2021-05-10

41. Painting eyes

Now comes just a short, but important topic about the eyes (Go for the eyes Boo, go for the eyes!).

Painting eyes is probably the most intimidating to do for a beginner like me (I mean in around 28mm miniatures, because I wouldn’t bother with eyes on smaller scales). As I’m not a particularly good painter, moreover, I would rather say worse than mediocre, so I was searching and experimenting to find the easiest process for it. Long story short, here is what I found out (I draw some pictures, because it’s much easier to see the essence so, than on photos):

  1. Paint the face with skin color.

  2. Paint the eyes white/ivory, but no need to be very precise, two blobs are ok.

  3. Draw the irises, but not with brush, with fineliner (a marker with a very fine tip, I use 0,1mm). Black gives here the most contrast, but other colors can be used too (in this scale would be hard to make a difference between pupil and iris, so I make just one dot). Here is important, that the direction of the look is determinded by position of these spots so care must be taken to avoid silly looks. Alternatively a small brush can be used too, but dont bother making circles: just draw a line in top-down direction. Overhanging parts will be fixed in the next step, just watch out, that the line thicknesses should be the same.

  4. Paint the lower and upper eyelids with the skin color. Try to make it in one, easy stroke, for that, the consistency of the paint should be right: too thin, and it runs everywhere, to thick, and it’s like drawing with chalk. The trick is, that its much easier to paint the eyelids in two strokes, where You have to take care only for one edge of both strokes, than to paint the small, white part, where everything should fit.




  5. Use a wash on the whole face, but take care, that it shouldn’t pool on the eyeball. On a good sculpt, that gives a bit better definition to the eyes, making a darker outlines.

And remember, if I can paint eyes, everybody can!

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