How to Draw an Eye in Conte Crayon

It's easy to draw the human eye once you know the trick. It's mind-numbingly difficult until you do, something I had enormous trouble with and so have almost all the beginners I've ever known. Conte crayon is an expressive medium that won't let the artist bog down in details, it demands good line and allows great shading.

Eyes are emotional. Eyes are alive. Eyes are what gives the likeness in any portrait. So let's draw the human eye the way it really is, and watch your drawing look back at you!

Difficulty: Moderate

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Conte crayon
• Kneaded eraser
• Stump or tortillon (cardboard blender)
• Drawing paper
• Large photos of people, graduation photos are good, where eyes are at least 3/4" wide.
• Matte workable fixative
• Art history book with Renaissance or pre-20th century drawings, large images

1. 
   Cartoon eyes, stylized eyes and an Egyptian style profile with eye that's turned to the side.

   Draw a sketch of an eye from imagination, the way you usually do. Don't copy the main illustration of this article, don't look at a photo, just draw it. Date it for today. Put it off to one side on the sketch paper because it's there for comparison.
   
   Eyes are something that grabs humans by instinct. The simplest symbolic eyes are just a pair of dots in a circle -- a smiley is what human beings inevitably respond to as emotion. An infant only recognizes two dark blotches and a third that widens into a smile. That same powerful instinct interferes with learning how to draw eyes though! Egyptian painters put people in profile but drew eyes on the sides of their heads as if the eye was looking to the side, directly at the viewer.
   
   Your first eye may look like one of these cartoon eyes. Cartoonists often simplify the eye and make it symbolic, so don't feel too bad -- their art makes us laugh and immediately goes to the gut. These eyes are perfectly good for cartoons unless you're trying anime, and drawing anime eyes is another entire lesson in itself. But if the eyes you draw always look like cartoons and you want them realistic -- read on!

2. 
   Copy of just one eye from a drawing of a young girl by Leonardo da Vinci

   Look through one or more art history books for drawings of faces by masters like Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, any of the realist masters of previous centuries. Ink sketches and pencil sketches or silverpoint drawings are the most useful, because they show the marks and crosshatching unlike realistic paintings.
   
   My example is a young woman's eye copied from a drawing by Leonardo da Vinci, close to an exact copy except that my shading isn't quite as refined as his. This is an eye shown in a face that's at a 3/4 angle -- a very flattering angle for portraits. Eyes look different in profile, in full face or in 3/4 view.
   
   This one has identity. She's clearly Italian -- two or three of my Italian relatives had eyes just like hers with big rounded lids, very dramatic eyes. She's not modernized with a lot of mascara, so it's possible to see the likeness in the shape of the eyelids.
   
   Try copying an eye from a classical source, try that now and then no matter how good you get. It'll teach many other skills besides drawing realistic eyes, my shading and hatching is a bit better from copying Leonardo.
   
   Incidentally, Leonardo da Vinci invented sanguine drawing crayons in 1480, after a fixative was discovered for using iron oxide mixed with chalk. Today's sanguine Conte crayons are very similar to the medium he used for so many famous drawings!

3. 
   Eyes in profile -- realistic, simplified and cartoon

   An eye in profile looks very different. Here are three examples of profile eyes. On the far right is a cartoon profile eye, which would be good enough for any simple line drawing of a person and establish immediately that your toon is looking to the left. Even cartoons are improved by drawing an eye that's in profile on a profile instead of following the Egyptian example.
   
   In the center the profile eye is reduced to its strongest lines without any shading, and has the same eyelid shape as Leonardo's young woman. Simplified, it's possible to see what's going on -- the eye itself is a sphere and the lids have thickness. In the case of Leonardo's model, they have quite a bit of thickness, something that's an individual trait. Some eyelids are thinner than that. Eyelid shapes are unique. They show family relationships, ethnic background, personality and expression. Eyelids are the part of the eye that changes constantly.
   
   The eye itself, pupil, iris and white, only changes direction. It's a sphere with a smaller circle on it and within that iris circle, a pupil of varying width. Eyelids are the likeness and the expression.
   
   Leftmost is a detailed profile eye drawing similar to Leonardo's but done without a model. Try finding a profile photo in a magazine or among your photos and look closely at it, if it's a small photo, use your printer to enlarge it and print it out in black and white. You'll see the same shapes -- all in tones, light and dark. There are lines for creases around the eye in some eyes, but the only real lines in any human face are the line of the eyelashes (if dark) and the line between the lips.
   
   Try drawing profile eyes, copying my examples and drawing from photos. On your drawing from a photo, do you see a difference in the shape of the eyelids and eyebrow?

4. 
   Eyelids drawn realistically without anything within the eye area itself.

   Try drawing just the eyelids without drawing the iris or pupil, without adding anything into the eye. Shade the upper lid and lower lid. Get their shapes as exact as you can. Resemblance is in the eyelid, not the eye itself other than whether it's light or dark in a monochrome drawing. But you can recognize an individual just from shape of the lids.
   
   On the lower lid, notice the edge of the lower lid has thickness. It's usually a little lighter there than under it for shading, it will be defined in soft value changes. Lower eyelashes are sparse and radiate outward a bit. Upper eyelashes sweep off to the side somewhat, but may also radiate forward depending on how closed or open the eye is.
   
   Because the eye is spherical, the center of the eyelid is pushed forward by the eye itself and will be lighter than the corners. It may catch a highlight and be very strongly highlighted, or it may just have a softer highlight within the shadow cast by the brow ridge. Different people's eyes are deepset or not, and this will affect the shadows cast on the skin around the eye. That makes complex shadow shapes and thus makes it hard to draw the eye entirely in lines.
   
   To draw eyelids accurately, think in shapes and tones, and don't add that eyelashes line till the last.
   
   The inner corner of the eye has two structures I drew a little more prominently in this example just to point them out -- the conjunctiva and tear ducts do show. Unlike the white of the eye, they are skin colored but they are wet like the surface of the eye and may also catch glossy highlights if you do a very large detailed rendering.
   
   The shape of the opening of the eye is rarely a simple pointed oval. It's asymmetrical, wider toward one side than the other, the exact shape of it will vary from person to person. Generally it's an almond shape though, more pointy toward the outside. Almond shaped eyes are very beautiful and many famous beauties are described with almond shaped eyes... so maybe this is instinct too, to look for perfection of that shape in someone's eyes.
   
   If you can get the likeness at this stage before adding iris and pupil, you'll have a good drawing of that person and other mistakes may not matter nearly as much.
   
   Practice drawing many different people's eyes from photos but don't fill in the iris and pupil yet.

5. 
   The Man with Transparent Eyelids example

   The iris is a circle on a sphere. Try picking up a small rubber ball and drawing a circle on it about 1/3 of its width, put a dot in the middle that's about a third the width of the circle, and you have a model of the actual eye. It rolls around in the socket to look at different things. So let's sketch the man with transparent eyelids to show what happens when he looks up and some of the iris is behind his eyelid.
   
   The eye itself is shaded at the edges with a tortillon, a little dramatically to show the point. Because the eye is really a sphere, it will be shaded a bit at the edges and it will have a strong shadow going across it from the eyelashes. With the transparent eyelid, you can see where the rest of the iris is.
   
   Very rarely does the entire iris show. Usually a little is cut off at the bottom and more is cut off at the top unless the person's eyes are wide open as in fear. So rather than drawing the iris as a circle that just touches the top and bottom eyelid, draw a section of the iris that slides up under the eyelids -- and it'll come out a lot more realistically.

6. 
   Self-portrait of the author's eye

   Using a mirror or taking a close-up photo with a web cam or digital camera, draw your own eye. Look at how your eyelids differ from the example eyelids. Draw the shadows around your eye and the shapes of light and dark around it, sketch in the creases lightly. Even if you are young and your eyes are bright and fresh, there will be some faint creases. The skin of eyelids folds in ways that are unique to every person and generally the same for everyone.
   
   It's seeing those unique details that makes drawing eyes so much fun and so rewarding. Because when you get the shape of the eyelids accurate and shadowed in so that it's three dimensional, you will have the likeness.
   
   Look for the shiny little highlight from the light in the room. Reserve those by lightly sketching around them. Using a tortillon, shade in the shadows on the eye itself -- wherever they are. If they are over half the eye, like the entire outside corner of my eye was shadowed, shade it in. Your mind may know the whites of eyes are white, but if they're darkened by shadows, get the values right.
   
   Sketch the section of the iris that shows under your eyelid. Make sure there is an eye highlight to make the surface of the eye look wet and shiny. I put that in even if it's not there on the model, because it makes eyes look a lot more realistic. My pupil was very expanded because my eyes were shadowed when I took the reference photo for this drawing with my phone. So sketch the pupil as it is, don't make it smaller or larger because of what pupils should look like.
   
   Use the tortillon to smudge the shading around the eye and spray this last eye study with workable fixative. Continue to draw eyes from life and from photos, until your drawings are always recognizable.
   
   Draw children's eyes and old people's eyes. Draw animal eyes and look at the differences. Try to draw all the detailed little patterns in someone's iris with a pencil, shading light and dark as they do, and always put eye shine on any portrait eye whether it's there or not.
   
   Glossy surfaces like the wet surface of an eyeball are called "active surfaces" by photographers and get strong white highlights. Matte or inactive surfaces like skin don't get sharp highlights like that, so the one detail of an eye highlight on the surface of the eye establishes texture and makes the eye look real. Placing eye shine over the edge of the pupil makes it the strongest contrast of light and dark and the focal point of any portrait.

Tips & Warnings

• Try drawing eyes in different mediums. You may prefer felt tip pens or graphite pencils to Conte crayon, but sketching in many styles will help you become more familiar with eye structures.
• Study the eye in anatomy books. Look at the muscles of the eyelids and see how they create the shapes we draw.
• When using photo references from magazines, combine them with other references or only use a small part of the photo so as to avoid violating the photographer's copyright.