Hi, everyone! I'm Yaine, a professional illustrator and comic artist, and today we'll learn how to draw different types of eyes.

 

If you prefer this content in video, check it here:

But before we begin, we must know: why is this important?

Why is this important?

When people look at each other, the eye is the most important part used for recognizing. Take a look at these 3 characters:

They have exactly the same hair and face, but they already look like completely different people because of the eyes.

 

So when we're drawing, let's use eyes to help readers differentiate characters!

 

Understanding shape language

In art, shapes play an essential role in determining how a character is perceived by the viewer. Let's compare these two pair of eyes:

What type of character would have each of them?

 

Probably, number 1 would be for a lively, happy, innocent character, while number 2 would be for a colder, sharper, maybe more dangerous character.

 

That is because, in shape language, roundness (circles) represents characters that are harmless and approachable, while sharpness (triangles) and angles represent danger and unpredictability. These are not absolute, of course, but are a good rule of thumb.

 

On top of it, because we see eyes as windows to the soul, larger eyes make for more trustworthy characters, while smaller eyes represent a closed or cold character.

Changing eyes shape

So, when we want to make different characters, what do we do?

 

You can start by changing the outside shape. That's when you can determine the ethnicity of a character as well.

 

You can make this by changing the angles, sharpness and roundness of the outer area:

Changing eyes size

Another element we can change is the size. As mentioned before, this will change how approachable/friendly your character seems to be.

 

Here are some examples:

Changing iris and pupil

Now we get to the most exciting part! Changing the iris and pupil will yield the greater results in differentiating characters.

 

There are so many changes we can make, I can only show you a few.

 

The iris can shange in size and shape:

Or even just the shading style:

And we can also change the pupil and the highlight:

Noticee that removing the highlight (example 2) makes the eye seem colder, and the opposite is also true: adding more highlight make it friendlier (example 3).

Changing eyebrows and eyelashes

Lastly, we can also change the eyebrow and eyelashes, and they will also support our character design:

We can see from these examples that:

 

1) Longer, fuller eyelashes make for more feminine eyes,

 

2) Thinner and more angular eyebrows make for sharper characters,

 

3) Rounder and fuller eyebrows make for friendlier characters.

Final tip: experiment!

With only these few iterations, we were already able to make so many different types of eyes:

So the most important lesson you can take from this is, experiment! You can make many small changes and several iterations! As you do, try to understand how shape language affects your characters.

Closing thoughts

I hope this tutorial was useful to you! If you have any questions, just comment it down below!

 

If you enjoyed this, like and favorite this tutorial to use it as reference later.

 

Thank you for reading this and bye bye!