Posts Tagged ‘illustrat’

a step by step guide to drawing eyes

Hi Guys

This week we will look at the basics of drawing eyes. Start with a shape. In this case I chose a square.

On the example we have typical male eyes on the left and on the right we have typical female eyes.

With my style, the men’s eyes are larger than female eyes by default. This isn’t always the case, but it’s a guide to help you find your own style.

Now add in the iris and pupil. The position, size and shape will determine emotion and personality.

For example, a large round eye with a tiny pupil could mean fright or anger. If someone is looking to the side then they could be shy or suspicious.

Try out different positions and see what happens.

Now look at the eyelashes. Women have longer, fuller eyelashes than males. The fuller you make the eyelashes look the sexier the character starts to look.

Tip: Be careful, thick eyelashes on a guy usually don’t work. Few artists can pull that off.

Children usually have larger eyes than adults. This adds to their feeling of innocence. Look at the bottom middle set of eyes, these are the eyes of a child. In this case the eyelashes aren’t an issue because the character is so young.

It’s the hair and clothes that will make it either a girl or a boy.

Please post your thoughts or illustrations on here.

This week we are going to look at knowing where your shadow areas are going to be.

This will all depends on where your light source is coming from.

I usually do this in colour (we will cover this in a future blog), but a lot of artists do the shadows in the drawing phase. So if you’re that way inclined have a look at the drawing for this week.

From left to right. The first guy is a typical male character and the light source is coming in from the right. Therefore all the shading would be on the opposite side. Notice what happens with eyes, nose and cheeks. Make sure that your shading takes into account the contours of the face.

Secondly, the smiling character. The light in this case is coming from underneath his face. This is probably the hardest to do because all the shading would be in areas which usually have no shading. So, this can be rather confusing, just plan correctly.

The 3rd drawing of the woman. The light source is in the same place as the 1st drawing although her head is slightly turned towards it. Look at the significant difference it makes to how you shade her. Now the shading doesn’t cover half the face anymore.

And lastly in the fourth drawing the light is coming from behind the character. So all his forward features would be in shadow.

When you choose a light source you need to consider what impact the shading will have on the character. Is this going to work with the rest of the emotion that you are trying to convey?

Tip: When you are trying to decide what to shade and what not to shade, look at the parts of the face that protrude. Chances are that those are the parts that aren’t shaded, they would create shadow behind them.

Practice makes perfect with this one. Experiment and have fun!

In part 2 of how to create the look for your character, we look at colours.

I’ll create a short Photoshop colouring tutorial soon, but for now let’s assume you know some method of colouring (even if its crayons or markers the same rules apply). Firstly we choose our colours and we colour his skin, hair and clothes with a base colour.

Chose your colour wisely. Colour often gives your character more of a personality.

Dark colours for a bad guy, light colours for good guys and neutral colours for guys like our gnome here. He could be good or bad. But with these colours he’s not completely unapproachable.

Now you need to figure out where you want the light source to come from. This can be the sun a candle, a light a torch, a fire, pretty much anything that gives off light.

Coloured in goblin

I decided that the light would be coming from the top right side.

Next you pick a darker version of the base colour and shade him where the shadows would fall. This creates much more depth and dimension to the character.

Next week we will look at how to put him into some scenes and show movement and body language.