How to Draw Alive-Looking Eyes

If you want to learn how to draw faces and portraiture, one key to make it captivating and real is by drawing the eyes realistically or making it alive.  The eyes are windows to our soul or emotions.  Even through drawing, being able to draw a  captivating eye can change the appearance and impact of your work.

When I started learning how to draw portraiture, I practiced a lot on the eyes of the subject.  I experimented and finally, I learned how we can possibly draw alive looking eyes.  There are several materials online to learn how to draw beautiful looking eyes.  So I curated some here for different levels of learning.  

Remember, you will not grow if you don't practice.  So with these materials, I advise you get your tools and find a perfect place to start drawing.  

Drawing Eyes for Beginners

The following video illustrates an easy way of drawing eyes starting from a circle.  This video exhibits outlines and not much on shading.  Thus, as a beginner, you'll be able to produce eyes that may lack details.

Advance Art Tutorial - Drawing hyper realistic eye

The next video takes longer but the end product is much better.  This will teach you more details on shaping the eye and using the right amount of shading for pencil drawings. 

As you have seen from the video, you need to layer the shading starting from light to darkest.  To add more value and make it realistic, take notice of the highlights or how the artist lifted off some of the granite to reveal the white light.  Always consider where the light falls in your drawing.  Train your eyes to see the details of lighting.

Painting Realistic Eye

You may now have the urge to learn how to add colors to your artwork.  The following video is a time-lapse but would still give you idea on how to paint realistically looking eyes.  The medium used in this video is oil paint. Oil paint doesn’t dry quickly and needs longer time to finish. If you are going to use oil paint, you need to be patient and don’t rush your work.

Take notice of the process.  Different from using graphite, the artist started with dark background to build on the foundation of his painting.  Then little by little he layered the lighter colors and used fine brushes to shape and add volume to his painting.  The final touches uses tutanium white for highlights.  He also uses clean dry brushes for softening parts that he wanted to blend.  The good thing with oil paint is that you can blend colors well using linseed oil even after a day or two. The colors are brighter as well and blending is much easier compared to acrylic. When acrylic dries, you can no longer blend it.  With acrylic, you have to work on wet-on-wet.

After watching these videos, it inspires me to start working on my art.  I hope that through these materials, you are able to learn some tips on how you would work on your "Eyes".

Now here are other references related to this post:

* From Art Rocket  Easy Tips for Drawing Eyes. 

* From Marvin Todd's pin in Pinterest - Drawing Eyes