Anime Eyes By Us – Ignite Art Tutorials
Do you want your anime art to come alive? Focus on the eyes!
It is not for nothing that the eyes have been timelessly remarked as the window to the soul. Your eyes give away even the most complex of the hidden expressions bubbling within your heart. Why not use the same to breathe life into your art?
One of the secrets to creating a scintillating piece of art is to get your anime character’s eyes right. Do that and you’ve already put half of the image in your mind to paper. Without much ado, let’s get started on our guide to draw almost any kind of anime eyes.
If you’re a beginner with some experience in drawing plain art, you’ll notice the almond shape all human eyes assume. But unlike human forms, anime characters are born out of our own imagination. The little secret here is: you can make them have eyes in any kind of shape you want!
Let us begin with the simplest of these – the plain, happy eyes expression. If you’re a novice with some expertise groping for professional instructions in the dark, follow How2DrawManga’s step-by-step tutorial on drawing anime eyes.
~How to Draw Manga Girl Eyes 3 Ways
By: Learn2DrawManga on YouTube
Just start with a huge hill-like curve for the top eye-lid and a slightly flat line at the bottom. These lines form the eyelids for your character’s eyes. With slightly more thickness towards the middle and less towards both its outer ends.
At this point, add eyelashes. Shorter starting from the top and generously flying outwards as you move towards the outer portion of the eyes at the bottom. Fill this portion with the iris and the pupil next. The iris being a huge oval circle going all the way from the top to the bottom. The iris being within the upper and the lower lines we just drew.
The pupil is drawn as a smaller circle within the iris, usually, a 3/4th oval emerging from the upper eye-lid. Next, we come to highlights in the pupil and the iris.
~ Favorite One?
By: @artist_pandaa on Instagram
Highlights add depth and realism into your character’s eyes. As a result, the highlights form half a bubble towards the top of the pupil touching the upper eyelid. In addition, a second one is done towards the lower right corner. This overlaps the pupil without its outline showing in the rest of the iris.
Of course, you can add a few more highlights depending on how you want to bring out your character. @artist_panda demonstrates this skillfully in his 6 x 3 eye-grid art. Each of these eyes reflects a different, albeit deep emotion. Owing to the playful choice of colors and the highlights.
With that, we finish the basic skeleton of the eye. If you take a closer look at it, you’ll notice that the eye you just drew looks more feminine. In order to add a masculine touch, skip the eye-lashes and maintaining the top-to-bottom length of the iris and the pupil, squeeze them a little bit flat from the left and the right ends. Or, you can draw pointy eyes, with the top eye-lid more like a flat line that bends sharply downwards as it moves towards the outside. Such eyes, without any doubt, belong to an adrenaline-pumping masculine face.
~Eyes of Fire
By: @shinxdraws on Instagram
Another little detail that makes a lot of difference is the shading in the eyes. Usually, irrespective of the gender, the pupil is completely shaded. For the iris, you can impart depth into it by starting to shade from the top and fade out towards the bottom. You can add similar detailing to the remaining part of the eye inside the eyelid – just remember to keep the shade lighter as compared to the tone in the iris.
Once you gain expertise in simple eye-shading, you can experiment with eye colors and add gradients to the eyes to reflect complex emotions, much like @shinxdraws does in her art which we playfully like to call “Eyes of Fire”. Needless to say, her perfect portrayal of different eyes made it a child’s play for fans take a quick guess at characters they belonged to.
~20 Ways Drawing Manga Eyes
By: Whyt Manga on YouTube
Notice how we are able to manipulate our character’s entire emotional form with just the eyes. Don’t want the character to look alive? Whyt Manga unveils the perfect trick to do this. Implant a zombie or a dead character with a just small black pupil nestled within the upper and the lower eyelids.
Over the course of 20 different eye drawings, this erudite illustrator gives away more such run-of-the-mill tips and tricks you can apply to your own style of drawing in his YouTube video titled “20 Ways Drawing Manga Eyes”.
~How To Draw EYES FROM AN ANGLE IN ANIME MANGA
By: mikeymegamega on YouTube
Once you’ve mastered these plain, simple, happy eyes, you just need to play with the angle, the form, and the shape. mikeymegamega patiently illustrates the details of drawing eyes at an angle, a feat he perpetually finds his fans struggling with, in a video titled “How To Draw EYES FROM AN ANGLE IN ANIME MANGA” on his YouTube Channel.
Just follow these basic rules and go wherever your pencil trace takes you. Or, as Whyt Manga keeps repeating thought his videos, “Break the Rules!” and you never know when you’d end up with a phenomenal art or an OC!
