How do I draw eyes that look real rather than flat?

Almost everyone draws the eye shape correctly and it still looks wrong, because the shape is the least important part. What makes an eye read as real is that it is a wet sphere partly covered by two flaps of skin with measurable thickness, sitting in a bony hollow, and every part of that description changes the drawing.

Step by step

1. Establish the socket before the eye.The eye sits in a bony hollow with a brow ridge above it and a cheekbone below. Sketch that hollow as a shape in the head first. An eye drawn without its socket floats on the surface of the face.
2. Draw the eyeball as a ball, lightly, before the lids.A full circle, of which you will only ever see a slice. Both lids then curve over that ball, which is what stops the almond shape from reading as flat. Erase the construction afterwards.
3. Give the upper lid a thickness.The lid is several millimetres of skin, so it has a lower edge you can see, in shadow, and the lashes grow from that edge rather than from the drawn line. This single detail does more for realism than the iris ever does.
4. Put the darkest value under the upper lid.The lid overhangs the eyeball and casts a shadow across the top of the iris. That shadow, not the pupil, is usually the darkest thing in the eye, and drawing the iris as a uniform tone loses it.
5. Make the iris darker at the top and lighter at the bottom.Light entering the eye passes through and reflects, so the iris is generally lightest opposite the light source and at the bottom. Draw the fibres radiating from the pupil rather than filling in a disc.
6. Keep the pupil truly black and truly round.It is a hole. In a three-quarter view it becomes an ellipse, along with the iris, and the minor axis of that ellipse points along the direction the eye is looking.
7. Do not draw the white as white.The sclera is a shiny ball in a shadowed socket. It is usually a light-to-mid grey, darker at the corners and under the upper lid, and only picks up a true white at one point. Painting it white is what makes eyes look staring and cartoonish.
8. Place one specular highlight and leave it as clean paper.It sits partly on the iris and partly on the pupil, on the side the light comes from, and it should be the brightest point in the whole picture. Reserve it from the beginning rather than trying to erase it out later.
9. Draw the lashes last, in clumps, curving.Lashes are not a fringe of parallel lines. They grow in irregular groups, curve away from the eye, are thickest at the base and taper, and are shortest at the inner corner. Fewer and better is always right.

Tips

• The inner corner contains the tear caruncle — a small pink fleshy lump. It is one of the details that instantly reads as observed rather than invented.
• The lower lid catches light along its thickness, which is why the bottom edge of the eye is usually a light line rather than a dark one. Drawing a hard dark line under the eye ages a face by twenty years.
• Both eyes must share a direction of gaze. Draw a light line from each pupil to the point being looked at and check they converge sensibly.
• Eyebrows are hair growing out of a bony ridge, not a shape drawn on skin. The hairs at the inner end grow upwards and the outer ones sweep outwards.

Common mistakes

• Outlining the whole eye with an even dark line — The eye has no outline. It has a lid edge above with thickness and lashes, a lit lower lid, and corners with quite different shapes. A uniform outline is what makes it read as a symbol.
• Drawing the iris as a complete circle — The upper lid almost always covers the top of the iris on a relaxed face. A fully visible iris reads as alarm or shock, which is presumably not what you meant.
• Two symmetrical eyes — No face is symmetrical, and in any view except dead-on the two eyes are seen from slightly different angles. Copying one and mirroring it looks synthetic.

If it doesn't work

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