Hello and welcome to my new video, How to Draw a Realistic Eye: Step by Step
in this video I will show you how to draw an eye using a 4b pencil
starting from the very beginning,
the first step is to try and imagine the basic oval shape of the eye before you
draw it, so that you can place it on the page where you wish it to be,
once you have decided to the position of the eye, sketch it in as a simple oval and
then add an upper line to represent the upper eyelid and then the lower line to
represent the thickness of the top of the lower eyelid
next it is time to draw the iris,
it is a good idea if you make the top of the circle look like it's going
underneath the top eyelid and the bottom of the circle of the iris touches or
just goes underneath the rim of the lower eyelid
now it is time to add a highlight to your eye
this will be very useful later on
next it is time to draw the pupil in the center of the iris, try to make sure
the highlight overlaps the pupil as then you will have the lightest and
darkest areas of your drawing working well together
I now add a line to represent the thickness of the upper eyelid
and then on the right hand side of the eye in the corner I add a tear duct, this would be the corner of
the eye, nearest the nose, at this stage it's a good idea to look at your whole eye rather
than parts of it and see if there's anything that you think needs changing
to make it slightly better
we already just under two minutes into the drawing in real time and we have got
the basic eye shape all planned out
once you are satisfied you've got the basic shape of the eye
then we are going to start to add eyelashes, one at a time, being quite
forceful with the mark, so that they don't need to be drawn
each one more than once
with a 4B pencil, if you press down hard and exert
more pressure of the pencil you just get a dark line and if you're softer, more
delicate with the pencil, you get a softer more delicate line, as these eye lash
lines will stay in your drawing it is could be confident of the marks that you make
but at any stage, if you see something that needs changing your drawing,
just erase that part that you see needs changing and improving and correct or
improve that part, rather than starting from scratch, it's good to build on
whatever you have
now I start to go over some of the earlier lines with a darker line
particularly the upper eyelid and around the circle of the iris,
and now it's time for some detail within the iris, of the lines radiating from the center of the
pupil outwards, sometimes they are continuous lines, but more likely they're
broken lines, quite complex shapes which you can just indicate with a variety of
different marks going from the center of the pupil to the outside circumference
of the iris
the more of these marks that you put in the iris, more detail your eye will show
for this drawing which is quite a large drawing of an eye it would be good,
I think, to put quite a lot of detail in, but if you were doing
an eye as part of a portrait of a person then you could simplify this quite a lot
because obviously the eye would be much much smaller than this sort of
demonstration eye that I'm drawing now
when drawing a pair of eyes in the face it is a good tip to draw both eyes together so that you
draw part of one eye and then part of the other eye and then you look at both
eyes before you make a judgment about how your drawings going
when building up detail in a drawing it's always a good idea to look at the detail in relation
to the rest of the drawing
so the detail works in itself but it also helps the rest of the drawing work well
so building up these marks hopefully we're creating a drawing where the whole
image is getting stronger because of the detail that we're creating the center of
the image
drawing his way of record
what you see and so to improve my drawing I make sure that I look really
carefully at what I can see in front of me
this is tricky to do because we always think that we know what we can see
but when you start drawing you find that all sorts of shapes and connections that
you didn't realize that were there
and so to draw an eye or a lemon or a cup
you start to discover all sorts of things which perhaps you had never
noticed or seen before
that's one of the reasons that I enjoy drawing so much
when drawing shapes that
repeat like the shapes within the iris of an eye
I don't think it matters too much if he loses track of which bit your drawing
as long as you look each time you draw, I don't think anybody's going to notice if
you draw the same bit twice, but they might notice if you start drawing things
which you can't actually see in front of you...
so it's always a good idea to really look very very carefully
next it is time to use the side
of the pencil to create a soft mid-tone, not dark and not light, but somewhere in the middle,
that you can shade over the detail that you've just put on the iris
so the details still showing but now it has a layer of mid-tone pencil on it but
not on the highlight of your drawing, the eyelid of your eye will create a shadow
which means that the top part of the eyeball will be in a darker tone than the
rest of the eye
so we can shade that in now, to indicate how the shadow of the top eyelid will
cause this effect to happen
this shiny reflective quality of the iris and the highlight on the eye is starting to show through now,
I think this is mainly because there are layers of tone, of light and dark, and the
paper which I'm using is quite bright white paper and that's looking brighter
as you put darker tones next to it, so we are not using any white, we are just making the
things around the paper darker, and that's making the paper itself look brighter
it is now time to shade in the darkness of the pupil in the center of your eye,
this should be as flat a tone as you can make it
and it doesn't reflect any light at all
and now I have shaded in the pupil I can start to develop the area around the eye
this is a stage in the drawing where you really want to look at your drawing as a
whole thing and to see if there's any way that you can unify the drawing or if
there's anything that can be toned down or simplified, so the drawing works
together rather than just pieces of the drawing working individually, so we're
trying to unify the drawing at this stage
starting to place in some tone to give the eyelid some form
so the lines that we drew at the beginning of the drawing now become
lines where the tone changes from light to dark, so on the right-hand side of the
eyelid
it's become a area of tone then on the left-hand side of the eyelid
the tone is above the eyelid, we can continue to strengthen here so that the
eye is not totally isolated, it is now in relation to the folds of skin around
the eye
the more that, I guess, the more dramatic that the image becomes, although the
actual I doesn't change
it's just a matter of changing the tone of the drawing around the eye to give it
some sort of context within a face,
this drawing took just under nine minutes, so far, in real time
I start to speed up this drawing now to show you the various steps
to get a full tonal range
I hope you enjoy this drawing and you have to go to and see you next time!
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