Human Illustration Tutorials

Now you know general idea of drawing human face. So let’s be more specific and learn how to draw each part of face in details.

It would be better to start with eyes as it is the most complicated part. There are many different methods of drawing, so we will discuss them in our illustration tutorials. In this tutorial I’ll show you the most simple part of the process.

Before getting started, you should know and understand the basic anatomy of the human eye.

Eye Anatomy

The eyeball itself is roughly spherical, with a bulge over the pupil due to it’s lense. This bulge is the reason highlights often fall on theiris and pupil area of the eye - it sticks out further and catches the light.

The eye is suspended in the eye socket by muscles and soft tissues. The hard bones create highlights around the perimeter of the eye socket. Soft skin folds over the sphere of the eye, and eyelids wrap around its surface. Notice that you can see the upper edge of the bottom eyelid, as it curves under the form of the eyeball. It’s essential to visualize the 3D structure of the eye anytime you are drawing one.

Highlights on the eye are often bright and sharp, due to the moistness of the eye itself. These highlights should reflect the intensity, direction and shape of the light source in your drawing.

Ideally, you have to read this article on Wikipedia. It’s long and sometimes complicated, thought worth it for your future drawing illustrations experience.

Getting started

First we draw an oval shape which define the whole eye. If you look at an eye and the shapes around it you can see an oval shape from the bony protuberance of the eyebrow and coming around to the upper part of the cheek. Now we have a rough oval shape.

Then draw the main shape of the eye itself, going over the basic oval shape we already made. Observe carefully the outline shape of the eye, it has subtle little curves and shapes on the top and bottom lids, the top lid is very different in shape than the bottom one. Draw in the crease above the top eye lid and note that this line doesn’t exactly follow the shape of the top lid so good observation is needed here, lastly put in the little nodule at the left corner of the eye observing its shape. Drawing the eyes as with anything else is all to do with shapes and once you get into the habit of observing what’s going on in whatever you are drawing you will be well on your way in your art.

Drawing details

Then begin darkening a couple of the darkest places in the drawing. Don’t be afraid to go too dark in these areas. It won’t matter. In fact, it will probably help the drawing in the end because it will add contrast. Now we have the basic eye shape in we can then put in the lens of the eye which when looking straight at us is a perfect round shape. Observation is the key here so observe how far away the lens is from the left and right corners of the eye and observe the size and shape of the lens in relation to the whole eye shape. Keep in mind the relationships of the shapes and lines that you draw in and then draw in a little round shape for the pupil.

Look to see where your light source is coming from, it could be coming from above or below or to the right or left or more straight on, here it is coming from above and slightly from the right. Now we can block in some shading over the whole eye shape either with diagonal shading (from right to left) or if you are left handed (from left to right). The actual lens of the eye is quite a bit darker than the whites of the eye around it so good observation of tonal values is needed here, also try to keep a little area clear of shade for the small highlight which in this example is more or less in the centre of the lens.

We now need to draw in the little areas around the eye to set the eye off a little so observation is needed here, shade in these areas with a 2B pencil. Draw in the pupil of the eye which is more or less in the centre of the lens with a dark 4B pencil. The actual eyeball is round so draw in slightly darker shade in the left and right corners of the eyeball to indicate its roundness.

Everything is drawn in darker now building up shade as we go along and we also draw in the eyebrow to set the eye off a little. The top lid is usually darker than the bottom one so we need to observe this if we want to make the eye look like a real eye. There are darker lines around the outline of the lens of the eye which brings the lens out to us more from the eyeball.

Summary

We have finished the drawing. The eye appeared to be darker all around the actual eye shape, and necessary areas are drawn in dark accents. Also don’t forget to leave white paper for the highlight. If you cover up the lights and the highlights with your shading — don’t worry! You can use a putty rubber or bluetac to remove the shading. We used this very method in that case. After all the efforts you’ll get something like this:

Next time we will discuss how to draw a nose and many other interesting thing. Hope to see you soon.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 24th, 2008 at 7:14 pm and is filed under Drawing Face. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.