In this tutorial, I will be sharing my techniques to stylize the eye for drawing anime-style characters! First, we'll be going over how to simplify the shape of a human eye into key components, and how that can translate into different styles of eyes. Then, we'll continue to apply those techniques to draw a variety of eye shapes to convey personality and emotion. And finally, I'll be showing a few simple rendering methods to make the eyes shiny and the colours pop!

 

This tutorial assumes some prior knowledge of CSP and drawing digitally. These tips are more a hobbyist's observation than professional advice, but I hope they'll be somewhat helpful to you! Let's get started!

I. Breaking Down the Components

Here's the rough lineart of the most simple and neutral eye shape in my style! These will be the eyes we'll be working with for the first part of the tutorial. First, let's break down the components of the eye and compare this "anime-style" eye to the parts of a real eye.

In red, I've highlighted the upper eyelid/lash lines. You'll notice how the shape of the two are relatively comparable. Of course, there is a lot more detail in realistic portraits. But in anime-style art, the simple curved line is enough.

 

Later on we'll explore the different shapes this line can take to give the eyes more personality!

In blue, I've highlighted the lower eyelid/waterline. I tend to draw this line as a shorter, and more angular curve. Anime eyes tend to be top-heavy to emphasize thicker upper lashes so that's the way I usually draw my characters, but we can absolutely subvert that later on. You can make this line even shorter, sharper, or smoother. The angle of the line is also pretty flexible! Generally it's better to avoid symmetry with the two lines, so I'd recommend against drawing them at the same angle and shape.

 

As you can see, these two lines pretty much make up the rough outer shape of the eye already.

Here, I've drawn over the iris in green. It rests underneath the red line and is just barely cut off from forming a perfect circle. I've opted for a simple circular eye, but the joy of anime stylization is that you can go ham here—the shape can be more triangular, oval, or square-ish to suit your character. Again, that's something we'll go more in-depth on later.

In orange, I've emphasized the shape of the eyebrow. If half of the expressiveness comes from the eye, the other half comes from the eyebrows! Pointing downwards, raised, arched—they can really shape the character's emotions. In this case, there is no emotion (yet). We'll get there.

The additional elements (pupils, and the upper eyelid) have been highlighted in purple. Depending on your style and the character you're drawing, these aren't necessarily mandatory. The lack of these elements can shape your character design. For example, if your character has a monolid, then the eyelid would not be visible. The pupils can be less pronounced (or completely absent), pointed slit pupils like a cat's, or even uniquely-shaped like flowers, stars, or diamonds. There is a lot of creative freedom for designing anime-style characters, so let your imagination run wild!

 

Now that we've gone through each of the key components of an eye, let's try changing up the shape of these components. Each of these lines don't have to strictly follow the above, and we can be as creative as we want. In the next section, I'll share a few (non-exhaustive) samples of what you can do to each of the colour-coded components to form different styles of eyes.

II. Line Shapes: Expression, Emotion, Personality

As mentioned earlier, the top line of the eye can take on a different shape to showcase a character's personality. In red, I've sketched out three possible ones—a straight line, a curve in the opposite direction, and a slightly downward tilted line. The first is more angular, possibly suggesting a more strict or uptight character. The second is more narrowed, suggesting a more devious or flirtatious character. The last is droopy, which may indicate a sleepy or lazy character. Well, depending on the rest of the eye none of these may apply at all...

 

A few other suggestions: angling the red line downward toward the outside of the face can give the character a more tired look, while angled inward can make them look angry. Curved lines are generally more feminine and classic shoujo anime style, while flatter lines are reminiscent of the cool sports anime rival from the powerhouse school -

 

Take these specific design ideas with a grain of salt, but these are some ideas you might want to loosely take into consideration when drawing or designing characters!

In blue, I've added the bottom line for each eye, purposefully making them all slightly different. The first is extra angular, the second almost intersects with the lashes at the top, while the third is at a flatter angle compared to the main sample. There's less of a variety here, but that doesn't mean you can't exaggerate the shapes further to suit your character designs! Speaking of which, I think the previously-mentioned character type suggestions for these three have been thrown out the window...

 

Generally, the red and blue lines work together to form the general eye shape. While the red line can suggest a character's personality, the blue line adds them a more subtle look to round it out. The bottom line being more rounded or giving the eye a wider look can give off a curious, innocent, or surprised look. A more angular line that narrows the eye can give off a studious, angry, tired, or suspicious look. It depends on how you combine these two lines, and form the rest of the expression with the other key components of the eye!

 

What sort of characters do these eyes look like they belong to?

Next, the shape of the iris is very important in giving the character emotion and expression! The eye facing downwards gives off a nervous or contemplative feeling. The narrow, almost triangular eye fits the devious character type to a T. And finally, having the iris floating in between the top and bottom lines makes the character appear scared or somewhat unhinged, depending on the rest of the expression. Try out different shapes to get a feel for what works best for your style and character!

 

All three elements (red, blue, and green) work together to form the eye shape, and the result can be as expressive or as inexpressive as you want it to be. You can try angling each of the lines differently to test different results. Generally, making eyes seem wider gives off a more shy or cheerful vibe. Making them narrower suggests a more serious or aggressive character. The size, shape, and placement of the pupil also plays a role in giving the character a particular look!

 

Those examples are by no means an exhaustive list of what you can do. Mixing and matching can give you more nuanced results.

And now, we add the eyebrows. See how the eyebrows play a very big role in determining the character's expression? After adding them, we've established a sort of contemplative character, an angry one, and a terrified one.

 

(The angular, strict character has definitely been thrown right out the window.)

And here, I've just added the pupils and eyelid (only for the first two) to show how that would look like. And now these rough sketches are done!

 

Take a step back and examine them. See how just a slightly different shape of a curve can form wildly different eyes? You can mix and match these shapes to form any type of eye. For anime style drawings, the eye shape can really define the character. Using just the shape, angle, and curves of those lines, we can give them a surprising amount of personality!

III. Adding More Details & Adjustments

Now that you have the basic shape of an eye, we can add some extra details as well as further enhance the expression. I've drawn over the multi-coloured guidelines above to get started...we'll be working with the angular eye for now because it's the first one of the three.

Putting the eyes on the face so it's easier to visualize. Who are you?

A really easy way to add more detail—more eyelashes! Here, I've drawn thick, tapered eyelashes at the top. Looking pretty fancy!

We can add thicker eyelashes to the bottom too. Personal stylistic choice, but I like to add defined bottom eyelashes as opposed to one big clump like the top. Alternatively, you can thicken the bottom with a single pointed line and add visible eyelashes to the top! Or only do eyelashes for one or the other. Or no eyelashes at all.

We can even adjust the shape of the eye! I wasn't really feeling the perfectly circular irises, so I'm making them more oval-shaped. This definitely gives off a different feeling compared to the previous image.

Also testing out angry eyebrows instead of the previous more neutral ones. You can make them thicker, thinner, more or less arched, etc. I won't be going over eyebrows too much.

 

Those were just some of the examples of ways we can add detail or change up the expression. We can do all, some, or none of these.

 

Now, let's look at some ways we can adjust the eye shape—in particular, the blue lines, to form even more nuanced expressions.

Without changing the shape of the red lines too much, here I've reshaped the curves of the bottom line for each eye. Drawing over the original outline gives me the freedom to maintain the parts that I like, while adding to or changing the lines I want to make adjustments to.

 

Below is a visual to show the changes in the bottom lines.

For the first eye, I softened the bottom line to a more rounded curve and moved the iris so that it rests underneath the top line. For the second eye, I added bottom eyelashes and softened the eyebrow. For the third eye, I added top eyelashes and raised the bottom line into a curve parallel to the top. With these expressions and eye shapes, none give of an immediate "this is an angry character" or "this is a shy character" sort of vibe. The emotions and personality is more subtle, but each still gives off a very different kind of feeling.

Applying all the techniques we learned, now we can draw a wide variety of eye shapes and styles! I just realized the eyebrows are kind of similar, and unfortunately I have same-eyebrow syndrome and this is an eye tutorial so we're just going to pretend everything is fine.

Here is the same image, colour-coded so you can see which lines are which. See how the red line can curve at all sorts of angles, or even lie flat? Similarly, the blue line determines the wideness of the eye, and the curve can be angular or rounded or something in between. The irises...are also all kind of similar but you can absolutely experiment with different shapes. I just really like my oval eyes, it seems.

 

After breaking down eyes into these simple components, detailed eyes are no longer THAT detailed...right? They're just three lines and a circle. Easy!

IV. Rendering Techniques for Shiny Eyes

Now, let's go through a simple and quick rendering technique using the eyes from the previous section. It's super fast, and low-effort, like...less than 5 minutes kind of fast. Feel free to adjust these techniques to make it look even better!

 

First, make sure you put down some flat colours for the iris. I chose brown, arbitrarily, but any colour is good! Make sure it's somewhere in the middle, not too dark and not too bright. This makes it easier to choose colours for highlights and shadows later on!

Then, you'll want to drop a bit of a lighter, more vibrant colour at the bottom. A semicircle as pictured above will do. I used orange because it pairs perfectly with brown. Feel free to experiment with all sorts of tones across the colour wheel! Red is a great highlight colour for purple, and turquoise for blue, for example. Or you can do something wacky like yellow to highly purple. Or you can just use light blue for dark blue like a normal person. Anything goes!

Add grey shadows with a multiply layer on top of everything. You can colour-pick on the sclera directly from this image—I usually use a warm light grey.

Then, add dark highlights at the top of the eye. I usually do a semicircle just like the orange highlights, with a little bit extra on the pupils.

With a soft, blending brush (I used the CSP default opaque watercolour), swipe a line of light blue right across the top. A semicircle slightly smaller than the dark parts also works. The key is to make it very light and blend in with the dark highlights so the result looks grey-ish. This gives off a nice reflective look with minimal brush strokes.

 

As a very general rule of thumb, you'll want to use a light blue for warm eye colours, and a pink-ish red for cool tones. Sometimes, anything on the opposite side of the colour wheel looks good. Just a warning that I'm not here to teach colour theory, this is just what looks good from my experience.

Then on a new layer on top, add the sparkly highlights! For each eye, I used a different style of sparkles. You can experiment with sparkle placement, colour, shape, etc. I used pure white for a specific technique I'll be covering shortly, but you can use an off-white if it's too blinding. Or even a different colour. There are no rules, just do what looks good to you.

And now for the finishing touch, on a layer underneath the white sparkles, add a bit of bright red. Any vibrant colour will do. This will make the sparkly highlights stand out against the colour of the eye and gives it a 3D kind of effect.

 

And that's it! We're done!

Here is the full set of eyes I drew for the cover of this tutorial because there wasn't enough to fill it out haha. I experimented with highlighting the second set of eyes (the two columns on the right) with turquoise instead of red, and the result is quite nice! I tried a lot of different eye shapes here as well for your reference and perusal.

And we come full circle! Here are the guidelines drawn on top of the eyes above to better visualize the variety of angles and lines to form these eye shapes.

 

Thank you so much for reading my tutorial! I hope it gave you some insight as to how I draw and colour anime eyes. You can mix and match all sorts of shapes to give your character personality with their design, starting with their eyes. Eyes are, after all, the window to the soul...