CRAPPY AS HELL EYE TUTORIAL
- Draw an eye and flood the iris with the base color of the eye
- Draw in a pupil. I don’t make my pupils solid black, just a really dark value of the main color. I also block in shading in the top half of the eye here, using a shade between the main and the pupil (you can use the burn tool, shh, but don’t abuse it)
- Using a shade of the main color lighter than the pupil but darker than the iris shading, I manually draw in some iris lines. Do your best to make sure they radiate from the center
- Oh no I did a lot of shit on this step before I remembered to save :c Highlight the bottom half of the eye with a lighter hue of the main color, and then use a shade of that lighter hue to draw in iris lines in between the prior darker ones. I also go around the border of the pupil with the smudge or water tool, depending on program, to disrupt it a little and add to the effect of striation on the iris.
- Go over all the striations with the water brush (or the blur brush) on a REALLY low %, just enough to disrupt how sharp and perfect the lines are. Retrospectively, if you laid down the striations with an airbrush or ANY OTHER SOFT-EDGED BRUSH, you could skip this step uwu
- hail satan and unabashedly use dodge/burn. Dodge the underside of the pupil and right around it, sort of like a halo. Burn a stripe from the top half down. If you wanted to do this the Legit No Cheater way, just set a medium grey brush to multiply and use it where I said “burn” up there, and set it to screen, addition, or linear dodge where I said “dodge”. if you’re in SAI then just do it on a separate Multiply and Addition layer, respectively.
- Go back, with a very fine hard brush (I used 3px hard brush in PS) and add back in some distinct, fine striations to break up the blurry sameness of the iris.
- Color dropping the hue from one of the lightest part of the iris, blot in where you want the eye shines to go. Ponies usually have two round ones but make them your own. Make the halos a tiny bit bigger than you actually want the eye shine to be, this is going to be the halo that makes them blend a little more naturally into the eye.
- Go back with white and blot in the eye shines, leaving the color we put down in the last step visible around the borders. Add a little white in the brightest part of the bottom of the iris, too. Water/blur the far edge of the eye shines, the one furthest from the light source
YOU’RE DONE, WOWOW LOOK AT THAT EYE
that’s the basics, it’s not great or “correct” but it gets a neat effect.
Please Don’t Abuse Dodge/Burn. They’re tools and it’s okay to use them, but if it’s immediately obvious that you did, it’s ugly and you should stop. if you want to use it to help learn what the very saturated, bright (or dark for burn) version of a hue is, it’s great for that, and eventually you should be able to just use/choose the colors dodge and burn would give you anyway. and DON’T ABUSE BLUR/SMUDGE EITHER GUYS. AGAIN, OKAY IN SMALL DOSES, BUT DON’T STREAK THE SMUDGE TOOL BACK AND FORTH OVER THE WHOLE IRIS