Make Comics Not Excuses

This is one thing that seems like it should be pretty simple, but I often see a lot of the same mistakes, so I figured we should talk about it.

Part 1: The Shape.

When we think of eyes, in general, we think of almond or football shapes. Now this isn’t quite accurate to begin with, however it’s terribly inaccurate when the eye are in profile. To over simplify its shape, think of your eye in profile as a slice of pie or pizza; round on the outside and pointed on the inside.  Now that we’re got the shape, let’s add the pupil and iris.

Part 2: Pupil & Iris.

We think of the iris and pupil as being at the front of the eye, and that makes sense to a certain extent. They have to be at the front, how else can we see what’s in front of us? But that’s where the most common mistake happens.  The iris (aka the colored part of the eye) is on the surface of the eyeball, the pupil (aka the dark dot in the eye) is not. The pupil is literally a hole in your eyeball covered by a lens. The light goes into this hole and hits your retina  at the back of the eye allowing you to see. So we don’t want to draw the pupil as a black dot on the front of our eye, we want to draw it as if it was a hole in the eye. So when we draw the pupil we want to make this dark hole at the back of the Iris, not the front.

Now that we know how to draw the eye itself in profile, lets talk placement on the face.

Part 3: Placement on the face.

Much like the placement of the pupil, it’s easy to think we should place the eye in the front of the face. Again, it makes sense right? This mistake happens for the same reason the mistake with the pupil happens. We imagine the pupil being on the surface of the eye, we imagine our eyes to be on the surface of our face. But it’s not, they’re imbeded in literal holes in our skull. This fact pushes the placement of the eyes back to be roughly in line with the nostrils.

Bonus tip: The “eyes in line with the nostrils” trick is very useful for drawing the face at any angle. So keep that in mind.

There we go, we have pretty well drawn eyes in profile. Now I didn’t go too in depth with things like eyelids and eyelashes here, I just wanted to hammer out the basics and address the most common errors I see. If you’d like me to do another tutorial on eyes please let me know. In the mean time look at real life eyes, study them, and draw them! Real life is your best teacher!

Ask any questions you might have about this, just leave a comment! And if you have requests for the next Tutorial Tuesday, please let me know!

If you’d like to see more of my work you can read my comic Shadows of Oblivion and you can help support me by contributing to my Patreon.

Keep on drawing, and most importantly Make Comics, Not Excuses!