Studio
shinmera
Eyes
I was asked to talk about how I draw eyes, so I made the above sketch composition and wrote some words: Before I start though, a note of caution: you should always learn from anatomy references first. Draw actual eyes from photos or renders made from photos. Draw many of those, from many different people's faces, with many different expressions, and from many different angles.
The way I draw eyes is simplified massively, and has several shorthands and changes that I developed for my particular style. My style is purposefully focused on being extremely minimal, constrained to lines with an almost constant and comparatively high thickness. This forces the omission of a lot of details, as well as the exaggeration of a lot of features in order to still convey the emotions and expressions desired. I thus consider it dangerous to try and just copy what I do, without also copying everything else alongside.
Part of what made this question so troublesome for me is that I don't really know what you mean when you say "the way you draw eyes." The eyes are a small part of the face, and how they feel depends a lot on everything else. The eyebrows, nose, cheeks, brow, bangs, ears, even mouth influence their appearance a lot. Again, everything is a part of a whole and it's hard (and possibly meaningless) to try and separate one part. So instead of giving you a dumb step-by-step of which lines I draw where and how, I'll talk about what I consider when drawing eyes:
- What is the overall mood and state of the character. Are they tired, excited, bored, horny, etc. This will change small details like whether I extend the lines on the lower eyelid to indicate exhaustion and so forth.
- Who is the character overall. This extends into character design, so should the eyes be slanted, open, small, etc. This is going to influence the overall shape and positioning of the eyes.
- What expression is the character displaying. Depending on that I'll narrow the eyes, open them in shock, change the angling and strength of the eyebrows, add wrinkle lines, etc.
- What angle and perspective is the face being portrayed from. This will influence how the eye appears, and I might have to exaggerate or bend features to make the expression clear, even if it's not necessarily accurate to the anatomy.
- How big is the face and what level of detail am I drawing at. This will influence whether I add supplementary details like the caruncle, individual eyelashes, the top and bottom eyelid lines, etc.
There's also several aspects I changed about how I draw the eyes over time. For instance, I started drawing several small dots to indicate bottom eyelashes in the corners fairly recently. Even more recently I started adding the top eyelid lines and corner eyelashes sometimes. I'm sure more is going to change in the future, too.
Anyway, I hope at least some of this was useful in some capacity. I don't know if this was the case here, but I sometimes feel like my simplistic style betrays how much practise, thought, and trial and error goes into them. I think you would do yourself more of a service if you practised from real anatomy first and figured your style out on your own time. Copying drawings wholesale to try and figure out how a particular style works is fine, but trying to extract individual elements and paste them together somehow seems not great.