Drawing the Human Eye

According to Mark Kistler, author of You Can Draw in 30 Days, "The human eye is most definitely the window into a person’s soul" (88). But how to capture it? Anyone can simply draw a dot and call it an "eye", but a dot isnt a very good window to a soul, now is it? In his novel, Kistler teaches how to draw a realistic human eye. 

To start off, draw an outline of an eye. In the eye that I sketched, I drew an eye that resembles the shape of a lemon. There are so many different variations of eye shapes that you can draw (Kistler 88). 

Next I drew a round circle inside the outline of the eye to be the iris. I then drew the outline of the top and bottom eyelid. By doing this, the eye looks more realistic. 

Instead of filling in the iris completely with shading, as I would have before, I drew a circle in the iris to be the pupil, and another circle inside the pupil to be a reflection of light. By doing this, it makes the eye more realistic because youre implying that there is a light source. 

I then shaded the pupil in. This provides contrast between the pupil and the reflection of light, differentiating the two. 

When drawing the inside of the iris, Kistler says to " use pencil strokes radiating out from the dark pupil, and use a variety of line lengths, some short, some long" (89). To make the drawing more realistic, I drew lighter lines diagonal of the light reflection on the iris. I also drew an eyebrow by sketching individual, angled, lines. 

To finish the drawing, I added eyelashes by drawing lines in clusters. I lastly shaded the outside and inside of the eye. By shading darker where creases on the eyelid are, i show value, making the drawing more realistic. Also i shaded the corners of the eye to represent shadows. 

Because of Mark Kistlers book, I now know how to a realistic eye. When drawing faces, eyes have always troubled me, but now, I no longer will have any trouble. As mentioned before, the eye is a window to a persons soul. Do you think that by drawing a more realistic eye, the statement above becomes true in a drawing as it would with a real eye?

Kistler, Mark. You Can Draw in 30 Days: The Fun, Easy Way to Learn to Draw in One Month or Less. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo, 2011. Print.