The Art of Eyes : Distortion and Shading Practice

By Elissa Rosenthal

Hi everyone! For this week I decided to keep up with practicing drawing the eye and while doing so I've learned some little tricks for helping to correct some errors. 

1) I found out how you can use photography to your advantage! 

This may not work in all settings since I'm drawing from a photograph, but what I found helps is while I'm drawing to take photos during some pauses in the process to see how I'm doing. This little tip helped me figure out the next one as well.

2)Try to look as straight on to your subject and your paper since, if you don't, it can end up becoming distorted. 

From my own experience this is because your eye is seeing your subject at a different angle, same as your paper. This can make it where you can end up drawing lines too long or too short, among other possible distortion issues.

I found out the distortion that was happening after I took my first photo (shown above). I saw that I had made the end of the eyelid- near the tear duct- too close to the tear duct and at a too drastic of an angle.

Then, once I took my next photo, I found out I had made the pupil a little too small to the right, so I fixed it as best as I could at the time. 

Once I had taken what I considered my last photo of this eye I had been working on, I remembered three more tricks I wanted to share. 

1) Drawing in the same direction the whole time makes the image look more natural and gives it less unnecessary texture. 

2) Blending with a paper napkin works better than blending with a piece of computer paper.

3) You can over blend.

In the picture shown above is my form study I did since I had enough time to do it this week. A way I found to help with not using guide lines in the shadow -since it's so light in value- is to lightly shade in the general area and erase what doesn't need to be there. 

Thank you for reading my blog! I really do appreciate it! If you want to ask me any questions directly related to this post you can comment in the comment section below and I will try my best to answer. 

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