How to Draw a Realistic Eye for Beginners! - Drawing Tutorial

Hello everyone Vaan here. In today's tutorial, I'm going to be showing you how I drew this eye using charcoal pencils.

The first thing that I like to do is create the initial sketch of the eye so I like to block out all of the general shapes of the eye and the structures and to do this, I use a really light pencil so for this, I am using the 0.5mm pencil. I'm just blocking out the general shapes so firstly I created a small circle for the pupil and then a larger circle around that of the iris and a lot of the iris might be covered by something like the upper eyelid and the waterline. I also drew out the basic shape of the eye the tear ducts the upper eyelids and the waterline.

The first thing that I did was I doctoring the pupil using the soft charcoal pencil so that we can get it really dark the pupil tends to be the darkest parts of the eye so I want to block that in first. What I'm doing is I'm using the 2h charcoal pencil and I'm using this on the iris and adding a really light layer of the 2h to indicate where the highlights are within the iris and also where the shadowed areas are so when I did my initial sketch I blocked out things like general highlights in the iris.

I'm applying a bit more pressure and building up more coverage on the shadowed areas and I'm leaving the highlighted areas completely blank so that we can clearly see where those highlighted areas are. I'm also going in little pencil strokes and lines rather than lots of circular motions because there is kind of like this spoke pattern in the iris of the lines going from the outer edge of the of the Iris tends to be the darkest part as well as a little portion surrounding the pupil.

It's important when you look at the direction that's the flex in the iris are going in so that you get this three dimensional kind of look and it is important that you block off the highlights because this is what is going to add shine to your iris. I want to do is soften it out a bit so it's not so gritty and so all of the pencil strokes aren't so defined so I use the blender stump and I thought this was really good it created a really smooth look. I'm building up the coverage with the 4b charcoal especially on the outer edge of that iris as that is the darkest part. I want to go in with the 2h again and I'm going to use this on the white of the eye. A common misconception is that the white of the eye is just white whereas in reality there's quite a bit of shading throughout the right of the eye to give it up spherical 3D look. With the HB pencil to darken up the shading especially under the eyelid and above the waterline and in the corners as well so this is going to give you a really three dimensional and realistic look.

Now what I'm doing is I'm working on the waterline and the skin around the eye and again I use the same technique I use that 2h pencil for this first layer of shading and then I added the HB but the difference is now that when I like to blend out skin. I like to use a tissue because you get really soft smooth shading. I'm also working on the upper eyelid and even though this upper eyelid is quite dark again I'm going to start really lightly. I don't want to kind of rush and make it too dark straightaway. I like to build up to those darker values slowly over time otherwise you can risk it becoming too muddy and too dark. Adding the eyelashes and there are a few things that you need to bear in mind when you're drawing eyelashes firstly the upper eyelashes tend to be a lot thicker than the bottom eyelashes. You need to look at the direction that they're going in and the way they curve so depending on where the eyelash is it's going to curve in different directions and you also need to look at the length of them and how many there is.

I'm also blocking in that crease and the eyebrow as well because they're dark areas as well when you're drawing the eyebrow try to use lines rather than just blocking it in in one block area just try and feather it in with some line strokes going in the direction that the eyebrow hairs would usually go in.

That's basically it for today's tutorial I hope you found it useful. Thank you, everyone!

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