How to Draw Eyes

this video is all about drawing eyes starting with a simple sphere structure for our eyeball and then moving on to placing an eyelid over it and an eyebrow and then showing how we can actually place it into a head consistently so it sits properly in a skull then we'll take a look at some of the subtleties that happen when you open and close your eyes or when you look from one direction to another we'll look at how the appearance of lids change when you look at eyes from different angles and then we'll finish with a

tight drawing of an eye done in a fairly simple style to really break down how we can go about describing our forms i'm david finch i've been a comic book artist for over 25 years if you enjoyed this video please hit like and subscribe and share with your friends this video is brought to you by squarespace from websites and online stores to marketing tools and analytics squarespace is the all-in-one platform to build a beautiful online presence and run your business and to do it all incredibly easily [Music] all right to start to talk about drawing

eyes we're going to start with sphere and the way that i take a circle like this and turn it into a sphere on a flat page in a way that i can understand is i draw a vertical center line and a horizontal center line and my pupil will go here and my iris will go here i can draw that same circle because it's a circle it's really not going to change shape no matter what angle i draw it at and i can draw my vertical here and my horizontal ear and then i'll have my iris

here and my people here and so i can angle it really any way i want and i have a good sense of where my eye is in space just with my vertical and horizontal lines and clean this up just a little bit and one other thing to bear in mind i'm going to draw another circle for my eye i'm going to draw my horizontal completely flat along and then my vertical is along the side of the eye and so my sclera will be here my pupil will be here and the eye actually comes out just

a little bit so it it doesn't sit completely flat along that circle so you actually get a bit of a bump out there and that's all well and good but you're not going to get very far drawing eyes like this you really need to be able to put them in lids and then once you get your lids working you need to be able to place them in the head and so the next thing that we're going to do is we're going to start to draw some lids on our eyes and so i'm going to draw

a sphere for my eye and this is truthfully not something that you'll need to do when you're drawing these practically but just for understanding the form that we're dealing with and getting a sense of the overall shapes it's a good idea to draw through and that's really what we're doing right now so i've got my overall eye drawn in again and my lid is going to connect along this line this center line approximately some people's eye will ride up just a little bit on the outside or maybe down or up or down here but generally

speaking we're gonna draw and it's gonna connect to just about the top of my iris maybe cover some of it and my bottom eyelid is going to cover some of the lower iris and then my tear duct is going to sit right here and that's good as a basis but what we really need to understand from here is that our eyelids actually have a little bit of thickness and so i'm going to draw some of that thickness along the top here and some of that along the bottom here and then i'm going to draw my

fold of my upper eyelid and my eyebrow will go just about here rough it in here quickly now this eyebrow isn't going to make a lot of sense and it's going to be a struggle to place until we start to actually construct the head which we'll do in a minute but just for now just to get our shapes established that's going to do it and i'm going to draw the same eye so this will again be the right eye so i'm going to have my lids attach here and here along this line you can see

that line curves and so my upper lid will be here it's going to touch the top of my iris my lower lid is going to be here and it's going to cover some of the bottom of my iris and my tear duct will just sit like this i'm going to see quite a bit more of my upper lid thickness from this angle because i'm really looking up at it and i'm really not going to see any lower lid thickness here at all and i'm going to get my hold for the upper lid here and my

eyebrow and if i draw an eye looking down we'll do this we'll do two more examples one looking down and then one looking directly inside and so i'm going to angle my vertical like this my horizontal like this so my eye will be looking down here's my iris i tend to draw in a very sketchy way and then i clean just with the kneaded eraser and it's a very helpful way for me to be able to not have to commit to a line and still get something tight and clean and this is still fairly loose

but it's going to give us everything we need and so now i'm going to want to connect one eyelid here my other eyelid will connect here and it's very for shortened on this side because it turns away from us there and so here's my upper eyelid my lower eyelid is going to have quite a bit more curve to it because it's curving around the bottom of the eye and it's you can see that my overall line horizontally around the sphere of my eyeball curves and so this actually really kind of follows that curve too the

same way that this actually followed this curve here and because of the angle that we're looking at i'm gonna see more of my lower eyelid and i'm just gonna use this eye here we're gonna connect our eyelid just about here there's my upper lid my lower lid is gonna be just about here there's my upper eyelid my lower eyelid is gonna stitch just like this and there's really my structure my eyebrow will be just about here hopefully this gives you a simple sense of how your eyelid fits over your eye based on the angle that

you're drawing the eye and how you can change that angle and think of it in terms of a 3d sphere by using this method here but we want to take this construction and make it work on a face i tend to use a very simple skull construction here's the center line for my head and you can see i'm using a vertical center line i'm going to use a horizontal center line and i've got a sphere slightly flattened for my cranium here and then my actual face sits below it just like this i'm going to draw

another center line around this side and this will be where my ear sits here and i've got a line for my eyebrow here a line for my forehead here a line for my nose here and then my chin here and these are all even divisions and so from here i need to get a little bit more shape because drawing an eye on here i'll be drawing an eye on something that really is just a flat shape in space and so i'm going to start by indenting for where my brow indents into into my eyes coming

back out slightly the base of the nose back in and then slightly out again or my chin and indent again here my cheek that's going to connect into my chin here on this side i'm going to indent just like this and follow my cheek down like this this will be the side of my head here and so i've got something that really flattens around to the side here and it's obviously not completely flat but that'll give you a good starting point the nose connects just about here this will be my brow and i'm just gonna

sketch in a brow here quickly so you can see that your nose doesn't start at your brow it starts just below and so you indent a little bit then you come out and the nose ends at this line here your mouth will sit here and so your eye is going to sit just below your brow on your face just like this and i think i'm a little large with my overall skull it's my ear get my proportions working a little bit better [Music] and this right here represents the kind of simple form that you can

use when you're trying to represent a head for drawing as a basic structure to place all your features on and it works well once you understand the forms but because this is a simplification of a skull there are things that you really need to know in order to be able to make this work as well as possible and so to help us with that i have an actual skull not an actual skull this is a fixed goal that i bought on amazon but it looks pretty real and it's a very useful tool for really understanding

the actual planes of the face and how they're made up and so i'm going to go ahead and draw my simple head shape again using my skull as a reference so i've got a sphere for my cranium and my face attached just below that i've got a line for my brow my ear will attach just back here i've got a center line line for my nose line for my forehead and then my chin here and i've got basically something like this a very simple form just enough to give me a basis to draw my face

on but with the skull i can really see that i have sockets for my eyes and this is really the key to making your eyes work on a face and so i'm actually going to go ahead and draw those sockets so instead of just drawing a really simplified form i'm going to draw a bit of a simplified version of the sockets that i can see in my skull that i'm holding on my hand and my nose is going to come out here obviously i've got a hole but i don't really need to draw that i

can just draw a nose [Music] and my cheek come around and up just about like this my other cheek is here my mouth area connects just like this [Music] so here's more of a skull construction or a face hopefully you can see why drawing this every time underneath the face would start to get a little bit tedious but it's really important for drawing eyes more than anything to understand the bone structure that exists right here so i'm going to go ahead and lighten this down and i'm just going to finish the eyes along the crest

of the bone at the top here will be my eyebrow it becomes very easy to place because it just follows the shape of the the ocular cavity top of that bone and then my eyes actually i'm going to draw them as balls will fit inside and you can see i've got my eyes fit inside those those cavities and i'm going to draw a center line on the line across my people and iris and i can delineate where my eyelids will go here just like this and my other eyelid is like this and let's lighten this

down we don't need all that under drawing [Music] and so you can see and so hopefully you can see that it becomes very easy to place eyes properly in the skull if you think about it in these terms i'm going to draw a face from the side [Music] and quickly get my overall form established [Music] and it can be a little bit difficult to know where in here to start placing your eye is it here right up against the nose which i see very commonly people do this or or is it well back here the

secret using a skull i can really see exactly how that cavity sits in here and i'm going to go ahead and draw that and so that would be the cavity for my eye right there and let's lighten that down i'm going to go ahead and draw my eyeball inside there and i can just draw my eyelids draw my eyebrow along the top of that bone finish my nose take this down clean it up a little bit and you can see that that eye is pretty well placed in there and it becomes very easy using this

kind of form let's draw a face that we're looking up at [Music] there's my very simple head construction we're looking up at this face here i'm going to lighten this down a little bit and let's use this again very quickly you really won't need to use reference at all and the angle that i'm seeing at this ad will be different than what you're seeing but the important part is to just understand that you're drawing the shape of the skull in space my nose starts here projects out where the other eye cavity my forehead will come

above it here my mouth will be just along here there's a pretty simple construction just to get the idea across and for me to put my eyes in here i'm going to draw an eye inside here another eye inside here [Music] and so i'm going to draw my brow again just along the top here my other brow here my eyelids will sit [Music] right there and you can see that that really places those eyes nicely on the skull before we move on i wanted to take a minute to talk about this video sponsor squarespace the

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anything i've ever tried i can't recommend it enough if you're ready to give squarespace a try head on over to squarespace.com forward slash david finch to save 10 off your first purchase of a website or domain using code david finch all right let's get back to it i'm going to go ahead and draw another simple head we're not going to use a skull this time i'm just going to use my knowledge of the shape of my eye cavities to help me with my head construction so here's my basic shape i've got i've got my face

here my skull portion here my nose is here my chin another division for my forehead here so these are nice even divisions my ear will be just about here comes up between the brow and the nose these are just simple shapes at this point and i'm going to go ahead and just draw in shapes from my ocular cavities here and i feel like at the angle that i've drawn i'm a little bit thin and drawing those cavities in actually really made that clear to me my nose is going to project out from here start here

that would be the bridge of my nose my mouth would be just about here like i came a little bit short with my chin [Music] and i want to point out i really wish that this was all working out absolutely perfectly and i wasn't having to erase and my proportions were working perfectly but i find i'll go through times inexplicably where i'll draw my face in and once i get everything properly established my head will be too short or too long or whatever it is and so you need to be prepared to make those adjustments

when you draw your initial shape it's easy for it to be a little bit off once you start to establish all of the finer shapes inside it and get it constructed well it makes it much more clear where you need to make adjustments and i find to this day i end up making those kinds of adjustments all the time and so that would be much more of a the kind of head construction that i would use now based on the knowledge that i have if i want to make sure that everything fits well and so

i'm going to go ahead and lighten it so in a more practical sense this is the way that i would actually approach drawing an eye i'm not going to bother drawing that entire circle in there but i'm going to allow this ocular at a space inform where my eye is going to go here's my brow i'm going to draw in my other eye [Music] that's really much more how i would actually approach it and if i feel like i'm not really working properly i can go ahead and just draw through draw in the spheres for

my eyes here just like this and make sure that they're sitting inside that cavity well so that's how we can go ahead and make sure that our eyes are actually sitting in our skull properly now that we have that let's draw the actual eye itself and i'm going to start drawing an eye in the way that i would do it this is something you'll be quite a bit more familiar with i know that i have a sphere behind here but i don't need to draw that whole sphere i just am aware of it [Music] i've

gone ahead and sketched in a pair of eyes here i'm going to lighten this down and i want to point out a few things that are very important because my eye is at this angle here and so that's the angle that i've drawn this eye at and i didn't bother actually doing this on my real drawing because that would start to get pretty tedious but it's important that i understand that i'm dealing with this form and so you can see that i see quite a bit more eye here than i do here because it's for

shortened as it turns away from us and so in my actual eye here because i'm looking at it from a bit of an angle i've got more more of my sclera showing here than i do here i want to see some of that lid just a little bit there some of my eyelid also for shortens around because it's rounding around a rounded form my tear duct then my lower lid attaches here and i've got my brow drawn just like this i've got the bridge of my nose and this is really defining my ocular cavity that

we were talking about earlier so that's going to sit just like this and so i've got my brow sitting along the top of that the ridge of my nose here and it comes out here and then my eye i'm gonna see again more of the sclera on this side and less on the other side this is also gonna round around a bit of the sclera there [Music] and that's going to be it so it's very very important you can see how i'm actually rounding out and around and then my curve is much longer here and

then it curves around that form here like this very quickly then i've got my my tear duct here and my eyelid actually follows kind of around the shape of that eye and as we discussed earlier on i'm going to draw a circle for my eye here on the front of that circle it's going to bump out where we actually have our uh iris that might be a little bit exaggerated but the fact that it bumps out like this actually creates an interesting effect when it comes to your eyelids that you really need to be aware

of so i'm going to draw this eye again just below and i'm going to turn instead of looking out this way i'm going to have my eye looking the other way so i'm just going to start the same way that i did and just sketch in my eye my upper lid here my eye would be here but instead i want to draw it here looking this way and i'm not going to change the thing and that's fine but it really doesn't look right and the reason for that is when you turn your eye it actually

changes the whole shape of your lid and so i'm going to leave this here and now this is going to flatten quite a bit and it's going to round more much more over my eye [Music] and so i'd get something much more like this where i'm actually pulling my lid over this way and lifting it and this eye would would really work exactly the same way and so now i have my eyes looking out this way and you can see that it's really pulled my lids a little bit subtly but definitely noticeably in the direction

of the eye it really lends an incredible amount of realism to your eyes it really lends a lot of believability to your expressions so it's something you want to be aware of so i've got a very neutral eye that i've drawn here and now what i want to do is draw that i almost completely closed and really wide open and show you the way that your eyelids work in order to make that happen and so the first thing i'm going to do is draw my eye open much wider and so in just in my sketch

i'm going to start with something that's obviously quite a bit wider my pupil is going to be just about here there's my tear duct i'm just kind of sketching in and so i get a much taller more rounded upper lid because your upper lid is really where you get most of your movement when you open and close your eyes the lower lid actually doesn't move much at all and when you do move it you tend to squint [Music] and so there's an eye open much more widely and you can see that i i've lowered my

bottom lid and so that's moved but what's really moved is my upper lip and it becomes much more apparent when i draw an eye much more [Music] you can see quite a bit more of your upper lid when your eyes close like this and it tends to look a little sleepy and tired because i've just lowered my upper lid i've really not changed my lower lid that's sitting in basically the same place and the upper lid lowers down and that really gives you that expression if i want something that looks more squinted i'll end up

with something a little bit more like this [Music] there and that's more of a squinted eye and you can see that i really don't see much of an upper lid because i've got my eyebrow pressed down and that really rounds out your your upper lid and pushes it down over the eye and so you can only really see just a little bit of a lip here and so you don't get this you don't really get this large eye bleed in the same way one last thing that i want to make as clear as possible it's

just how much the angle you're seeing the eye from changes the appearance of your eyelids and so here's my eye we're looking down at my iris quite a bit here just like this and because of that my upper lid is going to be very very shallow and flat my lower lid is going to be much more rounded here is my your duct here and my brow will be lowered quite a bit down too and if i'm looking at this eye and i'm looking upward this is our angle there's my pupil here's my iris here now

my upper lid is gonna start here and here and it's gonna be very rounded and my lower lid will actually even kind of come up and round this way you have to be a little careful with that but if you're looking at it from enough of an angle you'll actually see it round like this as opposed to downward like this and because of that angle you'll see a much greater space between your eye and your brow like this and if that doesn't make sense i want to show you that your eye is going to be

a point just about here and so if i drop my angle down very low you can see that there's very little distance between my brow line and my eye but if i lift it so you're looking up at that eye there's quite a bit more space and that's just the angle that you're seeing at it is very important in order to be able to draw 3d shapes in your head understand that concept and that's just for shortening so that's why that's happening so we've got a whole bunch of theory established and now i just want

to go ahead and draw a nice big eye and talk about the kinds of details that i like to use in my own art style i've got my eyes sketched in and i'm going to start to draw tightly and at this point now i'm not using any line weight i just want to get my cartoon i guess i'm using a little line weight i did there it's very difficult to resist but i want to try to resist as much as i can and just get my forms established [Music] so i've got my eye basically drawn

in in terms of just simplified form i'm gonna finish in my eyebrow and i like to think of my eyebrow in terms of a few pieces i've got a piece here and then piece here and then i've got a little end piece just like this so what i have right now is fairly simple and i'm going to go ahead and start to detail this in the way that i would for a finished comic page i'm going to start by darkening in my eyebrow [Music] i have the basic shape for my eyebrow obviously that's a little

bit too clean and perfect and i want to just break it up i don't want to get too carried away but i'm just going to draw a couple little extra lines in there just to give it a little bit more i still want to be a fairly graphic one or even at a large size i tend to like my eyebrows to be fairly graphic that's going to be just about it my upper lid because i've got my lighting and i've decided that my lighting is going to be coming downward like this i can see my

upper lid here i've got it drawn in i'm going to just darken that just like this and i actually really want this whole thing to be quite a bit darker and i'm going to imagine this as casting catching a shadow because it actually rests over the eye and has a lip to it so this would be dark in here i also right now i'm just going to go ahead and draw in a circle this is going to be a reflection in my eye and i'm going to draw another little circle here this is going to

be a bit of a lower reflection like another another light source maybe down below and these reflection shapes are a bit of a cipher i tend to do them all the time just about like this i don't really play with them too much because they work and a lot of what i do because it's cartooning tends to be a bit of a visual shorthand it gets the idea across in a way that makes sense for the reader in a way that they're used to and i'm going to want the top of my eye here because

this is actually recessed to be fairly dark i'm going to darken this whole area up here and the reason for that is from the side you can imagine your eye it would be your pupil your beer iris and this is just clear in here and so that actually sits back a ways because of that and so when you put an eyelid over that my eyelid is going to end up shadowing all the way down in through here and so i'm doing that i'm going to want to pull up some shadow in here my upper lid

actually rests over my lower lid and so i want to make sure that that's established there hold some shadow into my tear duct i am going to go just a little bit dark here i don't want to be too dark here because this is actually catching the light with a little bit of a lip i don't want to get too carried away drawing bags under my eyes but they can add a quite a bit of believability come out a little bit for for some eyelashes and that's a bit of a choice you can do that

if you think it works or you can leave that out if it starts to look a little feminine you're looking for more of a masculine look or it starts a little bit overdone and so now i want to get some detail into my eye i'm going to start a little thicker here and go toward my center and just bump the line a little bit i'm gonna be a little thicker and heavier with it as i go up towards the top because i want it to darken and it's gonna fade toward the bottom from here i

can just start to in a really simple way to start to render out just to soften some of these forms we talked about rendering in a video just a couple of videos ago and i'm going to use basically the same techniques and that's really it all right thank you so much for watching i will see you every monday night at eight o'clock eastern or monday night draw and i will see you in the next video