to. But any sort of kind of, I guess they called fountain pen, that'd be great. This one also is, this is the cheaper version of the pigments and I think they're just as good. This is a favorite Castile PIT artist pen. I use these unlike almost all my tutorials, they're pretty much the same. They usually come in a pack of like five or six or seven. And there are different sizes, right? The tip is different sizes. But these are really good and they're much cheaper than the pigments. I just kinda have the pigments cuz I got them as a gift. So these are also good. I don't have the rest of these right now, but as far as paper goes, I'm going to be using just printer paper. And this is regular printer paper and it is used, well basically it's larger though. That's the only difference. But if you have computer paper, it'll be completely fine. If you want to have a drawing that you're gonna save and hang up. I would use Bristol board. I don't have that with me right now. Bristol board is amazingly good at kind of cardboard ask to the touch. And that is paper where you wanna do a drawing and you're gonna save it. Like I said, you're gonna frame it. And if you do frame it, don't put it anywhere near where the sun hits because the sun will kill every drawing like overtime. It really does. It kills paintings over time. So don't put it in direct sunlight. If you do something that you want to hang up, that is pretty much it. So let's get into the actual lesson. 3. How to Control Your Pen: So the first thing I'm gonna talk to you about is I want to talk to you about control. And the reason I'm making this first is because control dictates how good the rest of your drawing is. So I want you to start out on the right foot. Because if you're drawing incorrectly and you don't have the control that you need. Your, everything's gonna look kinda wonky and kinda rubbery and strange and kind of shaky. So I'm gonna give you three exercises that are gonna help you get that control. That is gonna make not just this drawing better for you, it's gonna make all drawing better for you. And I think this is almost essential. So when you first start drawing right off the bat, I would say the way we draw here is not so much the way we write. When you write, you anchor your, what do you call this? You anchor the palm of your hand. And then you write, correct. Your range of motion is pretty small, so it's going to be hard. You're going to have to move, you kinda move it over here like that. It's not that good. Your range of motion when you draw, the best idea would be to kind of bring in the elbow and the shoulder. So because of that because like well, we're drawing like let's say a circle for the eyeball. Right there. See how my I'm not anchoring my I'm not anchoring my wrist. If I was to anchor my wrist, I could definitely do. It's still for sure, but it's not as comfortable. You're not going to get, if you like, this is a pretty normal size head, you wanna get a little bit bigger right now. Right now I'm moving my elbow and my shoulder along also together. So it's a combination of that. So that's the first 101. Really, really need to do that. Kind of learn to do that when you're drawing. And you're gonna notice that too, because some people will have very shaky lines and they're drawing and that has to do with the control of their elbow and shoulder kinda area usually and n including their hand as well. So it's a combination of all. So when I draw, I usually draw like this. And I'll normally anchor my pinky right here. Like I'll anchor my pinky. And I'll slide that around. And you have to be careful too, because you can smear what you're doing. You can't kind of slide over the whole thing. But like it, what I do is I anchor my pinky, anchor my pinky start drawing here. You can move everywhere and see I'm kinda like I said, moving at that elbow, moving at that shoulder elbow combination. And I'm also using the wrist as far as shaky hands goes, that will go away over time. A shaky lines that will go away over time. Because you're learning to use these muscles that you've never really used. And at least properly. And the more you draw, the better. But I'm going to teach you like again, these three exercises. So let's go to the excesses really fast to improve your general control. So as far as controlling here, so I gave you the 101 on kind of like using bringing your elbow and your shoulder and and that more or at least were like larger stuff, like anything above anything even slightly larger than writing. Anyways. So let's get until three exercises that are gonna improve your control. Number one, circles, circles, and clockwise and counterclockwise. As a weird one. You're going to make a 100 circles, especially if you're drawing eyeballs and people and everything, right? You're going to need to draw circles, ovals, and a good exercise, like I still do this to this day by the way, I'm a professional and I still do this to warm up. You know, I wake up in the morning. You're kinda like kinda weird. Elbow hurts. And it's like, okay, I gotta get into this. So I'll just do like a page of circles and that gets your mind and body connection, right? The muscles connected to your mind, again for me. And then I changed the size of them. And you're going to find this may be hard in the beginning. And like normal, what I do is I do like, as you can tell, I'm doing this circle shape. And then I sum making the shape almost in the air, almost right. It's not touching the paper yet. And then I slowly touch the paper. See Donald went wrong. But I was trying to like open up the my view there so you can see it. But doing this over and over and over again day that way they don't have to be perfect circles as you can tell. Black it says just getting your mind into it and your circles will get better over time. We kind of like, oh wow, it's nice, but this just a circle. Also do different ellipse degrees. So for example, let me move this over. So for example, I'll do this, right? Different degrees. Maybe circles and circles. And like I said, the most important thing is counterclockwise and clockwise. Do both. And I would do like a full page of those if you're brand new, like if you're completely new at drawing, I would do a full page of those. I would do maybe like two pages of those a day. Maybe more, maybe like ten. I did like ten when I first started drawing because what that's gonna do, it's gonna start went after you're done doing this, you're going to go back to like regular drawing, like actual just kinda going over forums. You really wow, like you're gonna be like, oh, that's weird. I had shakiness, that shakiness is gonna go away. And you're going to like, oh wow, why is that not there? It's just stuff's going to seem a lot easier for you when you do something like this. If you're a complete beginner, if you're, you know, if you still getting shaky hands in your intermediate, I would still do this. Like I said, I still do this to warm up exercise one. Here's the other one, the second one for control. I'm going to put a dot over looking at, let's say I put dot over here just randomly on a page and I put a dot over here. And my goal is to hit that in one shot. So I'm gonna go over here and say I'm a little short and try it again. Okay, I hit that one. It's a little tiny bit off the corner there, but I'm pretty, pretty dead-on. And I might, you know, I'll do another one over here, put another random dot, dot over here, and I'm going to try it. Let's say backwards from here to here. Who close? All right, don't pretty good. Dot over here, not over here. A little bit over, a little bit over. Back to short. And see the more you do this, you're going to again And what you're thinking, you're thinking about this. But what's actually happening is you're, you're teaching myself mind-body connection, right? Hand-eye coordination. That's what that is. And I didn't put one over here, just put it all over. And I would also do this all over the page. Completely. You just do that he started doing over here. So that is the second exercise as far as control goes. Let me do one more. I'll show you just one more. And there's a bunch of these. There's like 20 of these, but I'm just gonna give you three. I would say what you should do is, I've done this before. This is for line control. So I'm going to draw just a random, random shape like that. That's a completely random shape. And what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna make this boulder. I'm literally going to go over here. And I'm going to trace the line to make it Boulder. And this is going to give you, again more control. You're using hand-eye coordination. And like I said, this is going to, it's going to basically teach you to be cleaner in all your liner. You're not even really going to consciously have to think about it in your other drawings. It's just going to start happening. Because out of habit you're like God, just cleaning up my Learn artsy. That's a little bit thick right there. But, you know, it still works. See that one's a little bit a sliver off. How would I fix that? That was also a bit of a sliver off as a little tiny thing going off here. Anyways, I'm doing that allow a little bit quicker than I would normally do. But do that. And that's also going to give you the tools, is going to teach you to clean stuff up and it's going to give you more control on how to like double up some lines. Those are three exercises for control. I hope you enjoyed those less. Move on to the next part is gone to this structure. 4. Eye Structure: Okay, so what I wanna talk to you about is you're gonna think this is pointless, but it's not. I'm going to talk to you about the general parts of the eyeball. And the reason I'm doing that is because in anime they tend to do something called indication. So indication is when you're taking out information and you're leaving in and just enough to, you know, to show the view of what it is. So and I'll, I'll tell you what that is in a minute. So for example, like a real like a like an eyeball to eyeball, right? Let's just say has when you're looking at an eyeball and just run eyeball real quick. So when you're looking at an eyeball, you're saying a myriad of information. And actually this is what separates, I think, from realistic eyes to kind of anomie eyes is there's all these parts, like let's say in this drawing, let's just call this a realistic I, for example, I am just, it's just a quick line art. You know, obviously it's still missing certain things. But let's say that's a realistic ible. Anime tends to indicate stuff. So for example, it would be more like and the second no, ready. Just let's just save this. So yeah, I could, I could pull line here. Let me make a thicker eyelash here real quick. The, let's just say this is our NMAI. In MMA. They tend to take out information and then you still know what it is. So they're not going to draw I'm not going to draw the tear duct. What I'm drawing anime usually I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna draw this part sealed is a blank space here. And then up here there's the tear duct. There is like the kind of a basically a bag of EI. There's a strong eyelid. And same thing goes for the eyebrow. The eyebrows actually has hair on it. Let me draw the eyebrow here for the enemy. So an animator, you're indicating that instead of drawing separate little hairs, you're drawing like one line, like a thick line for the eyebrow. That's a difference between this and kind of, you know, like more detailed drawing. And It's taking stuff out. It's usually omitting this area here and you still know what it is. You still know it's an eye because it's usually obviously it's placed on the face because it's still like where it is. Sorry. It's like a quick I by the way, it's not I'll show you a little demo later. But yeah, it's, it's omitting information while still getting across the message that hey, this is an eye. It's, it doesn't need to draw an an eye duct. It doesn't need that stuff. And so kinda remember that indication part of it. But the reason they know how to do this, the reason they know this is because they already know all the parts of the eye and they know what they can take out in order to still make it look like an eye. Because they're just going over the essentials of the i write. The essentials would be like the eyelash, things of that sort. So what I'm gonna do right now is I'm going to go over just the, the parts of the anatomy of the eye so that you know it so that you can I don't know it basically knowing it, you you know what you're omitting, if that makes any sense. So let's go over just parts of the eyeball in general. And this is going to really show you what's going on. So and if the bat the eye is obviously a bulk form inside of the eye socket, right? It's in the eye socket of the eye. And the eye socket. It's cradled within the eye socket. Let me shade this in real quick. Like the indication of shading. And so let's say that's the empty space of the eye socket. And this is the eyeball. The eyeball is shoved in there. And what normally happens is, what happens is the skin is opening up over the eyeball. It's almost like it sounds gross, but it's almost like it's like a cut open kinda thing. And the you have the eye lid, which essentially is just like an opening in the skin exposing the kind of, you know, the all the parts of the eye like the eyeball like start like this skull era, which is the white of the eye. It exposes the iris and pupil. The pupil is the dark portion of that i, and then the iris is the colored portion of that I write. So this skin is like lay layering over it. And kinda just knowing that, knowing that this is an actual It sounds crazy, right? Knowing this is shoved in there like that. It, it teaches you a lot about what's really going on. So same thing goes for like if you were to look at the eye, let's say from the left side and the right side. It's also very similar. It's even more evident. So for example, when you are drawing the eye, going left over here, let's just say you have the eyeball, let's say is facing this way. You'll have the eyeball cradled into the eye socket here. You have the eyeball. You'll have the pupil and iris. And then you'll have the skin, which is the eyelid, covering that up and actually the same thing below as well. You'll have that eyelid as well. And that's kinda what that is just kind of the only thing, the only takeaway I want you to have from this is that the eyeball is again, a literal ball shoved in there with the skin open, almost cut open, exposing the, all of the stuff that we know as like the sclera, the again, the iris and the pupil. And that's it. That's part of the structure. Okay, so let's get into the next part and we'll talk about drawing the actual eye. So let's get started. 5. Demonstration of Process: Hey, how's it going? Let's go over the demonstration and I go through four of them, four eyes for you. Let's kinda get started using the tools I talked about, except this thicker one, just to kind of do things quicker for the demonstration. So I'm going to always start with the top lid, right? So almost always I'll I'll start with the top lid. Almost always make it dark and not always, but especially for the, if you want to have a thick eyelash, you wanna do that. Pull it over here. Continue the circle on the outside right here. And I'm gonna actually put this at a point. And the reason I wanna do that is because I don't know, it's just like a more it's just kind of a stylized eyelash. That's pretty much what we're doing. I'm almost never remember I've talked about this, the other one, it almost never connects over here. It's like there's gonna be an imaginary nodes over here, right? So in our, in our minds, me sharpen this edge right here. And I'm going to draw the iris. So this is what I mean by having control. You want to be able to pull circles or at least ovals, relatively easy. And I'm gonna thick in the line just kinda around that iris, the ring run that iris. Another to a highlight at the top over here. Let's just do a regular circle. I'm going to throw the pupil in there right in the center and I'm going to fill it well before filleted, I'm going to create a circle here for highlighting the pupil. I always like putting highlights in dark areas. You can draw maybe some more small highlights to around here. And I'm going to draw a line at the bottom. Just, just a straight line across the bottom here. I'm going to sharpen this to kinda, I'm not going to connect it though. I'm just going to sharpen out that edge. And I wanna make it look like it's gonna sweep into that shape. But in reality it doesn't touch it. Like again, we take that information and we have usually like just the essentials. I'm going to the eyebrow is going to be just a thin thin line that is a little bit thicker toward the center of the face. And I'm just going to get a bigger on this side. So one thing I want to tell you, always kinda have a thick line at the top for the other top eyelash you don't want to have, you don't want to just start drawing little lines like this without them being on something. So you want to use a thick line because when you look at eyelashes in general. They blend together to form a more solid shape. And so then once you have the solid shape, then you can do this. Like for example, if I want, see, I can add on as many eyelashes as I want, really. I mean, there will be a breaking point, so don't go too crazy with it. But you can add these shapes, right? And it can be almost infinitely kinda go nuts. And you couldn't really go nuts with it. Depending on what kind of character you want, you can pull them out the bottom here a little bit. Missy, but that grabs on to, I don't know, we call it the mother eyebrow. Just kinda in that shape that keeps its steady. You want that quick read and then you see like the detail. Hopefully that's making sense. Let's go over here to more of a, more of a male eye. So I'm going to pull it across and that top-line isn't going to be as dark. But I still want it to be kinda dark, but I'm not gonna do it with the marker. It's going to double it up a bit like the exercise I showed you in the other video. That's always good for pulling inward. Maybe throne, one line down a bit there, and maybe throw in a line at the bottom here that I'm not I'm not going to connect either. I could, but I'm not going to. And so now I'm gonna do is I'm going to pull the iris right there. Circle for the highlight. I almost always do the circle. It'll highlight first because that is kind of, I don't know. It just, it, it's just easier to do so, so doesn't get in the way of the pupil that I'm about to do, a pupil here. And I'm going to fill the pupil in though. Few pupils have black part of the eye. And at the top. Let me draw a line across and fill the top portion of that pupil because it's tucked underneath the eyelid. And when it's tucked underneath the I lay that in real life there tends to be a small shadow that kind of comes down on it. And so that's kinda what I want to show. Let me pick out the top eyelash a little bit. But since this is more male type, we're not gonna do anything else to it. So that's more of a simple kind of guy. I don't know how to say it. So let's do another one here. Let me think of a different type. So mongo is like I said, let's do I have an idea? So I'm going to let me use the big marker for this one. Oops. I'm going to pull it over here. Pull and I pull, pull, pull the eyebrow thick line, and then go back to the smaller one. And like I said, you can just do that thick line with this smaller one. I'm just trying to save time by by doing that thick line. Normally you have to go over to bunch. It's good to have a marker with e2. And then I'm going to draw a pretty large, pretty large pupil. Alright, pretty large iris. So that iris is pretty huge for, for that I end and that's also in stuff more. And I see a lot more like an Pokemon, stuff like that there, there's obviously degrees of different types. I'm going to pull out here. Like I said, See I have that strong eyebrow, eyebrow, eyelashes. And I'm gonna pull out here who I forgot something on this one. I forgot the eyebrow. I'm just going to same thing bigger on one end and it goes to a point. It's pretty flat. I very typical ie, I guess go back here. So I'm gonna go over here. I have put a huge highlight on this one. That's a very, I wouldn't say typical, but that's in a lot of different animals. Finding the the, what's it called? The pupil, sorry pupil and iris. Sometimes I'm mixing mixing it up and I'm going to fill in that pupil there. So if you want a general rule on the pupil, and this doesn't always apply because your pupil will kind of change, right? Sizes. General idea is if you're, let's say we go down here. If you were to draw like, let's say this is the iris, the colored portion of it, a pupil. So we draw the pupil in the middle here. You should be able to fit three pupils across. Right? That's a general rule just to get you in the ballpark that totally changes based on certain that some of them build at your pupil will expand Lena like especially when one character is attracted to another one. It'll pull my god or like just in awe of it, that there are people with huge. So just kind of depends, but if you just want a, just a complete stationary pupil, I'm going to thicken the line a bit around here. And I'm gonna go down here. C would not connected to anything. And I'm gonna draw a line and that's going to represent the bottom lid, right? That's the bottom lead bottom lid, bottom lid. And that's what that represents. That's what I mean by indication that it's putting information there just enough for let to let us know what's there without having to fully draw it out. And I'm going to draw it seemed that add on to that line just a bit. I'm going to add two prongs here. That's going to be the bottom eyelash. I'm actually gonna put an islet on this one. And there is a thin line over the top. And I'm going to fill in the top part of this because I want the highlight to be in kinda concealed in darkness a bit. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna do what I did over here with this guy, but this one is larger I, so it's going to come off a little different. And if you really, really want, I'm going to do you can, you don't have to do this, but sometimes you can do, is Pull lines across the actual, across the iris, across the colored portion where you pull lines like that because your eyes do have those striations. Beacon kinda pulled him like that. I usually kinda dark and I fade them out. That's usually what I do. But you can do them all the way around if you want. It's up to you. And let's draw that same thing that like thick on one end and then to the other it's just a line. You can make it thicker on this end too. It just kinda, it's up to you what the eyebrow is. So so easy, so unbelievably is it's just like a line. And that let me do I shouldn't do One more. Yeah, let me do one quick 11 more. So I'm gonna start with this again. I'm going to put one down over here, a point over here. So I'm going to throw another line across here. I always start with the top lid. So it's like that thick line and it's usually like how round Do I wanna make it too? How it's normally it, I'm sure thinking like how should I make this round or should I not? Then I'm going to pull that here. Very similar to that, I'm making eyelash shape. And so now that I'm done with that marker, I'm gonna go over here where the thin one again. And I'm going to kind of toy with these edges. That's it. That's the key to this drawing. That thick upper eyelash. You can do whatever you want with it. At that point, it's like boom, that's your setup. And then you can do anything you want with a smaller pen. Anything you want. It's so cool, I love that. So just remember the base of your drawing is this upper eyelash. Then put a lid on this one because I didn't really see the lid on that. Gonna throw let me see. I want to I'm going to throw the minute change where the eyelid is. So the eyelid, I'm going to put the iris there. I'm gonna throw a line right here. And I'm not going to I mean, that may might touch this one. This one might touch or not. I don't know. We throw a huge highlight, huge highlight. And then I'm going to throw the iris here. So I was the pupil here. And what I'm gonna do is I'm actually going to thicken out the ring of that iris and pull this down here. And I know there are some other eyelashes here. I mean, I could probably go on to say, I was thinking about like, should I go crazy on this on the show, you guys, how crazy man? Maybe I might let me pull a bunch of them out here just to really show you that. That's possible to do that without breaking it. Is all in the original top, a thick eyelash, eyelash shape. I am going to connect these actually I'm going to connect these. Pull that non-polynomial, just, just go nuts with them. Just going crazy. It's like, wow, like and even on the inside a little bit as well. And so I usually try to make them larger as they meet the mother eyelash. I try to make them larger as they meet. They're going to go into the top. I could throw a dark at the top, but I think I'm going to leave it like that because I think I got through aligns though. Maybe like they're looking through a peephole or there's some sort of secret going on. That's kinda vibe. I want to give it. And usually I want to see like the circle of the people that I, anyways, that is it, that is it for the demonstration. What I want you to do for practice, practice, practice, practice, practice. First of all, that's the only way you're going to get good. The reason is I go wash someone, lift the weights. For example, I could watch some lift weights. But I'm not lifting weights, right? You could watch me do this all you want, but you have to do it. So if you're completely new and just getting a grasp on drawing, like if you're totally, totally new, I recommend doing three. I's and then post them on here. That's the most important thing. Post them on here so I can reply to you. I'll reply to everyone. Everyone. But that's really, really big. Post them in that, but that's something that gets you accountable to doing it. If you're pretty good at drawing already and you draw stuff in general, do 20. That's like a huge challenge because I know for me That's my personal role. What I want to draw something new, I draw 20 times first and then I really try to dig into it more like I'm trying to learn how to draw like wolves Right now. I'm drawing 20 of those in a row just from pictures. And then I'm going to really get into dissecting them. But I really want to, you know, 20 is a good one. But if you're new to three, either way, post them, post them, post and post them. That is it. If you do that, you're gonna start drawing this stuff so easy, you cannot believe, like you'll start doing stuff. You'll have never, you never thought you could do. So let's go on to the next video and I'm gonna give you some parting advice. Okay, let's move on. 6. Final Thoughts: Okay, that's the lesson. Thank you for getting to this point. Amazing. I'm glad he, at this point I'm really proud of you. So this is it. Parting words. My main advice is to always keep this fun. I don't want you to go down on yourself. As far as like, I know you've probably heard this a lot when people are learning to draw and they go, they say something like, Oh, I'm no good or I'm not, I'm not good enough or I'll never be good enough for on there. When you say that stuff, that becomes your reality, you are putting these mental restrictions on yourself so that you're gonna prove yourself correct in the future. So you're putting those barriers up before you even started. So never do that. Just that mindset you should be like OK, mistakes happen. Try again. On my journey, chilling out, enjoy the process of learning the stuff because this stuff is so enjoyable to learn and it's so enjoyable to do. So. Never lose that fun aspect of it. If you keep this, I know it sounds very, at this point it sounds very like, Oh, of course, but almost everyone I know loses this. They, they lose the idea of light. You know, most people will just quit because I like all I'll never be this good and they quit right there. They're saying this and like again, they're going to make it real. You don't wanna do that. Used to be like OK, this is cool. I'm progressing, I'm learning, progressing, I'm learning, I'm learning and pushing forward. And that's it. Don't get too too like, you know, bogged down and don't get over-the-top excited or anything like that. And just kind of be like on your journey. Okay. That's pretty much it. I hope you had an amazing time. Reach out to me, check out my other programs, let me know maybe one of the programs you want to see on skill share, and that is that I will talk to you later.