How to Draw a Female Eye

Posted on 30. Oct, 2009 by DAS Team in Face, Tutorials

This tutorial has been created in Photoshop CS3. Drawing a female eye is all about curves and proportions. Female eyes can be created in many ways (also depending on the emotions or feeling the artist wants to project), but in this tutorial we are just drawing a beautiful standard female eye with not much emotion being presented.

First start by creating a new file in Photoshop as follows:

Once you have your file done, apply a skin color as your background. This will be very helpful when applying the skin color at the end because it acts as a datum where you can contrast any other  color shades applied above.

Create a new layer and name it ‘Eye’. This is the layer that you will use to draw the eyes in it. The reason we created the eyes on a new layer is to change the location or size at anytime if we wanted to. Now start drawing the outline of the eye with a darker skin color. DO NOT do it with black because it will give you a very hard time when using the smudge tool. Use the brush size of 10.

After creating the outline of the eye, apply darker shades of color in the places you want to emphasis such as the Iris for example. You can create the Iris outline with a darker color because you can smudge it later with the dark blue color that will be applied.

The iris is a VERY important part in giving the eye character but first you should understand the nature of it. The eyes have a pupil in the center which is the black circle in the top middle of the eye. The iris shades all seem to revolve around the pupil, so when you apply the shades around the iris make sure they all direct to the pupil as follows:

With the smudge tool, start smudging the shades together in the direction pointing towards to the pupil. Do not smudge in either a horizontal or vertical direction, but rather towards the pupil. This is very important because it gives depth to your eyes. After you have done so, apply with a small brush size the base of the eyelashes.

With brush size of 8, start doing one by one each eyelash. Be very patient while doing so, and make each eyelash point to a slightly different direction to give the eyes a natural look. Once you have done with that, insert a very small white circle in your pupil. That white circle will create MAGIC to your eyes making it look 100 times more realistic.

Eye brows define the eye and they are very important in providing character and personality to your eyes. Here we start by first applying a base color in which we will later apply hair strokes on (in the same way we did the eye lashes).

Patiently, apply each and every hair stroke with a very small brush size (brush size 7). At the left of the eye, the more the hair stroke is more vertical and the more you move to the right, make the hair stroke more horizontal.

All what is left now is to smudge the skin tones that we were applying all along the way. With a big smudge tool (size 13 to 15), start smudging all the skin tones together. In the zone directly under the eyes, use a smaller smudge tool to provide detail and reality to the skin, this will make the eyes pop out even more. This is what you should now end with (below). Hope you guys found that helpful and have fun drawing

Tags: brow, eye, eyelashes, female eyes, pupil, sight