How To Draw Realistic Eyes

Hello, I'm Di Roberts from the Insight School of Art and I'm going to show you some simple drawing exercises, and I hope you enjoy them. I'm going to show you how to draw a realistic eye. I'm using quite a soft pencil, I'm not pressing down too hard, and, a nice gentle curve to the top lid, and, also, a gentle curve for the bottom lid.

Don't make the mistake of drawing an almond shape. This isn't going to be an almond. In fact, what happens is, at the tear duct, it comes around with a bit of a blob that you're going to shade in soon.

The eyelid follows the same curve, around the top. And, the iris, the colored part of the eye, is in fact a circle that you can't see the top of, and you can just about see the bottom of. So, if you can sketch lightly, to start off, to get the circle shape.

But, you're missing out the top part hidden by the top lid. Dead center of that circle is the pupil. Very dark, I'll have to shade that in a moment.

Don't make the mistake of drawing what you think an eye looks like. Either look at a good quality image, or look in the mirror and you'll see that the light coming from above will shade under the top lid. So, let's get rid of that line by making it part of that shadow, right the way across including the iris and the white of the eye.

That gives the idea that the eye is rounded, it isn't just a flat piece of paper, it's actually got depth to it that goes around underneath as well. So, you can just shade up from that line, let the line disappear into the shadow. And also, the side of the eye where that tear duct is, put lot of dark shading, some highlights, and come in from there, quite heavy shading, and then you're going to lighten up as you come around.

Sync the side, coming around like that. In order to make the eye look realistic, we need a blob of light, and a good place to put it is to one side and above the pupil, maybe cutting into it a little bit. So, we can start now to shade that pupil, which is actually, as you should know, is a hole in the middle of the eye where the light goes in and hits the back of the eye so that we can actually see.

Really dark, as dark as the pencil will go. You could use a softer pencil, I'm using the 2B. But, you could go into the 6B, and really power it in.

And now, this is the trick: Bicycle spokes come out from the pupil towards the edge of the iris. Don't spend too long on this, because you're going to shade over it. Just to give you an idea of lines radiating out from the pupil, and you can also do the same radiating in from the edge of the iris.

Depending on whether your model or your image that you're working from has blue or brown eyes, or very dark gray, very pale ones, this will depend on how much pressure you put on at this point. You might just leave it like that, and that's a light colored eye. Or, you might decide let's have a bit more shading at the sides of the iris for a darker eye.

And I'm using the side of the pencil a little bit at this point. Okay, getting there slowly. Building up the shadows, you can spend ages just working away, or you can do the cheat way, which is using your finger to smudge, and I think it's actually very effective.

Those lines will still be visible. But, we can just soften up the shading a little bit and get a very interesting soft effect leaving areas of light showing. Right.

What we are missing now is the eyelid and the eyelashes. This is just not a solid flat piece of card, it's a piece of flesh that rolls around. So, let's start where it meets the eye itself, and just put a bit of shade in to soften up the line.

And, gradually darken up into the eyelid into the crease of the eyelid. This is the inner part of the eye here. So, it closes up towards the duct.

And, that area can be quite shaded, the nose is over here. So, there will be some shadow cast from the nose over to this area here. Now, again the finger blending technique works nicely here.

Now, pull