Original subtitles

In this lesson we're going to take a look at the forms of the eyes, and really how to grasp drawing the eyes.

Right. The eyes are extremely important.

It's also extremely important that you spend time really learning all the nitty gritty details of drawing eyes,

and also that you get them right when you're drawing.

Messing up the eyes really messes up one of the key focal points of a character drawing. Because usually

the head is where people look first, and on the head are the eyes, and the eyes are keys to the expression of

the character.

So, really take learning very seriously and do everything in your power to make sure that your eyes look

right, look correct, and look good when you're drawing them.

Nevertheless, let's get started learning the basic forms of the eyes.

So really the eyeball itself is just a sphere.

It's just a sphere. From an anatomical point of view a side view,

the eyeball, has a concave section in the front which is the iris, as well as the lens on top of that.

The pupil is inside that concave section, which lets light shine into the actual space of the eyeball.

Then there are many little elements here that detect light and color.

And there's a cup shaped type of connection behind the eyeball, that then communicates that data to the

brain.

So that is essentially the structure of the eyeball itself.

And for us we want to just grasp this form nature of it, the spherical form nature of it first, and get used

to putting that Iris and pupil section onto it, and being able to rotate it in perspective as we need

to.

So for example, here we're going to do just a front view.

We can draw the iris circle on here, the iris shape on here, put in the pupil and there is really an

eyeball.

It's essentially three concentric circles, right.

So there's that.

We don't want to worry about details, of the little flecks in the eyes, and other things yet, it's just the these

three shapes, but we're going to add the lens when, just a little bit of the lens, when we rotate the

eyeball left and right.

So let's take this sphere over here, put it over here, and let's start rotating. Let's rotate the eyeball

to the left and then to the right.

So we'll draw another sphere again.

Using some contour lines to give us a feeling of the form.

And now because we're rotating this circle, which is in the front view, it's a circle, in perspective to

the left it's going to become a bit of an ellipse.

And so, because it's an ellipse, so the pupil itself also becomes an ellipse, and because it's convex, the

form over here is convex, the ellipse of the pupil is going to move slightly in, it won't be dead center

of this 2D shape, but rather it would be inside this convex shape, right, this convex form here.

So it moves slightly in, and the lens actually wraps over. So I'll draw some contour lines for that.

The lens really sticks on just like we see here in the side view.

And a lot of ways that this is shown, is by adding a little highlight, because that is really where the

light is bouncing off from, the specular light the very sharp bright light in the eye, and especially

over the pupil area, and the iris here, is light bouncing off of the lens.

And that is a slightly left rotation. The right rotation is basically the same thing.

We use a nice center line, and we can draw through to really feel that spherical form, the eyeball.

And we're keeping things loose, we're keeping things rough.

This is not a refined drawing, and we're drawing in that ellipse.

Once again, a circle in perspective is an ellipse, for the iris.

And then for the pupil, remembering that this is concave.

Darken our pupil there.

And then again, we can add a light, let's add a little highlight here, just an indication of a highlight,

to show the lens shape. And that is essentially the core forms of the eyeball with the iris and the pupil

and we have an idea of all these various sections of the eyeball.

So we know the components that we need to draw an accurate eyeball. I would definitely say to you, get used

to drawing this spherical form and making the ellipses that you need as you rotate the eye. Get really

used to it and then move on to what we're going to discuss next, which is how we wrap the eyelids around,

as well as some great shorthand techniques for drawing eyes quickly.

So when it comes to doing the eyelid, we'll do a slightly left rotated eyeball this time. Drawing through once

again, getting that spherical form. We'll put in our slightly elliptical Iris and pupil

and that highlight just for fun.

And what we want to remember with the eyelids is, the eyelids wrap around the eye, the eyeball.

They really wrap around the eyeball.

Now for a for example, we're going to use just a simple type of shape, for this wrapping and then I'll

show you a great way to get very realistic looking, and very believable, and really appealing

lines around, wrapped lines around, or basically the lid lines around the eyeball.

And so what we want to imagine, are some volumes, some really thick volumes, wrapping around the eye, very

much like this.

They've got weights to them, they're thick, and they wrap around the eyeball, and they hold the eyeball

into the eye socket.

And when we zoom into this, I'm going to zoom in and draw this,

they really have a thickness to them, so I'm drawing in an extra line here, just so we can see that they

really have the thickness to them, and that's something you want to keep in mind, when you're studying

more detailed anatomy- that there is this very glossy usually because it's wet, section and thickness

to both the upper and the lower lids.

But generally speaking sometimes you won't really see the upper one as much, but it is in fact there.

I'll just add that in there as well, just draw another line in here.

So you have these thick pieces of skin that wrap over the eyeball, and then they kind of connect back to where

they usually go.

So the lower lid goes down to the cheek eventually, and then the upper lid has an indentation before we hit the brow line.

And that effectively, is how the lids work on the forms.

And again this would be a great thing to do to just really get some practical basic exercises in on

this. And just do some quick rough drawings.

You may not even want to draw in the iris and the pupil.

And just imagine these lids wrapping around, even draw through if you must, imagine them wrapping around

and connecting on the other side, and drawing those dotted lines where other side is connecting and draw

them as these thick flaps over the eyeball, and try and do it from different angles, and just get used to

the very basic form.

Don't worry about eyelashes and other details and things yet, just get used to this basic feeling of

what we're doing here with these eyeballs.

Let me do a few more quick ones, and I'll just wrap the eyelid around in different ways and drawing

sphere's

I'm putting my center lines down them,

so here we'll do just this.

Wrap it around that way, the bottom lid, wrap it around that way, add the mass add the mass.

Just some quick rough sketches.

This one we can have it more of an upward angle, so maybe we'll only see the lower lid.

Maybe a little bit of the upper lid.

Just put an arrow to indicate the direction the eye is looking. This one can be looking,

let's make this one look that direction, and wrapping the lid around here and here. This is more of a side

view almost, almost a side view, let's just do a bit more of a curve in there.

So, really get these basic forms, particularly the eyelid, wrapping around.

And then when, if you're really happy with them, feel free to then add in the ellipse for your iris and

then your pupil, just to get those very basic forms in, forms and shapes, right.

But now, when we've got the basic theory of this down, and we've done, you know, a million, OK maybe not a

million.

We've done a fair number of sphere's, iris's, pupils- we've understood, kind of, the lens shape being convex

and concave, concave in the iris, convex in the lens.

We want to then start getting a more realistic looking eye, right.

And of course I will encourage you, especially at the anatomy resources section at the end, to really go in depth,

study all the nuances of the eyes. I'm going to show you some great shorthand tips as we move forward in this lesson.

So the first big thing I want to show you, is that when we're drawing eyes, usually speaking we want to

have rotated views of character's heads and things, we don't want front views and side views.

Not to say you should never have them.

There obviously will be instances, like planning, and concept sheets, where you're going to want to have

those views.

But in general, we're drawing character's heads from some kind of rotation.

And usually it's a three quarter rotation like this.

A great way to remember to draw the eyes in accurately, is once you've drawn in your spheres and you

kind of, have them proportionately at the right locations, is to use this simple kind of tip or trick,

which is really, to make the far side eye's upper lid line, basically the lines you put in, quite right angled

almost, almost right angled, a very sharp curve, and then have the near curve at a long type of shape like

this.

And I'm going to show you how apposing curves ties into this now as well.

So the same height, the lid heights must be the same, and have a longer line for the upper eyelid for the

nearer side eye.

I will get into this in a bit more detail.

So when we're thinking about the lid shapes over the sphere of the eyeball, what we want to keep in mind

is we know they're wrapping, but the nuance of the shape in reality is something of some kind of strange

combination between a diamond and a circle, that when we kind of tie the theories together, we get basically

these types of opposing curves.

And if you remember these, you pretty much can never go wrong. Which is that we have a curve that comes

like this from the corner of the eye, so we can just imagine the tear duct here.

Curve that comes up like that, and then opposes,

and then a completely new set of opposing curves, that basically mirrors on this side.

So these curves are basically the same, the top and the bottom curves, and then folds in here, at the

bottom. And that is kind of the basic shape that happens over the eyeball, probably ties little bit closer,

a little bit more there.

It is the basic shape.

So if you get this basic opposing curves shape down, and you remember this kind of diamond-y, kind

of shape, with a bit of roundness to it, you can, you can draw eyes pretty effectively and pretty quickly

very easily.

So going back to the shorthand technique here for drawing from a side view.

Notice how narrow this top lid line is, and how broad this top lid line is.

And this top lid line here, is really using this exact shape over here.

Right.

So we're always opposing. Except you can see that this on the far side eyelid that we don't really see

the outer line.

Right.

Although technically speaking it would come i, it would come in like this.

You could certainly draw that.

But sometimes because of the rotation of the angle, it seems to just flatten into a single curve, which is

quite narrow.

And then the lower lid, you just follow the guide from here, and draw in the opposing curves and connect

it.

And here again, draw in the opposing curves and then just connect them. And you get a very convincing

and realistic eye shape with it.

We know inside has the ball and the iris and the pupil.

Let me just highlight this again, just so that you remember it.

We really want a narrow, kind of, right angle, kind of, curve here.

It's more of a trick, it's not quite hard core theory.

And then we want to just use our basic eye shape, flat eye shape design here on the near-side eye.

And have this being very wide.

And this being very narrow.

So let's go ahead and add in these lines and shapes that we've learned on this three quarter head.

And we want to keep the height of the lids the same.

So we'll wrap this around and make sure we're getting the height of the lids the same, and we want the

corners of the eyes to match up as well, so wherever we define the corner in one, the corners need to

point to each other. Draw in that shape over the eyeball, this side will get the long version.

And then on the far side eye, the eyeball will come down and then we'll draw in those curves, with that shape and

here will draw in curves of this shape.

Maybe this lid is a little bit high,

So I'm just going to lower it a little bit.

This isn't quite following our shape, so I'll just adjust it a bit. And for our rough view, we basically have our eyes in

place.

And then we can proceed to add in the pupil and the iris and so forth, based on the angle of rotation

of the sphere.

At that point.

So something else that's key to remember, is that when you're doing three quarter views of heads, that

you want to make sure there's always a space between the end of the eye.

So here's the eyeball and the lids and the side of the head. Make sure there is always a space here.

It's a very common error to make, especially for artists to draw the far side eye really right up against

the side of the head line, or even over the head line.

And I definitely would advise, don't do that.

Always leave a space and it will generally always look fine. And don't forget that when you are doing

head exercises for drawing the eyes and placing the eyes, that you're remembering your proportional rules.

The eye line is one third, roughly down the sphere, the nose line, the mouth line and so forth.

Right, and the ear height,

so here we'll adjust that, is between the nose and the eyebrows, wherever the eyebrows may be.

So those are some key tips for drawing the eye shapes, and getting the forms down. The lid lines, the upper

lid lines also make a crease.

And generally speaking you don't see the lower lid lines that much, perhaps when a character is tired you will

see a slight crease underneath the eyes, that you may want to put in when they're tired, but generally

you don't draw those in. But the upper lid lines just wrap around and they usually don't have to connect

directly from the corner or the corner, you can just indicate them by drawing them in.

Let's just get rid of some of our planning lines here.

Just erasing those out, and we draw in those upper lid lines to show the volume and the mass, in a sense, the

volume and the weightiness of those upper lids.

One more key points with eyes, is that, and we'll get more into expressive elements of eyes when we're doing

facial expressions in a later module.

But one key thing to note, and one key rookie error, is that when people draw eyes, even if we're going

to do a front view here, and they place the iris in the shape, so here we are drawing it without the spheres,

we'll imagine the sphere in there. Is that they tend to draw the iris with too much space at the top and the

bottom of it.

Right.

Or mainly with space at the top.

And the problem with this really, is that when, when we're drawing an eye like this, and putting in the space

above the iris and below the iris, the character looks surprised, and it may not be your intention, you

might just want to draw a normal eye. In which case, the solution really is, to draw the eye,

draw the upper eye lid, and ensure that you're covering a third or a quarter of the iris shape, the pupil

doesn't need to be covered, but a third or a quarter of the iris shape should be covered, and that gives

you a very natural looking eye.

I will just add in those other shapes.

Get out tear duct in there.

And this looks normal or a standard eye at ease.

Right.

But we'll go into how we can mess around with, and play with, the spacing and the alignment in facial

expressions, and how we can get different expressions with the eyes.

On that note.

So before we leave this lesson, I know it's been a long lesson, before we leave this lesson.

I just want to cover just the basics again of placing the eye on the head, placing the eyes on the head.

When we draw out our basic head form, and we are using our proportional guides to help us place the elements.

Place the spheres.

Don't be afraid to place the spheres of the eyeball, place the spheres of the eyeball in and then use the

shorthand to get those lines in.

This is a bit of a stylized, bit of a cartoony look, but use the shorthand and the tips to get the upper

eyelids in, especially when you're planning and you're doing your roughs.

You don't need to draw in all the little details of the eyes until you're ready for that.

And that is a good quick way to really just get the basic eye shapes in there.

So draw in the spheres at the right locations based on the proportional rules.

All right.

I know that's been a lot of information to digest.

you feel you need to, definitely watch this video again.

Otherwise let's move on to the next lesson.