Lighting: Drawing The Eye

Happy Blogoversary to us... the blog is one year old.

Hannah here. No, this title doesn't refer to sketching an eye. This is about using lighting to attract someone's eye to a point on a picture.
 Likely every artist that has had an official teacher has been told about contrast: contrast between dark and light. My mama, who has actually had art lessons (as opposed to all us home-school kids), said that her art teacher told her to make the dark parts of a sketch black, and the light parts white. It makes for a more dramatic image.

Light draws the eye. If you are in a dark room, and the only source of light is a tiny strip under the door, odds are you'll look at the light instead of at the rest of the room. This power can be manipulated. Bwahaha.
I don't know how many people are familiar with this technique (the technique that may or may not have a name, I'm not sure), but it can be used to great effect.

One notable example, and the one I remember best, is Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper.

Who is the most important picture in this image? Jesus, of course. And you may notice that, contrasting with the dark walls that make the backdrop, there's a window right behind Jesus, framing his head, drawing the attention right-smack to his face. About as effective as a halo. Da Vinci's pretty cool.

Another artist I see that uses this technique is Gustave Doré. He's got a fairly distinct hand. His illustrations of the Bible have shown up in both my CKJV bible and my study guide.

Nehemiah secretly viewing the ruins of the walls of Jerusalem.

The Ten Commandments

Daniel

See how in each of these, the white wall, or bright lightning, or the lighter sky, draws the attention to the dark figure or object directly in front of it.

Of course, there are different ways to use this. You could, for instance, make the object of importance light-colored itself.

The famous judgement of Solomon.

John and the angel looking down at New Jerusalem.

Take a look at the New Jerusalem picture. What's the first thing you want to look at? Probably the glowy-white city down there. It's the idea of a spotlight, if you understand that.

I have to say that I don't often use this myself, but I'm going to start... thinking about it. If the pros do it, why not?

To God be the Glory,

Hannah

Drawing Eyes

A step-by-step of how I draw eyes. No reason.

For starters, when I normally draw any pictures of eyes, I do the drawing from memory or from my reflection in a mirror. I chose to take a picture instead as reference, this time. This is Sarah's eye.










I took the picture to my computer and blew it up so I could see it easily.





Then I began sketching out the basic lines of the eyes. I usually begin with the teardrop. I'm weird that way.





Congratulations me! Already it looks like an eye.





The top of the eyelid, or as I've heard it called, eyeflap. Often the eyelid line has a vaguely squarish shape.


By the way, the eyelid does not lay flat against the eyeball. It's, I don't know, a half a centimeter thick, so it has an edge that's visible on the lower side at the angle. (That sounds super intelligent of me). Also, with all the eyes I've closely examined (meaning, no one's eyes outside my family), there's a subtle wrinkle on the lower lid, as you can see.


I put a little line where the eyebrow will be, and began to mark out the shape of the iris.




You may have to erase and redraw. As you can see.





I began shading the eyeball, and added the pupil. I had to redraw that part too. Depending on what the lighting's like, it'll be bigger or smaller... so long as it's round.



Shading the iris. Using light lines, and keeping in mind that the outer rim of the eye is usually darker than most of the iris. Once in a tutorial I read that you should be very careful to keep all the lines pointed toward the center of the pupil, so, respect the master, whoever they are.




Fleshing out the eyebrow more, and adding more shading...




The beginning of eyelashes! Keep in mind that eyelashes are curved, not stick-straight, so they go down slightly before they go up. Also, as I've heard and observed, the eyelashes are rarely seen individually, but stick together in clumps. Pretty clumps.



Adding lower lashes. Smaller than upper lashes, and a lot more scarce.






Darkening the pupil. Pupils are like, really black. I added a bit of shading around the eye (you may not be able to see it). For the most part, I'm done now.

So I hope this was at least vaguely informative. I'm not any sort of expert, I'm a sixteen-year-old girl, not Van Gogh or Michelangelo. I just like doing eyes. I have eyes. You may also have eyes. Eyes are good.

Update: Here's the image superimposed over Sarah's eye. You can see here that the eyebrow I've drawn is not proportioned correctly and instead should be much larger in comparison to the eye (and it's not just Sarah, she's got much thinner eyebrows than I have). That's one last tip, then. Well, maybe fuller eyelashes.

To God be the Glory,

Hannah

A Short Post With Eyeballs Included

Hey, everypony! I'm not dead!

 But you wouldn't know that, hmm, because I've been gone for over two months! And I said I'd be putting something up soon. Shame on me. For this post, ignore every excuse. I have no good ones. I am going to (I'm not gonna say soon, but eventually) put up the post I was planning on. But today is not that day!

On the other hand, I do have something to put up today!

The ideas for these came from Pinterest (of which I am on frequently). There are a lot of sketches of just eyes. 

                       

I don't know who these belong to, sorry.

And the way I did it was derived from this tutorial: http://pinterest.com/pin/26529085275129304/.

I used a mirror for reference for the lower four pairs of eyes. That meant me staring strangely at the mirror, then scribbling furiously on my sketchbook, then making the same face, then scribbling furiously, for about a half an hour during storytime while my dad read The Rats of NIMH.
Excuse the eyebrows, mine are profuse enough to need combing. Mama and Trinity despair of them and subject me to monthly pluckings. And mine are the only ones I can use for reference so... oh well.
And that last set of eyelashes and eyebrows look orange because I meant for their host to be a redhead. However, I'm not well acquainted with ginger facial hair (I shall just assume that's a good thing), so it might not have turned out so well.

These were done by being sketched out with a pencil and then edited in Photoshop Elements. I'm still working on different techniques for photographing or scanning my pictures - mainly photographing. I haven't scanned them in so long, cause we used to have a pretty lousy scanner that would ruin my pictures. I've got a pretty light touch when sketching, which had to be trained into me (I used to recklessly chisel my drawings into the paper, but I've gotten better at that), so the scanner, and often the camera, has trouble picking up the lighter lines.
Also, as you can see, the paper tends towards orange-brownness, no matter what I do with the camera, while the actual sketch paper is rather white. Any suggestions?

And I do have a host of others things stacked up in reserve to be put up here, including one I'm working on that I'm currently rather fond of (having a bit of trouble with, but still, rather fond of). In addition, Sarah may very well be putting up her first post soon! Yay!

She and I have been dabbling with painting on Photoshop, not just editing and stuff, but actually painting, in a manner of speaking. There are a lot of not-helpful tutorials on Pinterest that I've been able to chop down to something I can understand and almost use. Then there are slightly more helpful tutorials that I've not really been able to use. So let us see what turns up.

To God be the Glory,
Hannah