How to Draw/Paint Eyelashes

Hey there everybody. Joe here. Thanks for watching. I've got a painting from Courtney. She says, "Help me with the eyelashes." She's got a uh first abstract portrait is what she says. I'll show it to you right here. This is her work. This is what she's been working on. And so I love the style, colors, composition. Very cool. Nice work, Cornia. Uh, and so let me help you with the eyelashes. Let's go over here and put it in this app. I already got it loaded in there. I also went to Google and looked at some images. This eye is a good model to point to from from uh the eye center right here. We've got a good medical picture. So, uh, look at the curve of the perspective. Look at the curve of the eye lid. it curves more around the edge of the eyeball. So, imagine this eyeball as being within a a big big circle here that goes, you know, beyond what we can see. And and so this is the right edge. This eyelid wraps around it. That causes more of a curve as we go near the edge. So, I'll show you in your painting how to get that perspective tuned a little better. Dark shadow under the eyelid. And then we've got a highlight on that same area on the lower eyelid. If I get this one out of the way, look at this one. This eyelid, we see the light highlight because the light is generally coming from above. Leaves a shadow under the top eyelid, highlight under the lower one. And of course, there's this wrinkle that's on almost everybody. There's always exceptions, but but uh very common to see that fold on the eyelid. And so we'll put that in there. we'll get some uh a good-looking 3D structure to put the eyelashes on and then they'll make a lot of sense when we just do simple lines in perspective. Okay, let's go over here and implement those very things. We're going to take this eye and we'll swatch the shadow color that you've already got. That looks like a good color to me. And I'm going to go like this. I'm going to take the line up and over. It's going to bend suddenly as it nears the corner of the eye. See how it bent suddenly there instead of being symmetrical on both sides. Now, let's take that color, lighten it, and we'll put it on the lower eyelid right here. Oh, let's go even lighter. Let's undo that one. Make the line smaller. go even lighter than it was because we want it to be lighter than the color you've already got on there so that it looks like more light is hitting that surface. Okay, there we are. I think I'm going to redo that one more time so that I have the same perspective. We're going to go straighter where we're looking straight at this line and then curve it more sharply as it approaches the corner so that it looks like uh I went a little too extreme that time. I got got a little excited. Let's see if we can do a better job. Okay, curves here, curves less here. There we go. It's worth redos. You know, take the time to get the perspective dialed in on eyes because a little bit makes a big visible visual difference. Let's go a little darker. Might as well put these shadows in. We've got a shadow that's shaped like this typically underneath that lower eyelid. And then uh we'll go ahead and put the uh let's make that line a little darker. there's going to be that wrinkle that we saw. It'll be more rounded for a more feminine uh shape. That's because deeper eye sockets will make that line a little bit more squarish and and straight across when the skull starts uh changing the shape. So, we'll just stick with the curve of the eye. That'll be fine. Let's take the uh this color here. Let's use that and start erasing the eyelashes that are on there so that I can put my digital eyelashes on. Okay, we're going to go like this. I'm just uh erasing around. It would have been easier to do this than draw the line afterward. All right, let's use the blender tool. Let's use this so that I can make my make this face look a little more little more natural. Let's do that. Let's make this a little smaller. Blend this one. Kind of do that. It doesn't have to be real nice. We're just trying to do a a demo here. I'll show you something. Um, see that dark spot right in the middle of the upper eyelid that I made? Well, that really works against me. I want just the opposite to happen. I want it to be darker toward the edges because lighter colors will come forward out of the structure you're painting and darker colors will go back into shadow. So you can sculpt a three-dimensional shape with that just by darker lighter darker lighter. You can make things go in out in out. You know, you can control that. So let me grab a lighter color right here. put it right across the middle. And you can see that that that will pop out my eye shape. Let's go a little bit lighter still. Just like this. There. That lighter color is going to make my eye more 3D. Very reliable uh pattern. Just lighter to make something pop out, darker to make it go in because there's more light as things come out of deeper areas. They get more exposed to whatever lights are in the room. You can see that on the Google photo. Look how it's lighter right here in the middle. Lighter right here because those areas are not as deep. See, when it goes deep, there's things blocking the light as it goes deeper into a into a recessed area of the shape you're painting. All right. Now, the eyelashes. So, let's go in here and let's make the curve of these. Uh, let's grab this shape right here. Uh this this color. Let's get a nice dark color. And I'm going to curve out. I want to go with the perspective. I'm going to make my line as small as I can make it. And I'm going to curve out right here. And then as I move along, I'm going to curve less out and start going more straight up. So by the time I get here, I'll be going pretty much straight up. And then I actually want to curve the other way by the time I get out here. So, let me try that again. There we go. All right, let's fill it in with everything in between and be careful to be consistent because when I'm inconsistent, see how that inconsistency right there was enough to just, you know, interfere with what I'm trying to do. That's all. So, I'm going to try to be real consistent so that my perspective looks nice. Okay. straight lines. That's all those are. If you have a tool that can leave a tapered line, it works great for this. Just a brush that as you lift it off of your canvas, it leaves a tapered stroke just like a pencil. And you know, eyelashes will come down. They'll curve down before they curve out a lot of the time and actually block the view. So, you don't always see this shadow of the lower eyelid here. Watch. I'll make these lower because we're suggesting that these are going down before they go up, down then up. And you can paint that down then up or you can just do a straight line. But the point is I'm overlapping the eyelid that I drew. And some, you know, some pictures you'll see it, some pictures you won't. But knowing it's there just helps you put the parts together confidently and have less problems with that. I'm going to put a couple eyelashes kind of stuck together because I think it's a nice, you know, ordinary look. This is it's just like the typical prototype look. Probably has a few stuck together long eyelashes like that. There we go. We've got perspective telling the same story uh across more than one set of parts. I'm going to bring these in to make my curve more uh smooth. I had a curve that kind of had a sudden turn. So, I'm just just trying to make it all very gradual. All right. You can see that I I lost the curve. I really worked to make that curve more extreme here. And then I kind of sloped it right there. Uh, no big deal, but something to pay attention to. I want that perspective. Every uh painting is different, so I'm not going to get caught up in the details too much here. Just memorizing those patterns is is the helpful thing, knowing that they exist. Let's put a lighter color right in here. Get this to pop out a little bit more here. Let's go even lighter. There we are. There. Now that part will pop out just like on our on our nice model from the eye doctor. There we go. Okay, there we are. We've got a 3D set of eyelids and eyelashes to go on it. And then we can do the lower eyelashes, and they do the same thing. They um you know, I forgive me for being obsessive here, but I just don't like how the smear I did abruptly cuts off these eyelashes. So, I just want to bring them up and overlap that smear a little bit so it doesn't look like it's getting chopped off. Okay. Not my finest work, but we're going to live with it. Let's go like this. Let's go to the pencil tool and make a little curve here. Whoops, wrong color. We want this color. We're going to make a tiny little line like that. Same perspective, but just fewer and smaller. I'm going to make some stuck together, some spaced apart. You know, kind of an average distance that's the same, but just not not perfect. If if you perfectly space them, it well, you'll see if you do it. It has just kind of a funny look to it. They come right off of that corner between the the two surfaces. Same with the top one and the bottom one. They're the same like that. That's how we make eyelashes in perspective. Just like that. And then a shadow really helps. It really looks nice to have a shadow on the eye. Let's see if we can Let's see if we can accomplish a shadow here. Let's grab a little bit of that color right there and get this. And I'm going to just color in this eye right here. put a shadow right across the white of the eye. And the darker you make this shadow, the heavier the eyelashes look. So, we're going to give these eyelashes a nice heavy look. But you can decide what's appropriate for your picture. Let's not leave out the colored part of the eye. We don't want to put a shadow on the rest and not put a shadow on this. So, let's go ahead and put a darker shadow because this is a darker color. So, we'll put that across here. And then the eye won't look like it has a strange strange glow unintentionally to it. There we go. We've got a shadow. And now I'll just blend it. Let's get the blender tool. Let's do that. Let's blend it here. Just kind of scribble these in like this. Scribble that one in. Let's go over here and get a slightly bigger blend. Pull that down there. Pull this down. I just didn't want that sharp line. That was all. Let's blend this one here. There we go. Let's see how it looks. We've got a more 3D eye and it has the overhang that we're looking for. And we've got perspective on the on the parts. It's kind of a sleepy looking eye because of how I you know I I could have made this go up, but you can you can change that. Uh you can of course change all these parameters at your discretion. Uh this is just understanding that they exist and how to piece them together. I'm going to make the eye a little more round here. See? There we go. Let's do the other one. Let's go over here and let's take the U eyelashes here and we'll do a quick version on this one. You've got a good curve already on the eyelid. So, we're just going to go like this. Okay. Then, they're going to go a little more straight up as they come around the circle because the perspective on this is different. The part of the circle that I'm looking straight at, the eyelashes that are coming right toward me are here toward toward the middle of the circle. That that is the eyeball. And so over here is where it's wrapping around the edge and therefore the eyelashes go out sideways. Let's do a few here. As we come toward the nose, we start making the lines straight up and down representing a line that's curving directly toward me. There we go. Now we've got that same perspective on that eye. Now, of course, you can take this a lot further. You can look at you can look at eye anatomy online and learn all about it. Lots of cool stuff and details that you can put in your pictures, but these parts are really helpful. That perspective and and uh how to put those together can be really helpful in your pictures to get a natural look. Thank you, Cornneia, for the great idea. I love the way your picture has come along. Very impressed by your artwork there. And thank you everybody for watching. We'll we'll see you on the next one.