Okay, drawing the eye can seem intimidating and complex, but I'm going to simplify the process for you. With five pretty easy steps. Done one after another, we'll build a nice finished drawing for you. So let's get started. First step is the blocking phase. good rule of thumb is to go from the general to the specific.

So when I look at this, I see a big triangle shape. And I'll try to fit everything into that overall impression. That includes the eyebrow, the eyelids, the eyeball, all together. And I'll use a basically a very light pencil line to do this. And I'm trying to block in the average angles, the overall big impression of whatever it is and When I'm drawing the upper eyelid, I draw the bottom plane of the upper eyelid. Because it really helps to show architectural kind of 3d volume when I do that, and so I'm going to try and use everything I can to squeeze architecture out of these flat shapes on a piece of paper.

And a really good reference for you. And for me was the bark plates of the eye and and they're so clear and they're so well done that I would recommend doing your studies based on those plates. Until you're familiar with the complexities of the I had many different angles. Now you can see the eyes and almond shaped but it's asymmetrical so I found that diagonal that shows the peak of the upper lid and the peak of the bottom lid and it is at an angle So there are sculpting out the lower lid, the top plane of the lower lid. And I'll use again really simple shapes like ovals, squares, triangles, just to space and place the elements, get their proportions, going from the biggest shape to the next smallest shape, and ever smaller refining facets until the drawing is finished. Alright, the next step is value separation.

And I'm going to separate the family of darks from the family of lights. And I'm going to squint and compare this is crucial, I'm going to squint down and by doing so, separate out the dark values from the light values and then I'm going to put those in in a posterized way meaning a very flat simple shape, that it's not completely black. It's about a value of four in a five value scheme. And essentially I'll have black and white puzzle pieces. And I'll try to design those shadow shapes or those dark shapes and clarify by drawing and keeping it really simple. So this should be very clear step here.

Right, the next step is add the dark accents in my shadow shapes, which again, every mark that I make should help clarify the overall statement that I'm trying to make some getting in there, and really going for the dark stuff like in the shadows in the creases where folds of skin meet, and you can see I'm pulling that pencil with an overhand grip, to allow myself to get a really nice, chiseled, fine line, and I have control over the pencil. Sometimes I'll hold pencil like I'm writing my name, but that wears out the tip quite quickly, so I try to use that overhand grip and drag the pencil. So now I'm just adding one tone in the darks. And so now I have two values in the darks. And I have a five value scheme. So that's keeping it really simple.

Now I'm going to add the halftone. In the next step, the halftone is in the light, it's closer to to the lightest light than it is to any of the darks. And it occurs where the form starts turning away from the light and going towards that core shadow. So it's just before it turns into the core shadow. It's the place where you're going to see most of the texture, most of the color and detail and so on in that area. It's very effective in making the form turn.

So just using like Finger their last step is adjust, refine and finish. So we're almost there. Let's take this thing home. So I'm going to clarify again, work the darks, work the lights, I'll be working both the dark and light areas back and forth. Kind of like cooking in the kitchen refining, seasoning to taste refining fixing mistakes. There's always adjustments through the whole piece.

And I often think of drawing as fixing mistakes. Now one simple but crucial thing that people miss here is adjusting the edges when I adjust my edges between hard and soft and make that distinction. It takes this drawing so far down the road, it's not even funny, and it's so simple to do. So make sure you look at your edges and adjust them accordingly. Now the pupil is something that I like to sneak up on and develop very Gradually, because it's such a dark shape a definite shape, and I'd like to work my way up to that. And the iris just emerges out from the shadow of the upper lid.

So I'm putting in a gradation there, on the upper lid onto the iris and the pupil. And that seems to create depth and a kind of moody sense of the personality of the person, let's say, because you're looking into the, into their soul through their eye there. So you want to have some depth. The eyelashes I do maybe one or two, but I tend to group them together. They don't look that good when I do each individual one. And you can see that the eyebrows also just basically shaped with some edge work that's characteristic of eyebrow hair.

And so on the eyelashes, same thing. I'll have usually a tapered dark shape with just some lashes. Now I'm using the electric eraser to pull out those really bright specular highlights, reflecting the room around the eye, and just pulling some of those lines that are in finding the iris, fixing the tear duct finding details. So I've spent this thing up, but you can see in just five steps, you can get a pretty realistic nice result of an eye. And this is something you can work on. And if you follow these steps, you will definitely get better and better.

Okay, I hope this was helpful for you. I'll see you in the next module.