Any tips on painting eyes?
Sorry that I’m replying a bit later than usual! Usually I’m a bit faster at this.
First things that come to mind, if you are asking about doing them in a painterly style, are:
Color is relative and depends on your color scheme
Therefore, blue eyes might not necessarily be bright blue
Also whites are not necessarily white
Overdetailing can make eyes look uninteresting
Position of highlight can impact the look and expression of the character
I’ll go over those points in a bit more detail…
So, I already said that color is VERY relative. It’s often tempting to splash on that bright saturated blue for blue eyes, but usually you actually don’t need that. The color you might need to use depends on your color scheme. Every color you have on your piece will impact how some other color is perceived.
Colors that are right next to each other on the color wheel might dim each other out.
Complimentary colors tend to make each other stand out more, and seem brighter.
You can see both of those going on in the example below (yellow dot is the same color in both):
Things get a bit more complex when you also include saturation and value of the color. Good thing is that how we treat color is rather subjective, and with practice you can develop a gut sense for what colors to use!
Back to topic of relative color, on this piece the character’s face is in mostly warm and slightly saturated tones. So I merely need something that is desaturated and cold to act as blue. Gray often does that! In this particular case, I actually used some gray-brown to act as dark blue in left example.
On the right I applied actual dark blue. Note how it jumps out like it doesn’t belong? That’s because that color is not present anywhere else in the piece. However, if you need something to really stand out, that is what you’d go for.
Note also that whites are not white? Usually, in painting you can just get away with a bit more desaturated or lighter skin tone. If you were to add actual white for the whites of the eye, it would stand out far too much, and adding white in general to your color can at times make it seem washed out.
As for actually painting the eyes, try not to zoom in too much and overdetail. If you’re aiming for painterly style, you want to use your brush strokes to suggest form, not outright define it. Below I provided and example of how I usually draw eyes according to that advice, and beside it I placed an example with what you might not want if striving for a more painterly approach.
Note how the eye in the left example seems more intriguing exactly because of not being worked out to the last detail? When you leave things out for the viewer to add details to, it tends to captivate their attention more. Marco Bucci wonderfully explained the particulars of that in this video of his.
That doesn’t imply that making hyper-realistic images with all the details right there is wrong. It simply comes down to what you want to do with your work and what response you wish to evoke in the viewer.
Lastly, the way you position the white highlight on the eye can greatly impact the way we perceive character’s expression. In the example below I used the same detail of a piece and moved around the highlights.
Note how in example 1, where there’s no highlights, eyes look tired and can make the character seem lethargic.
In example 2 the highlight is placed directly over the pupils and it makes the character seem enthralled or as if under a spell.
Example 3 shows the most common highlight placement for most scenes since it just gives volume to the eyes.
And lastly, in example 4 there are multiple highlights, which can give off a sense of wonder.
Try to experiment with highlights, depending on what kind of scene you’re trying to depict, and see what works best for your idea!
And for the end, here’s a quick little demo gif I made of a portrait, while focusing on detailing of the eyes. Perhaps it can give you some ideas how to build up eyes in your own creative process!
