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Eyes - For the Less Than Steady Hand


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For a long time, I've painted eyes as many attempt to do, a tiny amount of white squeaked onto a tiny eyeball, finished off with an even tinier dot of black. That's just too tough for me, and often leads to goofy, manga eyes, or cross-eyed warriors.

I came up with a better way that fits my ability, and gives me good results, so I thought I'd show it off. It's demonstrated below with a Long Fang from my up and coming Space Wolf army.

The first step is to paint your base coat. I usually use Vallejo's Beasty Brown.

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Step two is to slop white over the eyes. The only thing you need to watch for is that you actually cover the eyeball without ruining detail (thin your paints if needed).

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Next, paint a thin line of black down the eye. This is the part that takes the most care, and as you can see, the paint got away from me a bit below the left eye. It's still okay as long as the paint on the eye itself isn't too much.

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Better painters might see this process as a waste of time, as the next step is all clean-up, but I find it's easier to paint around an eye than in it. A brush can be worked around the eyelids easily enough. Reapply your base coat over all the excess white and black you've left.

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Then you can see with the (nearly) finished product that once you get your skin tones on, you've actually got a good looking eye.

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I hope that helps. I know it's always disappointing to see a model with skintone eyes.

  • 1 month later...
  • 2 weeks later...

Great tutorial. This is how I finally figured out eyes, and many tiny details in general. If you consider the order you paint, shade, and highlight, there are a few things that should be done out-of-sequence - eyes being one of them. You need to be careful working on the skin after they are 'shaped', but it's easier than trying to add the eye after. I do the same thing with marine helmets, for the base eye color. Adding a center highlight is a breeze compared to trying to get the complete eye shape.

 

To push it, if you have a fine enough brush, add another step. Slop white, do an eye colour, then a tick of black in the middle. It will be a very subtle detail, but you can do striking blue eyes, or nasty red eyes that way. A very thin wash carefully added to the eye socket will even add easy depth and give a dark rings under the eyes look.

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