How to Paint Green Eyes in Photoshop

Many illustrators and artists use Photoshop to create digital paintings and illustrations. Painting eyes, especially in portraits, can be difficult at first, but once you have a formula down, it can be quite simple. With a little bit of Photoshop knowledge, you can learn this formula. Green eyes have a mystical jade quality about them and this can be achieved by using Photoshop.

Things You'll Need

• Adobe Photoshop
• Drawing of an eye scanned file

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 and put this 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 green you will want to use. This will the base color, so use the middle-ground color of green you will use. Select the paintbucket tool and fill in the selected area.

3. 

   Select a lighter shade of green. Think in terms of how an emerald sparkles. Use the paintbrush tool and select a soft brush with a 25 percent opacity. Paint around the pupil (black center of the eye) with the lighter color. Keep the edges the darker green, like the deeper part of an emerald.

4. 

   Create a new layer. Keep this layer on normal and make sure it is above the other layers. With the lighter color of green, paint on top of your original drawing lines as well as blending into the lighter color that you just created on your multiply layer. Now select a darker green (darker than your original green) and paint along the edges to make them darker and in between the lighter shades. Keep going between the darker and lighter shades back and forth until you are happy with the eye color effect. You should start to get a jade effect.

5. 

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

6. 

   Make your highlights. With your paintbrush tool, select a hard brush and make them smaller (as in the example image). Paint three highlights at the top and two at the bottom. The two at the bottom should both be smaller than the top one. None of the highlights should be exactly the same shape. Make them all a little different, imperfect circles.

7. 

   Change the hard brush to a soft brush and turn the opacity down to about 75 percent. Paint around the edges of the hard highlights. The bottom two highlights should be connected by a soft line between them as in the example image. Softening the highlights will make it look less like a gemstone and more like an 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

• Make sure the highlights are not too large. This will make the eye look scary.

• Make sure that the pupil is not too small. This will make the eye look scary as well.