Introduction

Someone once said that "eyes are windows to the soul."On top of that, eyes can convey several different emotions and can tell you a bit about a character before he or she even speaks. Today, I will be showing you how to draw a simple eye that you might see in anime or manga within the CLIP Studio Paint program.

I) A Simple Eye

First, we are going to want to draw the outline of our basic eye. To do this, we will need to draw a series of curved lines like so. Feel free to use any of the pen or pencil tools. I will be using the G-Pen tool to do my outlines.

Keep doing this until you have the upper eyelid complete. From there, begin working on the eyelashes and the lower eyelid.

From here, you will now want plot where the iris and the pupil will go. Depending on what kind of character you are drawing, you may want to forego the pupil, especially if you are wishing to draw a character that is not right in the head (i.e. under mind control or undergoing a mental break down).

 

If you desire to have a transparent background, an easy way to ensure that the white of the eye, the sclera, does not become transparent as well is to place a solid, dark color behind the area that the eye occupies. From there, fill in the entire area inside of the eyelids with white, including where the pupil and iris go.

 

Also, I rotated the canvas a bit at this point for a better perspective of what I want to do with the eye from this point. So if you wish to, feel free to rotate the canvas. Do not rotate the actual image. By doing so, you will distort the outlines and will need to hit the undo button if it compromises the image to big enough degree.

From there, fill in the pupil with any color you wish. For this tutorial, I will be filling it in with a black color. Do not forget to add in some white specks to the iris and pupil. These specks will be where light is hitting the eye we are drawing. Depending on where you want your light source to be, the appearance of the specks will change.

 

It should be noted that these white specks could also be the "eye glimmer" that many manga and anime characters get when they become extremely delighted. So, feel free to place these in the eyes of excitable characters when they see something that brings them joy.

Now we are going to want our colors. For this eye, I went ahead and filled the iris area with brown-orange color. This first color will be our base color and be where the shadows and highlights will blend.

Now, if you have not done so already, it is best to make a color palette for the eye. This palette will have colors that we will want to be our highlights and shadows. For this, I used the base color and worked towards darkening it for the shadow and then lightening up the base color for the highlight colors.

Now that we have a color palette, we can now use it to plot where we want our highlights and shadow. When making the highlights and shadow, do your best to follow the contour of the eyelids and the iris. We want this to look as nice as possible.

 

Also, make sure each color is on its own layer. The next step will require that each color has its own layer. If they do not have their own layer, this blending method will not work.

From here, we will want to set up the watercolor tool for the blurring/blending part. To do this, go to the watercolor tool and click it. From there, change the settings to something like this and select the transparent rectangle where your color selectors are in the left-most panel.

From here, go to the layer that you put the darkest color on. Use the watercolor tool, with the settings specified, to blend this layer with the base color layer below it.

As you blend the colors, do not be afraid of adding some of the original color back to help make the blending process look crisp. And if it helps, feel free to hide someone the layers until you are done with one you are currently blending.

After you finish blending the colors, you should get something like this. You are now done.

II) More Eyes

Now that we finished our first eye, let us take a look at some other eyes that I have drawn. Do you think you can copy them?

Also, do not forget to add eyebrows to your eyes. Eyebrows can help give the eyes more character. In this particular eye, I wanted to portray a menacing, slightly crazed look. This can be achieved by enlarging the pupils to a size larger-than-normal in comparison to the iris and changing how the specks of light shine in the eye. What would have been a large, white dot is now a white sliver, kind of like a cut. Also, adding a little bit of that pinkish-red flesh to the inner corner of the eye can help make it look more menacing too.

 

You can even add folds to the eyelid and places where flesh wrinkles to further enhance the look if you so desire.

Final Words

Now that you know a little bit more about drawing anime/manga eyes, test yourself and apply them to a face. Eyes may be fun and relaxing to draw by themselves, but when they are given to a face you can create a whole new character for an illustration or just to pass the time when you get bored.

 

While the eyes that I showed you may not be realistic, I do hope they give you guys a new avenue of drawing eyes.

 

And remember, practice makes perfect!