How to Draw Various Animal and Human Eyes

Eyes are the window to the soul or so they say. So it would only make sense that eyes would be one of the key parts to your artwork when trying to connect with your viewers. This step by step tutorial will help you to understand how to draw eyes realistically and easily. And since I truly believe knowledge is power, here is some additional information on how the eyes work.

How does it work?

Eyes give us the ability to see the world around us, but how do they work? For this article I’m not going to get too complicated and start sounding like my old college professor, but this will give you a rough idea. Light travels in through the pupil/iris and travels to the retina in the back of the eye. The retina takes the light rays and transforms them into electrical impulses that then migrate through the optical nerve to the brain for processing.

How do our eyes focus?

So how do our eyes focus from far to near, or near to far? Covering the pupil and iris is a transparent covering called the cornea. The cornea bends the incoming light to focus the image traveling to the brain. Over time this portion can become cloudy. Luckily, this can be corrected with cataract surgery.

Time to Draw!

1) Alright let’s draw! As we’ve talked about before, any object can be drawn if you start with geometric shapes. Here we have an eagle eye. I started with the brow to give me a base line (no pun intended). Next I sketched out a circle for the eye, and a rough idea of the skin surrounding the orb. Don’t forget the pupil!

2) Before getting too excited about putting in all the wonderful detail we need to first apply a basic shading to create form.

3) Now that we’re at the last step it’s time for the best part. All the juicy details that are going to make your drawing great! Now you can add the shine on the skin flap, color splotches in the eye, surrounding fur, and eye lashes.

Things that you should keep in mind, especially when you move to hues, are: texture, and color. Depending on feline, canine, bird, or we’ll say other, the iris part of the subject’s eye can have small or large color splotches and texture. For an example of texture see the crocodile eye above. The less decorative splotches the flatter the eye can appear. Think of looking at the back part of a cd verses the front. One is much more reflective causing depth.

As you can see above, depending on what type of species, the pupils will not always be the same. Horse pupils are smaller and more rectangular. Cats and reptiles have thinner vertical slits. Birds need to see far and wide, so to capture more light they have larger more round pupils. Keep this differentiation in mind when drawing your eyes.

Hope this helps! Have fun!