How to Draw Eyes for Comic and Cartoon Characters

get allies and gentlemen welcome to draw with jazz oh I'm jazzy and this is a video tutorial on how to draw eyes and that might seem like a pretty simple sort of thing to do in fact er let's jump into a how you might assume to draw eyes video tutorial to begin with so we have a head here and with my pen I'm going to draw the shape of an ice auger Lea shapes sometimes people draw more like football American football shapes and then you have an eyebrow on the top of the eye like this then you have the middle bit of the eye oh and that was a weird shape like that and then inside the middle bit of the eye there's a black area the pupil and that is how to draw an eye although it looks a bit odd in fact he looks like he's tripping on acid so let's delete this and I'm going to first take a look at some eyes and we're going to talk about how we can translate some of the information that we can see visually here and this is just from a google image search of eyes into our illustrations to make something that looks more convincing than what we just drew so of course all of these eyes have different attributes and look different in their own ways be it shape or color or details or anything like that but I'm going to go through a bunch of these eyes and highlight some of the things that are pretty prevalent through most of the images that you'll see where eyes are present and one of the first things that you'll notice pretty quickly with all of these are these little white sections that seem to be appearing in pretty much every single image of an eye that we have here these are highlights because our eyes are really glassy on the surface they reflect the environmental light around us and often especially when there are photographs being taken of people there is a light source usually quite in front of them or to their left or right and their eye is going to be catching that light and most of these eyes our caching highlights in their eyes so that's the first thing I want to point out the next thing I want to point out is in a lot of these images the eyelid is casting a shadow on the top of the eye and on top of that the eye actually has a gradient where there are areas of the eye that are a lot darker than some of the white areas of the eye so often it gets a bit darker in the corner here like that but one of the most prominent areas of shadow that I tend to find and use in my illustrations of eyes is this top area just under the eyelid another thing of course to point out is eyelashes and we're going to get to this in a moment because there are ways to draw eyelashes that look terrible and I want to highlight a few ways of drawing eyelashes that are much more streamlined and look a lot prettier but the next thing I'll point out is eye shape and I'm going to select a different color here so it doesn't all meld together a bit too much but you'll notice that there isn't actually any perfect oval or football shape eyes in fact they tend to hold more of an almond shape where there's a bit of a bigger end on one side and that tapers more sharply usually on the inside of the eye while it's still sort of unbalanced in the larger area of mass it's sort of a little to one side of the iron often that's the closer side towards the nose so for example here with this eye we have this almond shape which is a little bigger towards the left side of the eye which is again closest to the nose so in general the shape of the eye is much more of an almond type shape and the other thing to keep in mind about this is that shape changes it's not constantly that same almond type shape depending on whether they're looking up or looking down or even in a profile or side view and of course the eye itself can hold a different type of shape from one eye to another so that's another thing to point out and then the last thing I'll mention are of course the details there are things like lids of the eyes or hoods of the eyes some lines under the eyes or shading eyeshadow things like that and we're going to be talking a little bit about the economy of our lines because if you use too many lines things start looking a bit weird the characters start looking old or a bit decrepit door it's just an odd thing so we need to really actually be careful how many lines we use and where we use them because every line is going to be a part of telling that story that we're trying to convey through our illustration so jumping straight into our practical application how can we apply this knowledge to this either I want to create on this character here well first things first I'm not going to jump straight into the ink I actually like to rough things out in the construction pencil and as you can see here with my character's illustration I began with a rough construction pencil and then I did my line work on top so going back to my construction pencil I'm going to create a bit of an arm in shape for the eye and I'm going to do the same for the other eye but of course because it's sort of off to the side it's going to be a little more squished and that is going to be my basic eye shape now another thing to notice about all of these eyes that is sort of interesting to keep in mind when you're drawing eyes that we didn't really keep them on with our example at the beginning that the the circle areas of the inside of the eye are often covered by part of the the lids or the under lid of the eyes the under lids that the technical term so most of these eyes except for of course ones which are wide and look quite shocked usually have almost a quarter or a third of via the circle part of the eye covered by something so normally the way I would draw an eye is to sort of have it a little bit like this have the top of the eye sort of cover up the top of that circle now often the next thing I like to draw in this stage of during the eye is the highlight and you'll notice that wherever there's a highlight it actually covers up whatever is underneath so if there is a highlight even in between the the pupil and the colored area of the eye it covers both so usually that's the next thing that I draw and that is also going to be in the direction of where the light sources on the character now you would think also that the next thing passed the highlight to draw is the pupil and you would probably be correct but when during the pupil I actually and this is my personal preference don't just draw the pupil like that because it looks a bit odd you'll notice that the eye looks quite dilated and still a little bit shocked or like they're tripping on some kind of a drug what I actually like to do is extend the pupil to attach up to this shadow area at the top so actually fill in a flat black the same color of the pupil to cover up a portion of the color area of the eye and you'll see how almost immediately already it takes away that edge that sort of drugged up look on your character's eyes and already that i looks monumentally better than the first eye I drew next of course I can do something like the eye brow and personally when I draw eyebrows I don't like to draw some sort of a static or mundane shape I like to have a little bit of edge to it so I usually have a curve up and it curved down sometimes I add a bit of a point I have a taper in at the end there and make sure that the shape is a little bit more dynamic and interesting and the result is an eye that looks a little more aesthetically pleasing then of course when we get to our inking we're essentially just doing exactly what we did in a bit more a refined way now you'll notice that the shadow that I have that covers the inside part of the eye here doesn't extend into the white areas of the eye and once again that's because we're communicating with our lines because if I did that for example like this all of a sudden that eye looks very heavy and it almost looks like they're trying to be eyelashes or something but if we have that shadow area simply only in the colour area of the circle of the eye then we're communicating what we need to which is that there is a shadow in the eye the highlight is obviously taking preference here and everything's sort of serving its purpose finish up with the eyebrows and then I'm done so there you go pretty quickly there are a few steps that I've used rather than just drawing the oval of the eye the eyeball the pupil and the eyebrow and assuming it looks like an eye if you keep in mind to some of these aesthetic key points when drawing your eyes can make them look much more appealing and we're going to go through a bunch more of stylistic examples that that will hopefully serve to help you as additional points of reference or resources that you can use when drawing eyes the other thing I should have mentioned a little bit earlier is that this reference file it's a Photoshop file is available for you to download for free so the link is in the description and of course while I'm mentioning things like this I created an e-book called draw with jazz a fun with faces so if you're interested in really delving into more about the details of drawing eyes in different styles and of course other areas of the face and expressions and all that stuff make sure to check that out so moving onto our first example I have this character a little something I prepared earlier for you guys and he's in a bit of an angry state his face is facing down in his shouting so the first thing I'm going to do is get my construction pencil and just to explain what I'm using here I have a tray of different brush tool presets and these are custom brushes that I've personally produced for my professional work and tutorials and all the stuff if you're interested I have them available for you to check out and buy on my shop so I'm go to Jazza sears.com if you're interested in checking out the pens and pencils I'm using you now we're going to go through the process of drawing the eyes off this character in a very similar way to the one I just sort of demonstrated they're going to be a few different changes here and the first is that the head is on a little bit more of a downwards angle so what are the things that this downwards angle affects well if you can imagine the eye as what it is a spherical object in the inside of the skull and the eyebrows and eyelids are sort of overlaid on top of that they wrap around the eye so I'm going to draw a sphere achill object here and if you can imagine that with an eye facing straight on and we have our arm and shape covering maybe about that much of the visible I move this up here if I draw another spherical shape at this time with it angle downwards we're going to have to translate how this angle will follow that eye so the first angle up here is actually going to be a bit more shallow but the bottom one is going to be a lot deeper and go down a lot more like that and this helps sort of convey that there's a three-dimensional aspect to the eye that we're drawing so actually going to be applying a similar sort of idea here so I'm going to erase my spherical construction lines here because they're going to make it look really weird but I'm going to apply that principle to this face and it's construction drawing now similarly the eyebrow of an eye front on like this is going to be much more high than it would be on a lower one because with the downwards angle the things that are further forward are going to be appearing a little more on top of those things as the tilt comes forward so an eyebrow at a lower angle like this will also appear much more on top of the eye but let's say in this case it's the same expression it would look a little more like that so applying these principles to our character here I'll begin with the eyebrows because they're going to appear at the front because they pop out the most and we have a downwards angle and then beyond that I'm going to be drawing the characters eye shape which is going to be deeper at the bottom and more shallow at the top followed by the rounds of the eyes the highlights and then of course the pupil and the shadow under the eyelid the result of this is an eye that looks a little more 3-dimensional and a little more dynamic because we have these layers and as you can see the foremost layer is the eyebrow because we then have this downwards tilt and it pops out in front a little more than the eye itself because the eye is receded and then beyond that we have the details of the eye now speaking of details the eye as I was saying earlier on less is more but if we add simple lines here and there it really can say a lot and we can use them in moderation to really change the story of what we've got here and one thing that we can do in an expression of intensity is add a line under here that goes on this downwards angle and follows the edge of where the bone is on the face that sort of surrounds the eye and they're sort of like bags under the eye you cannot of course shade them in a little bit like this if the medium you're using you know might benefit from that so that's something that you can do as well simply adding just those little lines there can add quite a lot to an expression or at least add a little bit more to that story in those eyes so for my next example I'm going to be drawing eyes on this lady here and they're going to be a little more bubbly so we're not quite going to follow the exact proportions of a human eye we're going to blow them up a bit so we're normally the eye might look a little bit like this we're actually going to stretch it out maybe tilt it on an upwards angle up here in this corner and have the eye a bit bigger than it might normally be beyond that the actual circle area of the eye where the color and the pupil will be held are going to be much larger and the eyebrow can go nice and high and be nice and sharp have a little character there have nice big bubbles for the highlight of the eye outline the shadow area and the pupil and then the result is a nice big bubbly looking eye but we can make this look more feminine and of course one of the ways that is most effective to do this is to add nice eyelashes what you don't want to do is this I am drawing eye lashes and lashes there you don't want to do that why don't you want to do that well it looks like eyelashes but they look kind of rough and not very pretty and beyond the the fact that it takes a bit of time to do and draw each individual eyelash it's stylistically bit jarring and ugly one of the most effective ways to draw eyelashes is to use silhouette and clump things together and create a shape of eyelashes so for a cartoon character you have actually draw like maybe three lashes out like this and shade this whole area in between the edge of the eye and our eyelash silhouette in a black and do the same thing for the other side here and then filling that in already our character here has more femininity and the eyelashes look a little prettier now I'm going to provide another example of both the eye shape and the eyelashes with another duplicate of our character base here and in this example I'm going to demonstrate how we can really change the personality and character of our cartoon or illustration simply with the eyes so we had a character here who looks much more friendly and approachable let's make someone a little more seductive and maybe with some ill intentions how do we do that one of the ways I like to do that is to add have more of a seductive tilt to the eyes and half close the eyes and when I say half close the eyes if we draw the eyes nice and narrow like this still keeping a bit of an almond shape and we very lightly indicate the top eyelid being half closed like so and then draw the eye peeking out with half of the circle covered and then add our highlight at our shadow and our pupil do this for both eyes that alone adds a little bit of a a menacing look that's just her eyes alone then we have the eyebrows what we can do with the eyebrows is have a nice sharp point and add a little bit more of a an edge to the top and the corners of the eyebrows now the problem with this is it doesn't look very feminine because we've just got the very raw eye here so the next thing you can do is draw some eyelashes that sort of curl out have a nice aggressive sharp edge to them and even outline some of the bottom ones here and do the same with the other eye have a nice sharp curl out here and then the last thing that I'll mention that you can actually do is shade in this upper eyelid so with the upper eyelid shaded it just looks like that there are a little more seductive they're obviously wearing makeup darker eyes also help someone look a little more menacing and of course it's quite a feminine look as well and the result is with both of these drawings examples of two characters one that looks bubbly and friendly and approachable and another that looks a little more menacing and cunning so what about cartoons we've covered a little more comic book style eyes here but how do we simplify it even further while keeping them attractive and having a little bit of personality well I'm going to take my cartoon character here or make a couple of duplicates of him and I'm going to outline a couple of simplistic approaches that you can take when drawing cartoon characters eyes one of the most common ways that people think that you can do this is just with circles and dots and lines for eyebrows and of course this can work and be effective but it can also be pretty stale so I'm going to get rid of that because it's not oh pretty and I like to with my cartoon character still have a bit of shape with the eyes so you'll notice that rather than just drawing circles I'm having a little bit of a point up here that's tapered I have a nice round section of the front and a little bit more of a shape here at the side as well so it's not just a perfect circle we're actually adding a little bit of character by having some aspects that taper in and areas that still hold slight arm and shape now eyebrows can add a lot more character if we add a little interesting shape to them so rather than just drawing lines we can have nice big thick eyebrows like this with a little line of the edge to add some interest shade them in and then all of a sudden we have a character whose expressions are going to stand out a lot more beyond that the eyes themselves can work as dots but they also tend to look a little bit shocked what I like to personally do is draw a circle like so draw a highlight and then shade everything except for that highlight and then the result are some eyes that look nice and expressional and dynamic and you can actually adjust from those and use dots for very shocked expressions and such but have something like this as a home base to get back to now you've probably seen loads of different examples of how people draw cartoony eyes the version I just drew was a little bit more intricate and if you wanted to go with something a bit more simplistic you could quite simply just draw that inside part with the highlight and then fill in the the rest of it and then just draw your eyebrows and they could be various shapes there might be even more triangle like shapes and another way you might have seen eyes being drawn is with these odd-looking vertical stretched eyes shapes and they can work - and even really simple eyebrows like so often less can be more with cartoon so with such simple shapes and lines we could use these to create interesting expressions but the point is you can see how with varying your styles and the amount of detail you put in your eyes you can drastically change how your character looks now the last thing I'm going to talk about is character's eyes on extreme angles and we've sort of covered this briefly in terms of having a three-dimensional aspect and keeping in mind that the tilt of the head affects also the the depth of the angle on the hood of the eyes or how the eyebrows interact and we're going to sort of demonstrate this in more extreme examples so for example first my character here on the Left has a very upwards tilt on his face with an upwards angle on the face the top of the eye is going to have a much steeper angle than the bottom which is going to be much more shallow and that goes for both eyes the eyebrows are often further away or at least quite distant from covering the eye and then the rest of the eye can be filled in in the same order that we sort of discussed previously now whenever I draw a head on a very low angle I always draw the eyebrows first regardless of the expression so if they're very happy or very angry the eyebrows are almost always going to cover a part of the eyes in fact in this case in particular the top eyelid is almost entirely covered by the eyebrow from there we can draw the rest of the eye and in this case you will be looking off to the side like so fill in the shading or the highlights and then we're good to go now for my last example we're going to draw an eye in profile or on its side but Before we jump to drawing it on the face I want to talk a little bit about the particulars in the so we're going to begin with the eyeball and then imagine that we're viewing this on the side so we have the eye circles and highlights and all this stuff and we haven't figured out where the eyelids and the eye brow are going to go well we've already established that in a front on view where this is the eye the almond-shaped sort of wraps around the eye like so and the eyebrow sort of sits on top like that now what happens in a side-on view well as you can see if we cut the eye in half this front on eye both sides of the eye taper to a point but the middle is actually flat because the front of the eye is open from side to side we close off here but this is all flat therefore the front of the eye is going to be open in this expression here and then we're going to tape it in to a point like so so the eye shape in a side of your profile view looks a little bit like a triangle with their curvy front often like that and depending on the angle of the head sometimes it might be an eye that looks a little bit like this on a low angle or a little bit like this on a higher angle so that angle can change but the premise is basically the same beyond that the eyebrow usually has some sort of a curve and curves often have two halves so if your eyebrow has a curve on a side view those two halves are going to be displayed a little bit differently the behalf of the eyebrow closest to the end here is going to have a larger size a larger amount of that curvature showing and then the second half is actually going to be a lot shorter because it's at the front of the face and this sort of being squished away because we can't see much of it because of the characters are being on their side so when drawing a character on profile view I often like to begin with the eyebrow not entirely sure why it just feels a little more solid like I'm building up something to follow and then after that I draw the eye following that sort of triangular shape during the eyes highlight and pupil and shadow and then as a result we have an eye of a character on their side so there you go that's all I'm going to go through with you guys today I hope this video has been useful to you have gone through a whole bunch of different stuff here today but I hope that you found something useful that you can apply to your cartoons comics or illustrations now I know this video has been pasted a little bit fast I'm sorry if I speak a bit too fast or if my accents hard to understand if you want to go through this at your own pace once again I recommend checking out my fun with faces book where it's all quite evenly spaced apart and you can take your time as much as you need in that covering pretty much all of these aspects and more that I've discussed today so make sure to check that out otherwise reference files from this tutorial including images in the description for free thank you for watching and supporting my content and until next time I'll see you later thanks for watching if you enjoyed this video subscribe to my channel to see new content every week check out more of my stuff by clicking the annotations over there if you want to support my work and get a few goodies for yourself head over to my store for archives ebooks and get yourself something nice if you're looking for a great place to collaborate explore or share your own content head over to newgrounds.com that's it for now and until next time see you later

Channel: Jazza

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Keywords: josiah, brooks, jazza, jazzastudios, animation, game design, media, newgrounds, armor games, flash, humor, drawing, how to draw, adobe, photoshop, cintiq, 24hd, Adobe Flash (Software), tutorial, Artist, Painting, Educational, Software Tutorial, CS6, eyes, eye, pupil, comic

Id: HEcjYwYjXyQ

Length: 24min 39sec (1479 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 02 2015