How to Draw Realistic Eyes for BEGINNERS - Super Detailed Instructions!

Hey, this is Darlene and you're watching a rapid fire art tutorial. In this video, I'm going to show you my method for how to draw a realistic pair of eyes. This drawing took me roughly 5 hours to draw, but the one you'll see in this video is a quick 3 hour version. These are all the tools I'm going to be using in this video, so I'll link to all of them in the description below. Let's draw some guidelines first. You'll want to use an HB pencil with light pressure. First, decide on the size you want for the left eye, and then draw two ticks on the left side of your sketchbook. Use a ruler to draw a horizontal line through both ticks, and extend it to the right side of the page. Now measure the space you made for the left eye, and then triplicate it. You can use your pencil and your finger as a measurement tool. Here, I'm doing a final check to make sure I didn't mess up. In the left and right space, draw two circles, and make sure they're large enough to fill the space. Alright, to make sure these circles are similar in size, use a ruler to check the alignment horizontally. The tops are horizontally aligned, and so is the bottom. Okay, now we're going to decide on how slanted we want the eyes to be. I'm going to do something similar to the drawing I have here. Draw a straight line through the circle at an angle, and try to go through the center of the circle, and then just mirror it on the other side. Now we're going to draw the eye shape, starting with the inner corner of the eye. You want to draw a rounded V shape. If you get stuck, open the tutorial in the right corner of the screen. That tutorial is all about eye shapes. Okay, so when you draw the top eyelid, keep the tail within the circle. The stroke should end where the circle and slanted line intersect. Now, the bottom lid has less of a curve, but try to avoid drawing a flat line. I'm just going to draw a shallow curve, and then connect it to the top lid. Do the same thing on the other side. If you occasionally draw different sized eyes, use a ruler to check the alignment horizontally to make sure you're drawing them the same size. You can do this for the top and the bottom of the eye. Let's move on to drawing the upper eyelid crease, or fold. Starting at the circle, draw a line that roughly follows the same shape as the top eyelid. The distance of the crease to the top eyelid should be closer here, and far away at the tail of the eye. The tail can extend through the circle. Okay, let's move on to the left side now. If you want to draw it similar to the right side, just measure the distance from the top lid to the crease and compare it to the other side. Now, on to the eyebrows. I'm going to draw them a little longer than the eye itself. Let's vertically align the eyebrow with the inner corner of the eye, some distance outside the eye, and the outer corner. To make sure I draw the eyebrows in the right spot, I'll draw a vertical line from the inner corner of each eye, outside the eye. You can use your pencil and finger as a measurement tool to check if the distances are similar. And another line at the tail of the eye. I'm just roughing it out here, but you can use a ruler if you want nice, straight lines. Starting above the circle, draw the eyebrow. When you get to this line, curve your strokes down subtly. You can use the shadow lining technique for this part if you don't want your outlines to show through later. And then draw the top part by following a similar shape as the bottom. Here's a trick to get both of your eyebrows to match. First, you'll need to align your ruler horizontally against the paper. If it's not parallel with your drawing, you'll end up with one eyebrow higher than the other. Starting with this corner, draw a tick to mark the spot. Do the same thing for the tail of the eyebrow. The dot's going to go all the way over here. And if you want, you can go ahead and do the same thing for these sections. It's really important that your ruler remains parallel to the drawing throughout this whole process. Alright, now that we have all of our dots, just connect them together. Before I draw the eyebrow hair, I want to shade everything. But first, I want to erase all the guidelines to clean the drawing up. You can keep the circles if you want guidelines for shading things like under eye bits. Actually, before you shade, draw the iris. I completely missed this step here, so click on the tutorial in the right hand corner of this video to find out how to draw a good iris. I'm just going to skim over the shading process here. Right now, I'm using an HB pencil to shade a base layer over everything except for the area inside the eyes. You'll want to keep that area as clean as possible. To make sure the graphite looks smooth and easy to blend, use an overhand grip to create thick strokes that are less scratchy looking. Use a softer pencil like a 2B to darken areas like the eyelid crease, lower eyelid, nose bridge, temples, cheeks, etc. Here, I'm using a tissue paper wrapped around my finger to gently blend the graphite. Okay, now that that's taken care of, use a sharp pencil to draw the eyebrow hairs. I'm just using a 4B pencil here because I want it pretty dark. Starting at the bottom, draw strokes going upward. At the tail of the eyebrow, start to angle them down. After you draw the first row of hairs, add a second one, or even a third one. Here's a quick little example of what I mean. For the top row, angle your strokes down. When you come in contact with other ones, taper the ends together instead of drawing X's. It'll look way more natural this way. Adding a second layer. Finally, add some hairs going down the middle. Just going to darken the ones at the bottom here. I didn't shade the skin in this area enough, so I'm using an HB pencil to do that now. I'm also adding cast shadows from the eyebrow hair. Depending on the direction of light shining onto your subject, add some subtle shadows where necessary. So for me, there's light coming from the top. So I'm going to add a subtle cast shadow directly below the eyebrow. This shadow will have a soft edge because the lighting is also soft. The reason why I'm blending the eyebrow is because it looks pretty grainy right now. I'll follow the curve of the eyebrow using very little pressure, making sure not to blend out onto the surrounding areas. If you're going to do this, be aware that blending may remove a thin layer of graphite from the surface of the paper, and it's going to lighten the area. This can totally work in your favor if that's what you wanted. Once both eyebrows are drawn, you might feel the need to darken your shading because there's quite a bit of contrast between the top section and bottom section of the face. At this point, the skin is still fairly light, so I'm going to work on it a little bit more later. Now I'm drawing the iris with an HB pencil. I hope you did this earlier before shading. If you missed my prompt earlier on in the video, check out the tutorial up there on the right. It should pop up any moment now. If you missed that step like I did, you might not want to draw the full circle because it will be hard to erase from the skin. What you can do is draw bracket shapes and then measure the space on both sides of the iris to make sure it matches the other eye. If your eyes have the same length, you should be able to make both eyeballs look in the same direction. If one of them is a little off, it's actually quite noticeable. You can also measure and compare the size of each iris. Here, the right one is slightly larger than the left. Now pick any shape and draw an outline of it anywhere in or touching the iris. This is going to be a reflection from a nearby light source like a window, a round light bulb, camera flash, etc. When you draw the shape, make sure it's slightly arched. So for example, I'm drawing a rectangle, but the edges are curved because the surface of the eyeball is in fact curved. Now let's draw the pupil. I actually should have done this first because it's slightly easier to center it without obstructions. Anyway, the larger the reflection, the smaller you'll want to draw the pupil. Our pupils grow larger when there's less light, something you might want to keep in mind. Use a soft pencil like a 6B to shade the inside and make sure your edges are clean. Okay, now for the details. Use a sharp HB pencil to draw a wavy ribbon around the pupil. Around concave sections, darken the ribbon using a sharp 4B pencil. After that, we're going to create spokes coming from the center of the pupil. So make sure they're coming from the very center instead of sloppily drawing them like this second example I'm about to show you. Once you're done with that, you can add some depth by darkening spokes that fall within the concave zones we identified earlier. Sharpen your HB pencil and draw a thin ribbon around the first one. We're going to shade around this later and this is just a way to keep things clean. Use a softer pencil like a 2B to darken the iris slightly before we shade the inside with an HB. After you finish shading, you'll be left with a thin white ribbon around the pupil. You can add more depth to the eye by shading the top part darker than the rest. As you work your way down, lighten your strokes gradually to get a smooth transition instead of a hard edge between dark and light. Same thing on the other eye. Here I'm using an eraser to lift the graphite in a radial pattern. I'm mostly doing this at convex sections of the ribbon to make a nice consistent pattern, but you don't have to do it this way. I'm just doing what I think looks cool. Now I'm using a 4B pencil to outline some of these patterns, trying to make it look a little random. Use a blending tool to soften the graphite if it looks grainy. I'm using only the slightest amount of pressure right now. The blending stump is barely touching the paper. As an alternative, you can use a hard pencil like an H to blend instead. Now I'm just going over the whole thing to make sure the edges are clean, getting rid of blotches using my eraser, brightening areas that I want to pop, and I want the reflection to look as white as possible, so everything inside the eye must be some shade of grey. Okay, enough with the touch ups. Let's move on to shading the rest of the eyeball, starting with the inner corner. This area of the eye is pinkish in color, so let's shade it a medium grey. As you work your way to the eyeball itself, soften the shading so the transition is gradual. The flesh is bumpy and moist, so roll your eraser to a fine point and lift a small portion of graphite to make it look glossy. And also darken the skin around this area. Use a blunt H or HB pencil to shade the rest of the eyeball. I'm using the contouring method here. To make the eyeball look round, shade the far left and far right just a little darker. Now the rectangular highlight really pops. Again, I'm removing inconsistencies. And now just add a cast shadow under the top eyelid. The darker the shadow, the further the eyelid will be from the eyeball, so keep it nice and light, unless of course your subject is under harsh lighting. For this next step, you can use a blending stump or an H pencil to soften out the outer edge of the iris. Here I'm using a soft tissue paper to blend the shading that I did earlier. And then just repeat all the same steps on this eye. Alright, let's move on to the eyelashes now. Use a very sharp H or HB pencil to draw them. This is the planning phase, so we want to keep the strokes light, which will make mistakes easier to erase. On each eyelid, draw three lashes. The subject is facing me directly, so the middle lash is going to be straight, while the other ones are curved. These three lashes should be going in three different directions. The top ones like this, and the bottom like this. After you have all 12 lashes drawn, fill in the gaps. Make sure they're not wildly different in length, and pay attention to the overall curve they're forming along the top of the eye. Okay, here's the fun part. Draw additional hairs beside some lashes, forming triangle shapes. I'm switching to a 4B pencil to save time, but ideally, you'll want to continue using the H pencil until all the eyelashes are filled, the positioning and overall shape is right, and you feel confident enough to darken them. I'm also thickening the root of each lash so it's like she's wearing mascara, but this is completely optional. Now try to draw the inner lashes and bottom lashes lighter, because they're usually thinner than the rest. I'm doing the same triangle thing with the bottom lashes, trying not to make them look too dark. If you're following along, you might want to use a harder pencil just in case. If there aren't enough lashes, you can add some more in between. Okay, I forgot to mention something. The lashes should be drawn like they're curling out of the lid instead of sticking straight up like this. This is an easy fix though, just add an extension to the lash at the root so there's a more apparent curve like this. After that, use an HB or 2B pencil to add some shadows on the upper eyelid. You don't have to make it as dark as I am right now, I'm just going for a smokey eye makeup look. Okay, under all the lashes, you'll want to add some light cast shadows. Here, I'm lifting some graphite from the ledge of the bottom eyelid to make the eye look more open. If you regularly apply makeup, you'll probably know what I mean. This step is completely optional though. Now I'm just doing a few touch ups and blending areas that I've recently shaded. Now for a fun little detail. To prepare for it, I'm using my kneaded eraser to clean the rectangle so it's as clean as possible. Since I drew the eyelashes with a 4B, I'm going to use a 4B to draw eyelash reflections inside of the highlight. What you want to do is make sure the reflection is an upside down mirror image of the eyelash. Alright, a few more touch ups before I move on to the right eye. I'm building more layers of graphite to give the face more shape. Generally speaking, the darker you shade something, the more depth you give it. Here, I'm shading the bridge of the nose to lift the nose higher. If you're drawing on textured sketch paper, you'll notice a bunch of white dots or lines after you shade. What I'm doing here is just filling those spots in using a very sharp HB pencil with the tiniest amount of pressure. Moving on to the right eye. I'm not going to explain much because the steps are pretty much the same. Okay, let me explain the scribbling here. Since I'm drawing hair and I want each strand to look sharp and realistic, I have to keep my lead sharp. By scribbling on one side of the lead, I'm essentially creating a very fine point on the other side. So that's it guys. From this point on, I'm just applying small touch ups here and there. I really hope you enjoyed this tutorial. Check the description box for related ones from my website. And before you leave, don't forget to hit the like button, leave a comment, and subscribe to my channel for more drawing tutorials. If you tried this tutorial, send me your artwork and I'll feature it in the next video. 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