Tutorial: Drawing eyes

This is a tutorial written on drawing eyes in Photoshop. I noticed that a lot of people have a hard time drawing eyes so I decided to write a tutorial about how I draw eyes. I used a Wacom for drawing. A mouse should also be suitable, however is quite hard to draw smooth lines with it like for the eyebrows, hair etc.

First of all get a clear reference of the eyes you would like to draw. I almost always use references when I am drawing. The reference I used in this tutorial is this photo. The original size of this photo is 877*478. This will also be my working size.

When you have decided what photo you want to use, you first start making the skinbase.

I always set a few basic tones on paper and use the smudging tool to lose the white stripes. You can use a large brush for this. When you are smudging, also smudge some skintones in the directions of the eyes. It is not necessary to do this, but I think it is very irritating to find out at the end that there is some white left just around the eyes that should be filled with skin. At the end it is harder to fill those white parts up.

I filled the iris with different colors. Don't color it in just one color. When you look closely at the eyes you can see that they consist of many different colortones. After that, I smudged the different colors with a very small brush.

For the white part of the eyes I made a new layer. Be carefull and don't use pure white for this! When you look carefully you can see that it actually isn't white but rather grey or brown colors you should use.

I worked a little more on the white part of the eye. I used the burn tool and the smudge tool for this. I then added the shadow parts to it.

I made a new layer for the "red thing" in the eye. It is quite easy to make it look real. First select one colortone (the dark part) and draw it. Than you use the dodge tool and make one light part in it.

I made a new layer for the "light reflection" in the eye. You can see that this gives the eye a far more realistic look.

The lines for the outlines are not necessary anymore in this stage so I put them on invisible.

The layer with the "red thing" will also be used for drawing the bottom part of the eye.

For the top side I use another layer. I draw this in the color of the eyelashes. I also make the first lashes. You can do this by smudging with a tiny brush in the direction of an eyelash. I'm not really good at this part but it works. To get full lashes you can also duplicate the layer.

In this part the eye really starts looking like an eye.

I draw in onother layer. The bottom lashes.

A new layer is used for drawing the eyelid and putting some light and shadow parts on it.

The eye already looks quite natural but we don't have any eyebrows at the moment.

You can use the outline layer from step 3 again to see where the eyebrow should be placed and at what angle. I draw in a few different tones the line and smudge it.

Than I use a new layer to draw the small hairs. I use different colors for the hairs. I mostly duplicate this layer and blur it a little bit.

I add some highlights and some shadow in the right places around the eye. I was also not quite happy about the way the light in the whitepart of the eye fell, so I adjusted it a little bit, and than the eyes are finished!