How to Draw Closed Eyes - Beginner Friendly

Hey! My name is Darlene Nguyen and you're watching a rapid fire art tutorial. This is going to be a one-take, super quick tutorial on how to draw closed eyes. The drawing you see in front of you is from my written version of this tutorial, which you can find in the description. It took me roughly two hours to draw. In this video, I'm going to give you a general idea of how it's done, and I'm going to try and do it as quickly as I can in real time. So without further ado, let's start! Let's start with the left eye. You want to make two light ticks on the left side of your paper. And use a ruler to draw a horizontal line through it. Now, triplicate this. Draw a circle in each of these two spaces. Use a ruler to check the alignment horizontally to make sure they're roughly the same size. Okay, so what angle do you want the eyes to slant? Draw a diagonal line through the first circle, and then mirror it on the other side. Draw the outer and inner corner of each eye. And then connect them using a uniquely shaped, shallow type of curve. Just erasing some of the guidelines so you can see better. Darkening the eye slits too. Okay, so let's work on the eyebrows now. We want to set the boundaries for each one. So starting with the inner corner of each eye, we're going to draw a vertical line going upwards. Now let's do the same thing for the outer part of the eye. And another set close to the tail of the eye. And this is where we'll draw the eyebrow arc. Okay, so let's start drawing the eyebrow now. You want to start somewhere above the circle. And once you get to the eyebrow arc line, just curve your strokes down. Let's draw the upper part now. And what we're going to do is just follow a similar path to the lower part of the eyebrow. Now, let's do the same on the other side. But first, here's a quick little trick to get your eyebrows to match. Use the ruler to check the alignment of each part of the eyebrow horizontally. Here, I'm checking the arc. You can do the same thing for the tail and the highest point of the eyebrow. Use light ticks or dots to mark these areas down and then just connect the dots. Let's finish up with the eyebrows real quick. So I'm going to fill the bottom portion of the eyebrow with upward strokes. The top portion with downward strokes. Try to avoid drawing X's and instead taper the hair together at their ends. Draw additional hairs going down the middle to fill the white space. And when you're done, go over your strokes to darken the ones at the bottom. Let's do the same on this side. Remember to taper the ends of each hair instead of drawing X's. If you want a super detailed tutorial on that with close-up examples, check out this one. It's totally free and you should be able to find the link in the description. Let me erase some of these lines here before I continue. Okay, let's start drawing the eyelashes now. Start by drawing three lashes on each eye and you want to spread them well apart too. Each of them should be going in a different direction. I'm just going to start filling the spaces in now. You can taper some of the lashes together to form triangle shapes and it's totally okay if some of them are on their own. I'm trying really hard not to overcrowd the lashes here because that's kind of something I do on a regular basis. Now, you want to try putting a little curve into each line. You don't want it to be too straight because it might look unnatural. You'll notice that I'm starting out with very dark strokes and that's because I'm trying to keep this video short. What I usually like to do is first plan out the direction of each lash very meticulously using an H pencil and then just going over it with a softer pencil like a 4B. Here's a picture of what I mean and I'm just going to put the link down below for you. I forgot to darken the roots so what I'm doing now is just going over each and every root to make them darker. Okay, so once the lashes are drawn, you'll want to add some cast shadows underneath each eyelid and I already did that for the left side so I'm just doing that on this side now. And that's pretty much it. If you want to watch some sloppy shading and even sloppier blending work, make yourself comfortable. So now I'm just going to start shading the upper eyelids. What you want to do is use the circles as a rough guideline. So I'm just shading around the eye forming an almond shape here and avoid shading around the full circle because you'll end up with two very circular unnatural looking eyes. And do the same thing on this side. Again, use the circle as a rough guideline to add details like under eye bags. Let's draw the nose now. Shade from the eyebrow and just work your way down. As you're shading, think about the brow bone because the transition from the brow bone to the nose bridge should be pretty smooth and as you work your way down, just lighten your strokes a little. If you want to draw deep set eyes, just shade the bridge of your nose quite a bit darker. So I'm just using a harder pencil now. It's an HB and I'm just going to shade a light layer of graphite across the entire face. And now I'm using a 2B to shade the cheekbones and eyelids. If your eyelids look like they're flaring outwards like this, add a layer of graphite and you'll notice it become flat. So you kind of want to build up these layers and in this next layer, you'll notice that the lid kind of curves in and looks like it's wrapping around the eyeball. Just going over areas of the drawing that need more shading. I'm trying to give the face more definition too. I'm trying to shade this as fast as I can but you'll want to take your time with this because you want your lines to be really close together. It's so much better for blending because you don't have to make up for the white space in between each of the lines. And I missed the cheekbone on this side so I'm going to fill that in. And the temple needs some shading here to make the forehead look less flat. Okay, I think that's good enough. Time for sloppy blending. I'm just using a regular tissue paper here, ripped off a small piece, wrap it around my finger and smudge lightly. Always move the tissue paper to get a clean spot otherwise you might drag a dark line of graphite across the lighter area of your drawing. I don't know if you noticed it but if you look at the left eyebrow, I kind of did that there but I am not going to go back and erase that now because we're short on time here. And that's pretty much it. I hope the tutorial was clear and easy to understand. If you have some time, please leave a comment down below telling me what you thought. Oh and if you tried this, email me the picture at darlene at rapidfireart.com and I'll show it in the next video. If you enjoyed this tutorial, hit the like and subscribe button as well as the bell icon to get notified when I post a new one.