How to Paint Blue Eyes in Photoshop

Illustrators and artists use Photoshop to create digital paintings. Painting eyes, especially in portraits, can be difficult at first, but once you have a formula, it can be quite simple. With a little bit of Photoshop knowledge, you can learn this formula. Because blue is a commonly illustrated eye color, it is very useful to learn how to paint it in Photoshop.

Things You'll Need

• Computer
• Scanner
• Adobe Photoshop
• Drawing of an eye

Instructions

1. 

   Start with a good drawing of an eye. Make sure you scan it in at 300 dpi. Bring it into Photoshop.

2. 

   Create a new layer. Put this new layer on multiply. Select the iris or part of the eye which will be colored (use either the pen tool or the polygonal lasso tool). Select the shade of blue you want to use, possibly a deep, slightly dark blue. This is a base color. Lighter colors will be worked in as well.

3. 

   Select a lighter shade of blue. Use the paintbrush tool and select a soft brush with a 25% opacity. Paint around the pupil (black center of the eye) with the lighter color. Keep the edges the darker blue.

4. 

   Create a new layer. Keep this layer on normal, and make sure it is above the other layers. With a lighter color of blue, paint on top of your original drawing lines and blend in the lighter color that you just created on the previous layer. Now select a darker blue (darker than your original blue base color) and paint along the edges and in between the lighter shades. Keep going between the darker and lighter blue shades, back and forth, until you are happy with the effect. Eventually, it will start to look like clouds in an evening sky.

5. 

   Select black and make your paintbrush bigger. Keep it on a soft brush, but turn the opacity to 100%. Paint one distinct circle on top of your original drawing where the pupil is.

6. 

   Make highlights. With your paintbrush tool, select a hard brush and make them smaller. Paint three highlights at the top and two at the bottom. The two at the bottom should both be smaller than the top one. Make sure that none of them is a perfect circle or exactly the same as the other.

7. 

   Change the hard brush to a soft brush and turn the opacity down to about 75%. Paint around the edges of the hard highlights. The bottom two highlights should be connected by a soft line between them. There you have it! A beautifully painted dreamy blue eye!

Tips & Warnings

• Take as long as you need to get the color correct.

• Try different methods based on this formula. You may find a way that is slightly different but works better for you.

• For a flatter style, skip steps 3 and 4 and use only hard brushes for the pupil and highlights.