Drawing Eye Expressions

In this section, we're going to be learning a little bit more about facial expressions. We're going to be actually looking at some photograph examples so we can kind of have an understanding of what makes up different facial expressions. So in this lecture, we're going to be talking about the eye. So first off, I have a photograph here of an eye, and it's just kind of in a neutral state. So it's not really smiling or mad or angry or anything like that, just kind of neutral. And the thing that makes it neutral is kind of the eyebrow and the position of the iris. And so you'll see here, let's go ahead and let's kind of draw a version of this. We can kind of stylize it a little bit. But first off, I notice that there's kind of a curve underneath right there. And if we pay attention to where the iris is, it's just barely being covered by the eyelid. So we want to kind of capture that in our version. So we kind of just get a slight curve like that. The top curve seems to be a little bit more. Like that. We'll go ahead and draw the in. So it's just barely covered by the top eyelid and it just barely comes down and touches that bottom eyelid. You can go ahead and sketch in some eyelids. And then for the eyebrow kind of extends like right about here to where the tear duct is. Can. I has an arch out here. But go ahead. Kind of sketching those eyebrows like that. Let's add a pupil. We can also add a reflection. There's kind of a reflection right here on the eye. So we want to kind of mimic that. But since this is stylized, I just turned it into a circle. So this might be kind of more of a realistic kind of comic book style, I. Let me go ahead and add some eyelashes. So I'm going to thicken up this eyelash line. I'll just add three simple eyelashes like that. Maybe I'll add a fourth one. See how that looks. It's kind of cool looking, so I'll keep that one as well. You even add some eyelashes down here on the bottom that. Right. Cool. So there's just kind of a generic I. The main things that kind of make it up is the position of the iris. So if the iris are showing the wide of the eye above it, it would look a little bit too surprised. So to get that relaxed, look, we just kind of want the upper eyelid to kind of relax over that a little bit and we want the eyebrow. That's another important part of the expression is we don't want the eyebrow to be too arched or anything like that. We don't want it to be angled downwards like this because then it'll look angry. We don't want it to be kind of angled up like that because then they'll look kind of sad really quick. We could just sketch out a few more versions of this, like maybe another Stiles just kind of give you an idea. So let's say we're doing kind of an animation style, the eye kind of something like that. Thicken that eyelash up. Do an actual islet on their. Let me go ahead and draw on the iris. So we want the top of the iris to be slightly covered by the upper island. Let me give it an eyebrow. So just kind of give it a nice arch up there like we have above. We'll just kind of simplify this just because of the style. So it's just going to be kind of a swoop like that and a swoop like that. All right, cool. So that's just kind of a neutral lie. We're going to look at some other ones because we don't want there's there's obviously much more to this than just that neutral. So here you can see we have a smiling eye. Let's see if we can kind of pick up on what makes the eye look like it's smiling. First off, it's being squinted. So we want to pay attention to the shape, first off, the lines and the shape. Those are going to be the most important things to have an understanding of. And as you can see, it kind of just kind of arcs like that. So we can go ahead and kind of sketch out an eye like that. You can see the eyelid also gets kind of scrunched in there. And the top of the iris gets covered a lot by the top eyelid and the bottom eyelid. So all of that gets pretty covered. So we just kind of see the middle area of the iris. Go and put a reflection in there and go ahead and add an eyelash in. And then as for the eyebrow, the eyebrow stays kind of high above it. It doesn't kind of come down like this. You could do that if you want, but that wouldn't give you kind of that smiling expression. So I would kind of keep it up a little bit higher. And so this would be the eye of somebody that's smiling very big and very genuinely when somebody's not actually smiling for reals, like they're not actually feeling that emotion, you'll see it in their eyes. If their eyes don't squint up like this, it's because you're not actually feeling that they're not smiling. It's it's what people call a fake smile. And so when we do do a smile, a big smile, that is, if we can kind of squint their eyes up, it's going to make it look like they're really into that emotion. And depending on what style you're doing, you can kind of choose how much. Sort of detail you want to add in there? If you add too much detail, it's not going to look as stylized as something like animation. So like right here, for example, on this I we don't want to start adding wrinkles and stuff like that underneath the eyes. So like with this one, for example, you see that on our photo, we have a bunch of wrinkles, but if we were to kind of draw that in here. It kind of starts to get a little bit too detailed for the simplified style we're going for. And so we'll just kind of leave that out. Go ahead and shade this in. Right. So you could imagine if there was a smile there. It just makes her eye look like they're really smiling. We could shade in underneath the eye a little bit to kind of give it a little bit more of that smile look. All right, great. Let's go ahead and look at another eye. So right here, we have an angry eye. So I'm guessing that a lot of you are probably at some point want to draw anger character. So let's go over this. So when we're drawing the angry eye, you can see that the brow just kind of basically hangs over eyebrow and the brow itself, the brow is kind of that flab of skin that hangs down over the eye. Both of those kind of push down the muscles all pushed downwards to hang over the eye. And so that all kind of covers up the eye. We'll kind of look out a few examples of how we can kind of exaggerate those and stuff. So let me bring my brush size down. So we're drawing that kind of I. Maybe we'll kind of stylized that a little bit more. So it kind of have a big a bigger rounder. I like that. And then we can go ahead and draw that eyebrow in. So first we want to kind of sketch in that angle like that. And we can get kind of that brow hanging down over the eye. So it kind of just flattens out the top of the eyelid a little bit. And then in this case, when you have an angry eye, the brow hangs down really far over the iris. So that's another key point of drawing an angry eye as you want a lot of the iris to be covered. And the pupil should basically be touching the top of the upper eyelid. Add some eyelashes in there. Right. So there's kind of one version of an angry AI if you want it to look even angrier when it comes to character design, it's all about that exaggeration. So if you're doing something a little bit more cartoony or anime style, really almost any character design style, you can still do this even though it's very exaggerated, but you can just kind of bring the eyebrow down all the way over the eye. So what I mean by this is you can just go ahead and you can sketch out an eye brow. Let's start with the eyebrow. I think that. Let me go ahead and bring up the size of that. So it kind of matches the size of the rest of my eyes. And then you can just draw the eye in like this. And so you see how it just basically comes down right over that I. To uncover the iris. Like that. Right. Another thing is if you kind of darken underneath the eyelid, the bottom eyelid like that, it also kind of makes them look a little bit more angry, even though that doesn't really happen in real life. It's just something that kind of shows up a lot in sort of anime, animation styled drawings of characters that when they're angry, you kind of add a darker sort of look underneath their eye. You can even kind of add a line like that, and you can see that the eyebrow also can get a little bit of a scrunch right there. If we wanted to, we could kind of add that scrunch onto that eye as well. I'll leave it out on that one. But that scrunch in the brow can also show up. All right, great. Let's go ahead and move on to the next eye. Whoops. Apparently I drew that on the wall along the wrong layer. So go ahead and I'm going to put that onto the right layer with all the other eyes. All right. So for our next eye, we have a surprised eye. So if you remember me talking about the surprised eye, the surprise eye is going to typically be showing the white of the eyes and the eyebrows are going to be very high and very arched. So let's go ahead and give this a shot. So an eye like this. All right. So we really accentuate that arch of the upper lid and the bottom lid also gets very accentuated. So that just means that we're kind of making it a little bit more curved than it would be if I was in a neutral pose. Then we can also accentuate and exaggerate the eyelid. So we might see a little bit more eyelid. And then the eyebrow. We can also go ahead and exaggerate that out. So meaning that the eyebrow can be really, really high. So even higher than it might be in reality. All right. And then when we add that Irisin, again, we want to show the white of the eye at the top of the iris. So right here in that area, we want to make sure that there's some white space. That. Gwen Etter pupil. The pupil will always be in the centre of the iris and a reflection. Go ahead and add some eyelashes. Bert Great. So there's a surprise. So really the main thing with drawing is surprise to eye is you want to focus on that eyebrow and the white of the eye. So if you can get the white of the eye above the iris and you can really exaggerate the arch of that eyebrow and really raise it up higher than it should be, that's really going to make your character look like they're super surprised. You could see that we could kind of redraw the skin, maybe more of a cartoon sort of version. So even if I were to just kind of draw, let's say a cartoon, just had a circle for an eye. If I were to draw their iron like this. Then I added a really wry high eyebrow like that. You can see that makes them look very surprised or scared or nervous. All of those kind of fall under this eye right here. All right. That brings us to the end of this lecture. So what I want you to do is go ahead and draw these eyes along with me, and then I want you to post them to the Q&A section of the course so that we can see your work. It's a great way to kind of track your progress, and it's a great way to just kind of get some feedback from people. Thanks for watching this lecture and I'll see you in the next one.