How to Draw a REALISTIC EYE

Hey, I'm Darlene and you're watching a Rapid Fire Art tutorial. In this video, I'll show you an easy way to draw a realistic eye using budget-friendly tools. I'm using a 2B dollar store pencil, but you can use an HB school pencil if you prefer. Use any eraser of your choice. I recommend kneadable erasers for precision. You can learn how to make one in the link below. And to blend, I'm going to use a regular facial tissue. Let's get started. We're going to start with a simple trapezoid shape to help us draw the eye outline. I think it's similar to the shape of an eye, so we can use it as a rough guideline to very easily draw our eye over top of. You can tweak and morph the shape however you want to get a unique shape that appeals to you. If you struggle with drawing masculine eyes, try a very narrow shape, since narrow eyes are correlated with high levels of testosterone in males. I'm going with this shape. It's roughly 10 by 3 centimeters, in case you're wondering. Once you have your shape, let's go over to the bottom left and draw the inner corner of the eye. It can have sort of a U or V shape to it. Now let's draw the bottom eyelid by making a shallow curve that dips down slightly and then comes up at the end, meeting the bottom right corner of the shape that we're using as our guideline. When we get to the top eyelid, we're just going to round off those corners. Make any adjustments that you want. And then finally erase all the unneeded guidelines to clean up your drawing. Above the eye, we're going to draw the eyelid crease. An easy way to draw it is to use the top eyelid shape as a rough guideline. You can also draw a hooded eyelid, where the skin hangs down over the crease. I'm going to go with a hooded eyelid because I think it looks quite masculine and I prefer how it looks more. Over here by the tear duct, draw two curved lines. This separates the pink fleshy bit inside the eye from the eyeball. Now let's draw the iris. It's about half the size of the eyeball. If you want, you can totally make a rough estimate and go ahead and draw your iris. But if you want to be more precise, you can measure from here to here using a ruler. Divide that number in half. Now you know exactly how big to draw the iris. Mark where you want your iris to be positioned and then draw it within those boundaries. For a realistic iris, avoid drawing two bracket shapes and instead, draw a full circle. Position the circle so that the bottom is most visible and the top part is cut off. To draw the circle, hover over your sketchbook as you make circular motions using your elbow and shoulder to move, instead of your wrist and fingers. Once you're confident with the shape, lower your pencil till it touches the paper. My circle is very light and won't show up well on camera, so I'm just going to go over my pencil marks to darken it. Don't erase the top part of your iris yet. The next step is to draw the pupil. Locate the very center of your iris and draw a circle. You can find the center by drawing a cross through the iris. The intersection between the two lines is the middle. The size of the pupil depends on how much light is entering the eye. It gets wider in the dark and smaller when it's bright out, so the size is up to you and how much light you want in the scene. Speaking of light, we have to decide on where we want the light source to come from. I'm going to have my imaginary light come from the top left. This decision is going to affect how I shade the entire eye, so you can choose whichever direction that you want. Since my imaginary light source comes from the left side, I'm going to draw a highlight in my eye in the top left. I'm going to draw a reflection from a rectangular light source, like a window, but you can choose any shape that you want for this step. It could even be a reflection from a round ceiling light or a ring light, etc. I'll go with the window shape. Since the eyeball is round, the rectangular reflection is going to look skewed as it wraps around the curvature of the eyeball. This will help give off the illusion of roundness in our drawing. You can make the shape more unique by throwing in a few silhouettes, such as the silhouette of a person, a plant, or just a simple gradient. Once you're satisfied with how the reflection looks, go ahead and shade the pupil. We want to shade it as dark as we can. If you have a set of pencils, use a very soft one, like a 6B for this step. If you only have an HB or number 2 school pencil, you will need to press quite hard to get a very dark value. Now let's shade the iris. Since my light source comes from the top left, and the iris is actually like a concave bowl shape, I'm going to shade the top left side darker because it faces away from the light. And over here, the iris curves back out, making it face directly toward the light, so it's going to appear lighter. Before shading, make sure your pencil strokes are not scratchy and thin. Scribble on a scrap sheet of paper until your strokes become thicker, and then use that to shade. We want to keep our strokes as close together as possible to make our shading look smooth, and thin pencil strokes will make that task very difficult. Shade your iris darker or lighter depending on the eye color or shade that you want. I'm going to blend my drawing much much later to save time during video editing, which I don't recommend you do if you're a beginner, because it's very easy to smear your drawing once the details and shadows are added. Now you don't have to blend your drawing at all, but if you want to, I recommend you do it as you shade each layer or every few layers of graphite, and definitely before you add any fine details, such as the eyelashes, because they can be smeared pretty badly. Here's the blending process that I like to follow. I shade the light values, blend it, then add the shadows. I try to blend just the shadows, so I don't smear the darker graphite into the lighter areas. Then finally, I add the details. If I need to do any blending after the details are added, I blend around them, being very careful not to blur or smudge my detail work. Once detail work such as eyelashes are smudged, it may be quite difficult to recover. Alright, moving on. If you want, you can shade the rim of your iris a little darker. Continue shading your iris until it's as dark as you would like. Shade along the very top of the iris to account for cast shadows that are being casted down from the top eyelid. You can stop here, or you can add some additional detail to the iris. Draw some faint lines that radiate from the center of the pupil. That's just an example. You'll want to make the spokes look more randomly spaced, instead of evenly spaced. It'll help if you start your stroke from the center of the pupil, and work your way out. You can make them look random by varying the thickness and length of each and every stroke. You can make the eye look even more interesting by shading around the rim in a random, wave-like pattern, but this is also optional. To do this, start from the very edge of the iris and flick your pencil inward, feathering out the end of each stroke so that it fades out nicely. Once you're happy with how it looks, let's move on to shading this little crevice. Shade a light layer of graphite in here, and then shade darker around the edges. This area is quite moist, so go in with an eraser and create a few small highlights in the lightest areas, to make it look like it's wet. Again, you can easily make one of these erasers at home, using materials that you probably have lying around your house, so check out that video in the description below. Let's shade this curve a little bit darker as well. We'll soften it out more as we shade the eyeball. Alright, let's shade the rest of the eyeball. We don't want to leave it white, so let's start by shading a very light layer of graphite across the area. Try shading in a curved pattern, making your pencil strokes follow the contour of the spherical eyeball shape. If you want to blend your eyeball, I recommend doing it now, before you add the darker values. Okay, now let's add some shadows on the far left side, to show that the eyeball is round. The brightest area will be wherever the eyeball faces the light directly. Let's also shade a little darker along the top, to account for the cast shadow of the top eyelid. And then we'll also slightly shade the bottom part of the eyeball as well, because it curves away from the light. Also, I like to shade very slightly around the iris, to soften out the hard edge. Now I'm going to move onto the other side of the eyeball, starting with a light layer of graphite. If you find it difficult to shade using curved lines, you can shade using straight lines instead. The thing with straight lines is you want to be extra careful not to let any gaps show through when using this shading technique. If the individual pencil lines are apparent, they will make the eyeball look flat. That's why I recommended the curved lines, which are more forgiving. Just like we shaded the other side, we're going to add a cast shadow along the top, a shadow along the bottom, and a shadow along the far right, where the eyeball curves away from our light source. If you want to learn more about shading, check out the link in the description below. Also I'm shading around the iris, to soften out the hard edge. When you're done, the eyeball should have a round shape to it, without appearing too dark. If you did shade it a little too dark for your preference, you can blend it with a tissue, which will actually remove a little bit of that graphite at the same time, making it appear lighter. Some small details you can add to the eyeball are subtle veins that creep in toward the iris. These should be drawn very lightly. If you make a mistake, you can easily fix it using a kneadable eraser, by rolling it to a very fine point, and dabbing the mistake away, instead of using a solid eraser to rub out an entire area. The veins are barely visible, and that's exactly what I'm going for, to avoid the bloodshot look. We're done with the inside of our eye for now, let's move on to shading the skin. I'm going to start with the bottom lid. There's a small ledge that will be visible along the bottom eyelid from this angle, and I'm going to use a circular shading technique to outline this ledge. Try to avoid drawing a hard straight line, because it might look unnatural. Keep it nice and subtle. Next I'm going to lightly shade around the inner corner of the eye. The next step is optional, you can add an eye pouch or a bag under the eye if you like. Just go from this shadow and create a curve that stretches all the way to the other corner of the eye. The darker you shade this area, the puffier the bag will look. And then you'll want to shade the rest of the eyelid, just slightly. So if you shade the lower eyelid skin too dark, you might get a tired looking eye, the type with dark circles, but again that's up to you and your creative decision. Alright, let's move on to the upper eyelid now. If you want your drawing to have a very strong bone structure, you may want to really bring out the nose bridge and or brow bone. You can do that by shading the area beside and below very dark, to show just how much the bones protrude out of the face. The darker you draw the shadow, the more you bring out the nose and brow bone, so go ahead and shade it to the degree that you want. I like to work my shading up in layers, making several passes, instead of shading it to the full level of darkness right off the bat. So I will come back to this section again, many times, to build the graphite up some more. If you want to learn more about the differences between male and female facial features, check out the video in the description. If you want to draw a very strong brow bone all the way across, you can cover this entire area in a very dark cast shadow. The skin above the eyelid crease curves inward, away from the light, so we're going to shade that section a little darker. Let's just hop down here and shade a dark layer of graphite along the other side of the eyelid crease. Allow your shading to lighten up gradually as you work your way down, where the skin starts to curve back out and face toward the light. This edge curves inward, away from the light, so let's shade it quite dark. When you work your way upward, toward the crease, shade lighter. If you're enjoying this video so far, please subscribe to my channel and hit that like button if you want to see more videos like this. To learn more about light and how to shade, please visit my shading tutorial down in the description box. Once you're done, let's add an extra layer of shadow along the far right side of the eye, to indicate that the eye is curved. It's curved away from the light. Feather your shading out as you work toward the left and right. Once you're done, step back from your drawing and check to see if there are any adjustments that you want to make. Maybe the shadows aren't quite dark enough for you, or the lighting isn't consistent across the entire drawing. You'll want to make these observations all throughout the drawing process. Okay, now I'm just going to go along and touch up a few spots. I want the eyelid crease to be a little darker, and I want to darken this area of the bottom eyelid. If you wanted your shading to look smooth, I hope you followed my advice and have been blending throughout the shading process, because that just makes it so much easier. If you haven't, and you're afraid to smear your drawing, you can carefully use your pencil to fill in any white dots, or gaps, between your strokes. And if you have any dark blemishes, you can use your kneaded eraser to lift those away, until the drawing is as smooth as you can get it, and then skip to the section on drawing eyelashes. Or, you can of course follow along with me now, as I blend, but make sure that your shading is as smooth as you can get it, because any large gaps between your pencil strokes may still be visible after the blending process, and they will need to be blended again, as you can see here in this example. You can use any blending tool of your choice. I'm just going to use a soft facial tissue, because it's pretty much accessible to everyone. Just wrapping it around my finger, and then I'll blend one area at a time. In each area, I'm going to blend from a light zone, into a dark zone, to prevent smearing my work. Use a new spot on your tissue after every swipe. If you want to be extra careful, try using less pressure, and make several passes over the same spot. If you're working in a large area, you can use more of your finger's surface area to cover more ground. In smaller areas of your drawing, you can reduce the amount of contact by using just the tip of your finger, or by using a smaller finger. If you want to blend a very narrow or tight spot on your drawing, you can fold your tissue in half, twice, and then fold it like so, into a triangular shape, until you get a pointy and stiff blending tool. Rotate your tissue to a cleaner side when it's dirty, or you can unravel the tissue and fold it again using a clean spot. It's a little tedious, but it is a very cheap option. And you can even use toilet paper. If the graphite is smudging too much, reduce your blending pressure significantly until you're barely touching the paper. You want to be very patient when blending, because it's very easy to transfer that graphite. To demonstrate my point, you can see here with the amount of graphite that I have on my tissue right now, I can actually use it just like a pencil to draw something. Here I'm using my blending tool just like a pencil to add graphite to my drawing. So basically, you can use a dirty tissue to your advantage. It's not always necessary to continuously use a clean spot on your tissue. Just reduce the amount of contact to transfer less graphite. When blending more detailed areas, like the iris, try following the lines that you've created, if there are any, so that the details don't become messy. Continue blending the rest of the eye, using your preferred blending tool and method. If you get any smudges or blemishes, roll your kneaded eraser to a fine point and lightly dab the mistake away. In light areas, like this, I like to use very little pressure to blend. If my shading is already smooth, I can just skip over the area. Lastly, I'm going to blend the lower eyelid, going from light to dark. And I'll switch back to using the pad of my finger. It'll just take 2 or 3 swipes and we'll be done. Once you're happy with the result, you can move on to the next step, which is drawing the eyelashes. We're going to work on the lower set of eyelashes first. The eyelashes are going to point in a bunch of directions, but we're going to simplify it down to 3 main directions. Over here, they're mostly going to point toward the left. In the center, they'll point forward. And here, they'll mostly point toward the right. And I say mostly because you're going to have some random hairs that go in the opposite direction. I'm going to start out by drawing one eyelash in each section. Make sure that your pencil is very sharp. You'll want to lift or flick your pencil at the end of your stroke to taper out the end of your eyelash. Next, we're going to fill the spaces between each of the 3 hairs that we just drew, making sure to gradually change the lash direction for a smooth transition from one section to the next. Before you start, here are some tips. Try to stagger the eyelashes so they don't look as though they're growing in a perfectly straight row. Also, we want to avoid drawing all the eyelashes parallel to each other, because that isn't going to look very natural. Instead, we can have them taper together, overlap each other, or just vary the amount of curvature, so you can have some hairs that are really curved and others that appear almost straight. I'm drawing this without a reference image, so I'm being very careful where I place each eyelash. I'm visualizing it and measuring my options before I draw it, to avoid the need to erase my mistakes. Just take your time and don't be afraid to use several strokes to draw one eyelash. Just make sure that your pencil stays sharp. Every now and then, just step back from your drawing so you can zoom out of the specific area that you're working on to see the drawing as a whole. It'll help guide you to make better decisions with each and every pencil stroke that you make. Eyelashes around the inner corner of the eye are going to appear shorter, thinner, and therefore lighter in appearance. Once you're done, we're going to create some texture and shadow along the base of each hair using a random circular motion, just very gently. Now let's move on to the upper set of eyelashes. Again, they're going to point in three main directions. You can point the lashes up or down. Here's an example for each. I like to draw downward pointing lashes for males, because I think it looks more masculine, but you can choose whichever direction that you prefer. We're going to avoid drawing eyelashes that look like straight cartoon sunrays, and instead draw these candy cane or J-shaped lashes. If the motion is awkward for you, you can always practice this flicking motion on a separate sheet of paper first. Again, we're going to start by drawing one eyelash in each section, and then we'll fill in the spaces in between, making sure the direction of each lash changes gradually as we go from one section to the next. Feel free to slow the video down or pause it if you want to copy the lashes that I'm drawing here. On the leftmost part of the eye, draw those lashes shorter, thinner, and lighter. Once you're done, let's add a slight cast shadow directly below the lashes. And we're going to go along the root of each eyelash and do that circular motion shading, very subtly, just to add some additional texture to the skin. Don't forget to add some eyelash reflections in the highlight. Time for some final touch-ups. Have a look at your drawing from afar and see if you'd like to make any improvements, such as elongating some eyelashes, doing some touch-ups on your shading work, etc. I'm going over the highlights over here to brighten them up and make the eye look more watery. If you want, you can add some glistening water inside the eye by erasing a thin area along the bottom eyelid, where it comes in contact with the eyeball. I think the window reflection in my eye looks too bold and intense for my personal preference, and it takes away from the rest of the drawing. I feel it could be toned down a bit. Now instead of making the reflection smaller, I can add a silhouette of a person or just a simple gradient, which will take some attention off the area. To do that, I can simply shade it with my pencil or carefully use a tissue to smear some graphite from the iris. You don't have to do this, it's just something I wanted to experiment with, and I think it looks pretty good. If you want your drawing to pop out of the page more, you can increase the contrast of your drawing by darkening the shadows further and or brightening the lightest areas. You can use white paint or correction fluid to make highlights pop even further, especially if your paper is off-white, like mine. The areas that you intensify are up to you and how you want your drawing to look. Here I'm flattening my kneaded eraser and dabbing along the lightest parts of the iris to bring out more of that detail. Here's a before and after, so you can see the impact that it made. Continue polishing and tweaking your eye until you're satisfied. If you also want to draw the eyebrow, which is going to be my next tutorial, you'll need to extend your shading around the upper part of the eye. Make sure the shading up there is lighter, as it is the area above the brow bone, an area that is angled toward the direct light. So that is pretty much it for the eye. Here's a look at the process from beginning to end. If you made it all the way through to the end, congratulations! This was a very long video. Stay tuned for part 2, where we're going to draw the eyebrow on this exact eye. Remember to subscribe and hit that bell so that you don't miss it. Give this video a thumbs up if you liked it and drop a comment down below to tell me how your eye turned out. Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next one!