PS Drawing 101 : The Eyes

The eyes are vital in any portrait painting, it is where different expressions are conveyed and it is often the focal point of any portrait. As they say, "The eyes are the windows to the soul" so what better way to jumpstart Graphicult's Drawing Tutorial Series than sharing some tips in illustrating the Eyes.

1. Create a new file (the one i made was 600x600), Create a new Layer (Shft+Ctrl+N), rename it as Outline.

Our goal is to make something similar to the End Result and this will be done freehandedly.

2. Select the brush tool and choose the hard round brush size 5px & foreground color should be Black or #000000.

Select the Outline layer.

3. Select the Pen tool, make sure the settings are the same as the ones below.

You need to set three points. Point A will be the inner tip, B will be the curvature and C will be the outer tip. When you click on Point B, drag it slightly downwards to create a curve between the points. Point A & B should be aligned horizontally.

5. Do steps 3 & 4 again to draw lower half of the eye. For finer details such as wrinkles, eyelashes, adjust the brush size (refer to Step 2). You should get an image similar to the one below. For the eyebrows, i set the brush size to 32px.

6. Now we'll be doing the Iris, select the Elliptical Marquee Tool (M), then create a circle on the Outline Layer, then select the brush tool and fill in the Iris.

7. To create the Pupil, select the elliptical marquee tool and click the Subtract from Selection option (red box below). Now create a circle slightly smaller than the Iris and a smaller circle inside, which will be your Pupil.

Select the Eraser Tool (make sure you select the Hard Round brush, work with a brush size you're comfortable with) and erase the inner portion of the Iris, you should end up with something similar to the one below.

8. Create a new layer (Shft+Ctrl+N), name it as Color & make sure it's below the Outline Layer. Select the brush tool and choose a color for the eyes and color the area inside the Iris.

Then color the tear gland (#FFBDBD) as well as the skin (#FFEDBE) surrounding the eyes, remember to resize your brush to fill in the small gaps.

9. Create a new layer, rename it as Highlight and place this one on top of the Outline layer.

Select the Brush tool, set the color to white (#FFFFFF) then put in some highlights on the pupil.

Basically that's it, if you want to accentuate, you can go ahead and add layers for shadows, highlights, put in extra details like eyelashes and so on.