How to Draw Comic Style Eyes - Step by Step

1. How to Draw Eyes Intro Video: Hello everyone. My name is Robert Marzullo and welcome to my class: How to draw comic style eyes, brought to you by Skillshare. In these lessons, we'll be doing breakdowns of a variety of things. I'll be showing you my techniques for creating eyes and how to simplify certain areas and how to make it easier on yourself. Things like breakdowns of drawing eyes on an angle and how to think about perspective when doing that. We'll do male versus female, talk about the differences that lie within those. We'll talk about different expressions and how to draw those and how to elaborate on those to make all sorts of other expressions. This is going to cover a lot of different things. Again, it's a breakdown, where I draw through it with you and I talk to you about the process. I hope you find this informative and fun, and let me know what you think. As always, keep drawing, keep having fun and I will talk to you soon. 2. Constructing the Eye: Now we're going to work on drawing eyes. The eyes are very important to practice as often as possible because there's so much expressiveness that you get an emotion from the eyes. Very important to have a good variety and a good solid foundation to the way that you draw eyes because that's where we relate to when we look at other humans. Essentially your eyes are probably the most important thing to get right in your storytelling. If not the most important, it's right up there. What I'm going to do is first draw a shape of an eye. Just to tell you what got me to even this part is thinking about things like the fact that there's a slant to the eye like this. So it's not straight across and that there's a roundedness behind the eye obviously viable has a sphere behind that. When I draw this shape, I'm thinking of those two things immediately. then if I was to put the tear dock on the one side and then a flip up to the other side, I'm pretty much already there, I've got a good foundational shape and place. Just one of the fun little things I like to do is I actually picture this as a bird head. I always seem to see that. Just something else for you to memorize the shape, I guess. But mainly it's a little bit wider here and then it tapers back here, things like that. There's also this other slant that you get right here. You can generally use this slant to define the brow and we'll illustrate this more and I'll talk about that more in a minute. But essentially, if you get this base shape and place like this, you can start to work out some of the other ideas. Now obviously when you do comic style stuff, a lot of this gets thrown out the window as far as proportions as far as the possibilities of style and look. But you can take this and say, I want this relatively large iris. Now the iris is usually one third if you're talking realism, it's about one third of the eyes. If you were to divide that into thirds, but when you are doing stylized renditions, that can again get pushed to the side and you can really do what you like. But the main thing is that you just pay attention to the placement of the iris. Let's say that we want this eye look and relatively straight to camera a little bit offset. We draw in a circular shape for the iris, another circular shape for the pupil. Now the thing to really pay attention to here is that if you place the pupil too high up to the top eyelid, you are going to get a kind of a lazy look or a sleepy look or relaxed look, things like that. You also want to pay attention to that and the white of the eye. If you have wide of the eye on both the bottom and the top, you are going to get a very excited or scared a motion. You just really want to play around with those concepts and move that around and pay attention to the differences that you get by doing that. The other thing is if you put the pupil too high up, by the time you add the drop shadow because you are going to want to drop shadow from the top brow, really the eyelid, but really the top brow is going to cast a drop shadow on the top of the iris. If your pupils up too high that, that drop shadow is going to look to blend right through it. That's going to really convey again, either the characters looking up, like the head is tilted down on there looking up or they're tired or sleepy or less enthused. Again, there's a lot of expressiveness that goes into these tiny little choices and that's where subtlety is everything with this type of stuff. Let's go ahead and put a drop shadow here now. Looks like this. I have to be too heavy, but it needs to be there. Then glare can be all over the eye. It's just mainly that you make it look glossy, but the glare generally will be right against that shadow. A good thing to do for eyes is a study realism and then take that and agile and flair and style to it. We'll give it a thickness to the sides of the iris. Then we'll have that thing out at the bottom. We'll get into some rendering techniques here in a bit but first we want to get all the base information in place. Now that we've got this in place, let's go ahead and take this off to the side bring this over and we'll go ahead and erase this back just a little bit, get some of these construction lines out of the way. We are going to add in the top eyelid now. This is going to vary a lot depending on the type of character and style that you like to draw. All these things that I'm mentioning basically will vary based upon what type of style you like to see in your work? But the main thing is that all of these parts are in there and you know that you have got the shape of the eye, the iris, the pupil, there's certain things you obviously can't forego with because the style but proportions and waves that you render it, all those things will take large variations within somebody's potential work or whatever. There's a drop shadow again, redefine that. Now when it comes to the eyelid, for a comic style I like to draw it all in one large shape. I think the reasoning behind this that this became so popular is because of a couple of things. One, I think it's really quick to do. You can really draw a solid shape as you can see really quickly there. The other thing that I think it was really important for comics, especially for printed comics because size reduction. It made sense for if you draw this type of eye up close, you could get away with the same type of drawing for this up-close and a smaller version, it's going to read really well in both instances. I'm not sure if that's exactly the reasoning, but that's my understanding of what I would think it made the most sense because when you generally see a realistic eye, you are going to get flips of the eyelashes like this and they are going to rotate all the way around in each direction as it goes around the eye. But with a comic style or even anime or just an animated style in general, you are generally going to see it more solid like this. Again, it's a bit easier to accomplish and it reads really well from a distance. Like anything else, if you use larger shapes and simplify it, it works better in a lot of regards. Lets see. So do these little style choices with the way the eyelashes separate. Lots of opportunity there to play around with your own style and ideas for that. Then as far as the eyebrow, I generally will draw up at an angle like this and start the eyebrow like this, and then I'll draw a larger shape across. Then I think about the plane change of the brow, the forehead. Then I just put a little into it. Again, that's the simplified version of it, and then I'll fill that in like that. Then I'll start to think about little style choices. Maybe a couple little separate hairs. Maybe change the shape to the thicker part or the back part a little bit put a little point there whatever. Again, it starts as a basic blocked out shape, but then you can add in style choices and refine it and things like that. That can be done with anything and that's really the way that I look at any of this as I start to build up on it. Now once I've got it to this point, I'm sorry. One other thing I wanted to show you is one drawing the eye, a lot of styles that are trying to be a little bit more realistic I think, will tend to draw in the ridge of the eyelid. For instance, if you are looking down at this eye, not necessarily down because actually there's some shots where if you're looking directly at eye, you will see a little bit of the bottom ridge and you'll even see a little bit of the top ridge just from the very underneath because you know you got to remember that the shape is rounding. If we were to look at it around a sphere from an angle that eye is going like it's rounding around the sphere. You're giving part of that out. You're going to see some of that edging from the bottom lid and even the top lid from a straight on shot. But I've noticed in a lot of comic styles that gets ignored completely. But I just want to show you that different. If you want to try to push a little bit more depth and to the way that you don't especially on an up-close shot, you can get that bottom or top ridge in there and really show the thickness of the eyelid, and as well as giving a drop shadow and here toward the tear doc is like this. Put a heavier drop shadow there and there on the side. Again trying to really push the effect that this is a spherical shape inside of the eyelids. You really want to think about that as you illustrate it. Now, once you have gotten to this point and most of the information is in place, you can render it. Rendering obviously there's just so many different ways you can think about rendering. But probably the most simplest thing I can say is that you're really just trying to show the roundedness that you see in the iris. That's the most definite thing that you see. The other thing is that maybe you want to get in there and really show the texture as well as the soften up the drop shadow that you get on the top of the eye. I generally will keep it a little bit more simplified just because it's real easy to overdo something like this. Sometimes less is more, especially in comic work. So it's really up to you though. I've seen people get in there and they do all the little shading lines back and forth and they come back with white and they really punch up the detail and that's fine if that's the style you're after. But again, I like just a simplified thing. I'm just really trying to round out the edges of it. I think what helps here too is you can really let the colors take hold if you don't go to awfully detailed with it. By the time you come back with the color inks and the color, it will definitely look pretty impressive. Again, when you get that thicker edge on the sides, sometimes you'll see people put a little glare at the bottom. When they're really trying to push the glossiness of the eye, they can put a glare there. I've seen glares the top most part of the eyes. If you're looking at the spherically, it's coming around like this. Generally the highest point is where you are going to see a glare, something like that. You'll see people sometimes put a glare right across there. I usually do that with more than color than the line work, but and I've just seen it done both ways. Now what I'm going to do, I'm going to softer-ace this one. I'm going to go ahead and tighten up the line work and render this out. Our time-lapse this part and just talk over it just because it will be just me rendering. But I think it will give you a better idea of where this is going. Let's go ahead and do that. Here I'm going to add the finished pencils over top. What I like to think about here is just really cleaning up the concept and tightening up the work. Thinking about things like line weight and how to really push any of the little bits of ideas into the forefront. Anything that I can make a bit more crisp and understandable, I'm going for that and just really refined in the those little details so that I know exactly what I'm after. This is, again just my final decision-making when drawing something like this, and then clean it up and that is about it. There's the eye with a bit more rendering, and now we're going to draw it from different angles. We're also going to draw male versus female and talk about the differences that you see there. With that, let's move on. 3. Drawing Eyes on an Angle: Now, let's draw some female eyes on an angle, and we'll do both eyes. We're going to do just a kind of a container box. I'm just going to start off by doing a rectangular shaped like this. Because normally I would obviously outline the face and then use that as my guide. I'm simulating that affect just with these rectangular shapes. Essentially the eyes are one-third apart, or they are the distance from one eye through the middle. From this point to this point would be equal to one eye. Now obviously that's going to change what style and whatever you're after. I like to make that a little bit more narrow than a full eye width apart. But the main thing to focus on, I think with this is that perspective and foreshortening is working in a situation like this. You want to basically perceive that. Essentially if you get in here and you immediately define some kind of bridge of the nose, just something as simple as that. When you start to draw these eyes in, you want to really imagine the way that they're going to change shape as they go away from camera or the viewer. I'm going to start with this eye, and am going to use that same basic shape as we illustrated before. I'll point up into the back like this slant, coming downward to the tear duct like that. You're going to get a bit more of the roundness of the eye right there, and then I'm just going to bring this out and around connected like that. This is just a starting point, so it doesn't have to be too overly correct. It's always good to just make the first mark, get something, I'll just say a few marks at this point, but always make the next mark. Don't stop yourself and worry too much. You want to fix and evaluate and make changes as you go. As we start to incorporate and draw this next eye, we want to use that same slant. Now, remember that when doing stuff on an angle or just generally when drawing parts of the face, triangular shapes are really important. Like you can define a lot of things with triangles, obviously, rectangles, spherical shapes, whatever you can use, but angles really help you to pinpoint problems in your work. If you take this and you bring this eye over this way, again, we want to condense down the side, maybe even further than what I've illustrated there because of foreshortening. As we get to this side, we may want to quickly bring this eye to an end over here and really condense it down. Then again, just like this area right here, how that round over starts to be more visible, it's going to appear to be more visible here as well. It's not going to bring itself to a point that point is kind of going to get hidden by the eye itself and it's going to change shape or look to change shape. You got to be very aware of that. Just because you have this angle here and you see this point here, doesn't mean that point's going to be right there. That's the little things that you have to learn by studying realism, and then you have to make your own decision based upon style. Get some of this top eyelid in like this. As far as the brow, I'll just do a basic line, again, keeping it very angular. Just to kind of check the work and get everything in place. Then we'll make adjustments as we go here. Let's say that these are beginning eye shapes and there's still a bit off, they still need to be adjusted. I'll just keep nudging lines around and just slowly kind of manipulating it. I try to always think of this like a ball of clay. I'm just kind of moving things around and trying to find the right shape before I settle on something. Now having the, eye look back at us, I'm going to take that iris and I'm going to have it take up a good portion of the eye from this angle. Again, almost a little more animated by drawing it this large, but this is kind of the style and going for, so that's what I'm going to do. I'll draw a little bit larger iris like this. Just paying special attention to the round over that occurs before it gets to the top. The more of it that, shows as a full circle. If it starts to round back over before it meets that top eyelid, it's going to look like a more alert eye pose, but if I had it to go say something like this, you could see that it would look very sleepy and vary, unenthused. But if I bring it to where you see more of that round over, it immediately starts to look more alert. We're going to get into that a bit more to as well, explaining kind of how that works. Then the pupil kind of put that in the middle, and obviously over and out. One of the things to think about two of these, is that these are pointing at us. The iris appears to be a bit more spherical or circle like, but if it was pointing away, it would become more disk shaped. Just be aware of that, as that starts to rotate around and away from the viewer. If we were to draw the eye again, like over here, and they're looking, if you can kind of understand this a little bit in this way. This eye is now going to become more disk shaped. It's going to be more of an oval. For the iris and the pupil are both going to take more of an oval shape, but since they're looking at us, it's going to start to appear to be more spherical or circular in shape. Now we've got that in place. Now let's go and take this, and bring this over, make a copy of it, and I'll go ahead and refine this a bit more. I'm going to go ahead and soft erase this down just a little bit, because this will allow us to clean up the work as we go. Each time we want to make our adjustments as we go and try to fix things and not worry too much about it being entirely correct. Even at this stage, we just want to slowly move the lines around and fix things as we go. As we get to this eyelid over here, it's going to appear to round down more abruptly on that edge than it is over here. Here it could probably come out a little bit more horizontally, where on the other side because of foreshortening, because of the angle of the face, it's going to be a more abrupt change. This eye, from certain angles, the eye will actually look like it's floating out there being kind of the edge of the face, and then you'll have to perceive the way the eyelashes would come around it from that edge. Again, this just takes practice and kind of getting the right feel for it, the right look. Likewise, the eyelid will actually look like It comes down and then back up. You'll get a little bit of a side of the brow like that, that actually comes up from right there. I'm just still sketching this in a little bit. With the brows, I just tend to make those thicker and then have them taper off an angle with the shape of the brow right there. Again will get in the bigger shape of the eyelash, the top eyelash almost as one large shape like that, and over here, the bottom shape of the lower eyelid or eyelash like that. You see it just kind of encases the eye and that's really helpful for the drawing because it really helps to define the eye really well. It traces it out, it gives it this nice border, and you can do a lot of neat things with that. Top eyelid, this lower eyelash in place. Now remember you can do the edge of the actual lower eyelid right there and you can push some depth that way. I don't think I'm going to in this particular instance. We'll see by the time I finished it, I might make a different decision, but for now we'll just go ahead and worry about the overall shape of it. We probably could get a little bit of an oval shape to the iris here. It's almost never completely spherical or completely circular, but the more it's appearing to be straight on shot, the more it will appear to be that way. Just remember that drop shadow from the brow, just like that. Bring that drop shadow over here, and I think it helps to really round out that drop shadow with the iris. To really round it out down to the edges. If you were to just bring this line straight across, it's going to flatten that look out, but if you round it up and around, it's going to help put a little more depth in there. Again, that highlight. One on this side, one on that side. We're starting to get a little bit more of a look here. Now, what I want to do, we've got pretty much all the foundational work in place. I'm going to go ahead and soft erase this one more time. I'll time-lapse this next part and will tighten up this work, so let's do that. We'll just do a quick soft erase and redraw over top. All the foundational work is there and this is just the clean-up stage, but you'll notice I add a little changes to things like the eyelashes. I'll move components around if need be, and it just just that final tweaking of the work. Sometimes you've finished the work and you look at it and go, "Okay, it could be a bit better. Maybe I'll come back on the next revisit and I'll try this. I'll change this about the eyes or I'll add this detail, or an extra glare or a bigger eyelash on the top versus the bottom." You're always analyzing your work and you're always trying to evaluate it and improve. Sometimes that means improving in the moment while you're doing it, and other times it means improving it the next time you revisit that subject. I probably drawn thousands of eyes over the course of my career, and I'll probably draw a 1,000 more. You constantly evolve your process as you go and it's a really transitional thing. Just don't worry about improving everything all at once. Just make small adjustments as you go. That will complete this part, and now we'll move on to the next lesson. 4. Drawing Male Vs Female Eyes: Now we're going to focus on male versus female. I think a lot of people get hung up on this and really it's just the same thing. It's best if you do them side-by-side and really do a comparison. But essentially the way that I'll do for comics is I'll do the male eye just a little bit more angular and a little bit more squinted. Again, just do them side-by-side and really show the difference. Again, I get that angle in there, and that can be said to be on both of them, you could see that's still pretty evident. I would say, if anything, you might do it a little bit more noticeably on the female eye but not necessarily, that's not going to be the determining factor for male versus female. I'll show you why, because a lot of times what makes the female eyes so much prettier and attractive is the longer eyelashes. We'll get that in there quickly like we did before on the other ones. Obviously you're going to leave those out on the male eyes. Then the squintiness and then pass that. A lot of the same things are true. You might do maybe a little bit larger iris if you're really trying to push the effect that she's got these big shiny eyes kind of thing. But that's again, I don't know that's definitely a determining factor, but we'll just draw through these. All the same rules apply, the drop shadow, the glare, everything we've done before. Obviously there's an eye lid to both male and female. Now I will say that typically with the male eyes, at least the way that I draw them, you can see male eyes where they have more of a larger eyelid up top. But I tend to make them smaller than actually hidden by the Bram wall like this. I think it gives more of a stern look and a toughness that I like to see in my characters. I put that in there. Again, that's preference and I don't know what that really would determine male or female, but it's just something I like to see in my character design. Even with the iris, I probably would make it just a touch smaller by comparison, and even a little bit more hidden like this, where the pupils is even closer to the top eyelid. Again, I think this gives a little bit more of a sternness to the look of a character and a toughness that I go for the superhero males that I draw. Again, that's probably old style choices, but that's what I see when I do it. I would do the male more like that, more slanted, probably even a smaller, tear dot, then that looks a bit large, right there more like this. Then once you get to the eyebrow, actually let me go ahead and fill on the eyelash here just a little bit again, just kind of roughly sketch this in here because I really want to focus on the differences of the two. I'm trying to look into that as I work out these concepts. Then when it comes to the brow, now I would definitely do more of a thicker brow, for the male and thinner for female. Obviously there's exceptions to every rule, definitely seen females of pretty thick brows and males with thin brows, so it's not guaranteed but a general concept. A thicker brow here, and by comparison, a more elongated and a thinned out brow and maybe even a touch further away from the eye. All these little changes, these little details add up quite a bit and start to give you a very different look. Likewise, you can even make the argument that maybe there would be a few more, not wrinkles so much but maybe like the more stern look to the brow, and that's going to be more expression, so we'll get into that next. But you could definitely say that more lines would toughen up the character, and I would keep in mind if you had too many lines, you're actually just going to make the characters look older, so you do have to be careful for that. But there is a certain amount where you could make the character skin look a bit more rough and a bit more rugged, and again convey male versus female. That's about it when it comes to comparisons of the two. Now I'll go and soft erase this back like before and clean this up a bit more and embellish them with a final level of finish work. But it's again all pretty much there and we just make our final decisions as far as the thicknesses of the line work, line clarity, things like that. One other thing I will say with anything that you do, drawing the female generally you're going to use more curvature lines all throughout. Everything from just the eye and the mouth all the way to the curvature of the body and things like that. It's very much a good way to convey male versus female simply by using angular and curvature type lines. In this case with the eye, I'm going to try to make it look more fluid and softer with the curves, then I deal with the male counterpart, the male will be a lot more angular and rigid. Then unless a certain detail that I think would just look better, so you can see I'm even using a little bit of angular lines just with the way I'm changing the shape of the eyelash but not too much, not letting it take over the piece basically at this particular part. That's a smooth curve there. Make sure to give a good weighted line to the edge of the iris. Again, really trying to round out that drop shadow to make that iris look more rounded in the way that it's unset in the eye or unset behind the eyelid, I should say. You know with the eyebrow really just make it thick to the one side, have a taper off, and then have it change shape and point to the the part where it changes direction on the brow at least that's the way that I do it. Again, lots of ways you can interpret that and do that in your own fashion. Just sharing with you the way that I tend to do it. I'll keep the rendering basic just so we can go ahead and get to the other eye and finish that off. I'll just do some real simplified rendering. There's a female shaped eye, much like the ones we've done before minus some of the little, additional eyelashes and things like that. Remember that you can really play around and develop a style just on that. Then also maybe play around with the overall shape that you get from the negative space and the light of the eye. Over to the male eye, I'll probably use a lot less weighted lines. Again, I'm going to focus on making it a bit more angular. Now I'm not going to make everything angular because, I think you lose a little bit of a human quality from that and a certain softness that you're even going to see in male eyes. They're not entirely rigid, of course. But you do want a little bit more of that angular effect in my own opinion to show the comparison, and will show the difference. I can say, since there's not these big heavy eyelashes, maybe you do get a little bit more of the thickness of the eyelid. Couple of wrinkles there, but being careful not to add too many because it will show age. Other than that, a lot of the same rules apply, so then that's pretty much the same as drawing male to female. But it's amazing how jostles fuse. Somewhat subtle differences can have a pretty dramatic effect to the look of what we're doing here. Obviously a lot bigger brow here will do a lot for that. I'll just thickening up the use of the brush there. Rendering lines can be the same, again, I'll keep it a bit more simplified just to hurry up and get it in place and get it done. That's really it. Hopefully that shows you that comparatively in side-by-side, they're pretty much the same thing. I mean, there's definitely some differences, but not as much as you might think and then you can get in here and keep worrying about the way the brow might leave a drop shadow on the eye, and all these other little details. But comparatively in side-by-side, those are the main components of what I think about when I do male to female. With that, let's go and move on to that next lesson. 5. Drawing Anger and Fear Expressions: So now that we've got some basic understanding of the eyes, let's go and work through some of the expressions that you can get. So to do this, we're going to just draw a cross, a little bit of a downward arc and a line through the middle and we're going to start with anger and again kind of that one third of the eyes usually spaced equal to one eye. So you can kind of set this mark into thirds like this, somewhere in that realm and then what we want to do here, this is going to be male eyes and we're going to focus on the downward angle that we've started with. So one of the things I will recommend if you do have a problem with symmetry, which can always be tricky with things like eyes and faces and things like that. Really practice going from one side to the other instead of drawing the entire eye on one side and then drawing the entire eye on the other, you can kind of balance things out a little bit better if you move from side to side and this I find it to help me anyways. So what we want to do here is a downward slant to the eyes and a little bit kind of squint in this because we're really trying to push the perspective or the concept of anger into these eyes. We want to squint them up a bit. We want them downward tilted. Now the biggest thing that will really help to define this is the brows. So we'll get those in and we're going to bring the brows down in the middle and then slanted back and up like this. So very influential downturn to the brows like this, have them kind of meet in the middle and scrunch up a bit, have the skin kind of bunch up. Obviously that's going to really make it look more of an angry type look. So get that, and obviously the wrinkles like I talked about before, you can really express more of that frustration with the wrinkles around the eyes and then once you've got this much in place, you start thinking about the iris and the pupil. So like I said for the iris is generally about one third, but if we're really trying to push the perspective of anger, we can really take this iris and have it kind of halfway under the top eyelid like this. We're intentionally bringing the pupil up pretty close to the top eyelid, and it does a couple things, it enforces the look of anger, also makes it look like the character's head is tilted down just a little bit. We can also do a more focused pupil, which generally will make to look more focus, more intense. So we get that drop shadow from the brow onto the iris like that. You can even bring that down further maybe to enforce this very kind of hidden iris or whatever and also we wanted to really check the shape as we do this. So each time I add something else to this little bit of illustration, I check the work. So the distance from the eyes is little off from side to side and also little things that I can change while I do it. Now to really reinforce that we're looking down at this character just a little bit, we can also get that bottom ridge of the lower eyelid in there. So you see a little bit of that bottom ridge or if you'd thicken it up quite a bit then you're looking more down at the character, and then I also want to give him some pretty hefty eyebrows and we'll probably even bring those eyebrows further down to the eye. Again, all reinforcing this kind of intense glare that the character is giving, and the little glare on the eyes, stuff like that and then again, you can kind of keep playing around with the wrinkles and the more you shade and add effects to this render, generally the more intimidating it will look. There is a certain boundary to that, where you just don't want to go too off like crazy with it, but it does generally help it to make it look a bit more threatening with rendering and stuff like that. We could probably even add a little bit more drop shadow to that top eyelid. All right, so that essentially gives us kind of an angry look and we're going to render these out, but what I'm going to do is first sketch, actually I won't even erase. I'm going to first sketch this out. By comparison now I want to do fear. So I'll take this, make it a little bit larger, and I want to show how I would draw a fear now. We use female eyes just to again, put as much variation as we can and you can see that there's still some pretty big differences like the one side is wider than the other. So we still got to check the work, but we'll clean that up as we go. Right now we're more focused on the expressiveness of what we're trying to get down. So let's go ahead and do the next emotion now. So now at fear, we're going to do the same thing, line down the middle. We're going to actually arc this the other way. So we're going to arc up now and this is just a good way to say, okay, the face is tilting back and same thing, kind of divide it into thirds and try to get those as even as possible just to start because everything is obviously housed against what we're placing here, and keep in mind too, you can soft erase this down if you feel more comfortable with getting some of this rough sketch work out of your way. Just soft erase that back. I only need little bits of it to really see where you're at and then now for the female eyes, we're going to do that kind of rounded shape. There's still going to point up at a slight angle, but not so much now because we're really going to try to envision that the head is tilted back a little bit more. So they point up to the back of the eye, the tear duct lower. By comparison, the roundedness of the bottom of the eye and kind of curving up as it meets the tear duct right there is little curve up, a drop shadow on the inner ridge to the tear duct. You're going to get a little bit of the eyelids. Eyelids are probably going to appear a little bit less prominent because of the upshot that we're going to get. We're also going to immediately draw in the brows and the brows are going to be tilted down now. So I'm just going to lightly sketch those in, just for placement, just kind of get an idea of expression. Those might be a little too far away, but hopefully you get the idea that it's a very different expression already than the angry look, just by the shifting of these few little details. Now the main thing that I wanted to illustrate here, let me just size this up just a little bit. Is it the pupil placement or the iris placement by comparison, is quite a bit different. So one of the things that you can do when showing fear is put the whites of the eyes on both sides. So the reason this is is when we experience fear, we open our eyes and our reactionary state is wide as possible so you get whites of the eyes and both sides of the iris. Likewise, our pupils will dilate to let in more light, more information, again to take in everything around us because of some kind of surrounding danger or excitement. So it's a fight or flight response. I'll start by drawing the pupils very small for placement, but later we'll increase the size of those to enhance the look of fear that we're trying to convey. So when you take the time to learn a few of these things and the kind of the ideas and the science behind why we react a certain way or why we look a certain way in a certain scenario, and the emotions and the depiction of those emotions, your work takes on another meaning, other level of impressiveness. So it's funny how even though we're doing this animated kind of fun art style, you still need to know the rules, and then obviously once you learn the rules, you can also learn when to stretch them or break them. So back to illustrating this, we just want to get into more of the details. So back to drawing in the larger shapes of eyelashes like we did before, kind of a solid shape for the top and for the bottom, and then we'll add more detail from there. Let me start worrying about the other things like the drop shadow on the inset that you get on the sides of the eye. Those are still going to take effect, and we'll fill the eyelashes in. So hopefully, you can see there that, quite a bit different from the two expressions, and still very rough. We're going to clean this up now, but I just want you to see how you can get that information and rather quickly and have a very different expressiveness to these eyes. Once we refine it, it'll probably look a little bit more interesting. Now one other thing I want to show before we go to the refinement, I'm actually going to take this one off to the side and make a copy of this and show you one other thing that it's actually a good idea to mess around and manipulate existing poses and really see the difference. So maybe you've got all this into place and then you go, well, I really just want the look that now the character is looking down at the, say, impending danger. So one of the neat exercise that you can do is keep everything the same, but then just change that one component and I feel like you learn a lot in this process because sometimes you've got everything almost there, it's pretty on the level, but then something is missing and you can really find those things by doing these types of exercises. You can learn when you can really save, not necessarily a bad drawing, but just something that's not really the way that you need for a particular shot. So exercises like this can be fun and interesting to do. So essentially just by moving those irises down and the pupils pointing down and being at the bottom ridge of the eye, you get a very different kind of effect to it. Now character is obviously looking down, so the same fear factor. It almost makes it look a bit more like the character's head is tilted back. Now again, you can enforce this by showing more of the ridge to the top eye. You could slope the eyebrows and even the proportion of the eyebrows by comparison to the eyes, so you can get this very perspective kind of shot going like this. So there's all sorts of neat ways to kind of embellish this and make it really push more dimension into what you're doing. So I just wanted to show you that, we're actually going to go back to the previous one, and we're going to render these out a little bit more and make them a little bit more refined. So now we'll solve to erase and redraw again, and also this is a good time to really check symmetry and try to get things a little bit more correct. But I will admit that I don't worry too often much about this. I mean, I like to practice symmetry as much as the next person, but you do have to remember that faces are never symmetrical, so certain characteristics you can let be a little bit skewed. But obviously if it's too much and it distracts away from the effectiveness of the drawing, then you want to try to fix that. There's lots of ways to really horn your skills on that, you can use graphs over your drawing or a graph paper, things like that. Or if you're working digitally, create your own graph and then also flipping the work back and forth as you work can help as well or use a mirror by art table. I like to use little sketch lines side-to-side to check it and there you see me increasing the size of the pupils. So that really helps to convey that emotion in those eyes, and at first I started shading the irises, but you'll see I get rid of that just because I started to feel it was a little bit too distracting. So again, whenever I refine something like this, I just try to make those judgment calls and those choices to clean up the work and then make it read better, and sometimes that means adding things, sometimes that means erasing an idea back and doing away with it. So that'll wrap up this one, so now what you want to do is practice drawing a variety of expressions, taking note of all the little details that make them different, and really cataloging lots and lots of variety within those expressions. So with that, let's move on to the next lesson. 6. Drawing Eyes Young and Old: Now, we're going to go ahead and do another study. We're going to do a child's eye versus somebody that's elderly and render that out. The thing that I would say is most identifiable by a child's eyes is they're very rounded, very wide open, very alert, and a lot of regards. What we're going to do is just get that very wide open expression. Big tear doc, the proportions are obviously different and then a very large iris by comparison. We'll get that into place, pupil being very visible. So again, going for that overly alert expression, a little bit of a drop shadow on the iris, but not as much as somebody with a pretty hefty brow anyways and a little bit of the eyelid there. But again, focusing on the proportions and not being the same obviously from what we've done in the previous steps. Now the ridge of the bottom eyelid and same thing with the eyelash. I'm going to draw it as a solid, but proportionally, I'm going to make it a lot smaller, then maybe a couple of little strands popping out, something like that. Again, keep them with the animated look like that. As far as an eyebrow are very light. Children don't tend to really have overly defined eyebrows till they get a bit older, but I'll go ahead and just throw that in there like that. Then now what I want to do, is by comparison, draw a more elderly eye. Let's do that. Now, the main thing that I would say, the big difference that you're going to see and obviously, we're jumping through all the different age categories and really going for the extreme. But I tend to start there and then we can work on settle these later. But I think it's important to really look for the major differences and that's what you're going to get by doing this type of study. One that I immediately see is that the skin starts to really affect differently and come down in the way over. Obviously, gravity takes its toll and we start to get all these neat wrinkles. I think they're neat anyways. You really want to play around with that concept, so you get the bags under the eyes. I really like this one where you'll notice the skin will actually dip down over the brow and over the top eyelid a bit. I think that's a quick way to really signify the age, because the brush can put all these wrinkles in and maybe get the look of age or maybe just get the idea of an over stylized ruggedness. But when you start to do these types of wrinkles, there's really no doubt, but this is a more elderly type person. I like to get these little fold over as you get and wrinkles can occur both directions or all over the place, really in every different direction, but they can go across and down and overlap. But then they can also occur almost like scales would look and turn it into like overlapped bumps and ridges. I don't do a whole lot of that in my own style, but it is there when you start to pay attention to realism and then try to incorporate some of that into your work. But as far as the iris, it's generally going to be about the same, but it's going to look a little bit less large by comparison, so again, one-third generalize the role across. I think that because of the droopiness of the skin up top, I think it makes more sense to bring the pupil back up like this and to get a larger drop shadow on the iris. Because, again, this is going to be an older person that's got a more defined brow, so there's a better chance of drop shadow occurring on the eye. Again, just trying to think about all those things as I get in here and detail this. I also think that you're going to see more little detailed veins, more strain on the eye from the aging and things like that, so you can get then also veins and things go on there. You're definitely going to see a lot more definition in the eyebrows. But they are going to look to be generally a more wispy, rigid hair. They're going to go all over the place. Gray hairs are more brutal, I think, so they don't comb as well and they just go all over the place, so you can really show age with that as well. Likewise, the other argument can be made that there would just be less of them because of loss of hair. But really with aging, you tend to grow more hair, I think in the areas like eyebrows and ears and things like that, but then you lose it in you wish you retain that like the top of your head. I'll just get those crazy hairs in there and some areas thick, some areas thinned out, are probably the best way to show that. Then as you start to render, really bring out these cool wrinkles. You can do a lot with them. You can really push the designs around with your shading, with your line weight. I think a good way to do wrinkles is to have the line and shadow go in and out as you go around it. Instead of tracing every line, just [inaudible] in and out with it. These little line breaks and seems to look more interesting if you do that. We'll get some of the bags under the eyes, like those more pronounced. Obviously, as all this information comes over and meets the nodes, you're going to get more wrinkles over there as well. You can really get in here and just text dries to scan and really bring this out. Again, this is going to be just dependent on how much your stylization you'll want to really get in here and see what you can do. But the major difference, is I think to really pay attention to when doing the study, is that the softness that you get from the side over here to the almost the rugged feeling that you get from all the texture and the detail from over here. Now what I will go ahead and do is render this out and see how we can really bring these to refinement. Let's go ahead and do that now. Now to soft raise again and add in some more detail and really just finalized what's here. Again, thinking more about line weight, things like texture, trying to make sure that the lines have a certain ruggedness to them so that I give the feeling of age and a wear and tear to the skin and on a life lived. I'm thinking about these things as I'm adding in these little details and hopefully that comes through in the artwork. But I can over render something like this, because of the age factor and lens to that. Again, ruggedness or roughness to the skin. But then when I get to the child eye, I have to think quite the opposite. I have to try to think more minimalist and just put in the bare essentials like keep things very smooth, light and hairy feeling, quick read, and really hold back on a detail on the line work because the more lines I add, the less it's going to feel like a youthful eye, it's going to start to feel more aged and things like that. Lines in the rendering can really control a lot of that for you and help you to push those concepts. Now, I'm going to go back over to the elderly eye. I feel like it still needs more. It wasn't enough and I almost feel like you can go too far with this or it's okay to go too far because of the nature of what I'm trying to get here. I want that roughness to the work, so I can keep adding and I can keep playing with the concept. Notice too that I'm using different line weights and different line thicknesses to really convey varying levels of shading so that it doesn't have the singular, uniform look over the whole area. I think that's really important to get nice variation in the folds and things like that. That will complete these lessons on eyes. I hope you've gained a lot of insight from this. Just remember now you got to practice lots of variations, so fill up your sketch books with a variety of eye designs, render them in different ways, study different ages, different styles, and just learn. I really appreciate you for tuning and watch in this. One on the way real soon, keep drawing, keep them fun. Bye for now.