Learning to Draw an Eye: What to Keep in Mind

Learning to draw an eye was rather uneventful, but fun nonetheless. In the drawing studies (in my computer screen) I picked up a few pointers, which I would like to share with you.

Learning to draw and eye takes a few tries and many tutorials, but it's completely possible.

Learning to Draw for a Reason

To have a goal in place, is always a good place to start. If you want to draw people for fun, you have a goal. If you want to draw people for money, you have a goal. If you want to draw people only as a beginning, you have a goal. It doesn't matter what your goal is, just make sure you have one.

Once you have a goal in mind, you will be able to focus on the present task. You want to keep that end goal in mind to keep you motivated. Sometimes you will feel like you can't draw to save your life, but keep on trying! I have to tell myself to stop complaining and start drawing more than I would like to admit.

Learn to Draw Eyes First  

You can even start with the eyeball itself, before you move on to the eye.

You need to have a starting point. You might want to try and draw a face without any know-how, but halfway through, you will find yourself annoyed at the fact that everything is wrong. I work best when I work through new things one part at a time. Focus on learning one part of the face. I would recommend the eyes, as they require great detail, a lot of work and earn you a lot of experience points!

Furthermore, you might find yourself elated at the fact that you managed to draw something difficult, winning you bonus motivation for the rest of the learning curve.

Learn from Various People and Places

I am spoiled rotten. I have an artist who can give me pointers. However, even though I could easily learn only from her, I also learn from other sources. I have found a lot of useful tutorials online. I would suggest finding one that covers the type of drawing you would like to do (for example tutorials on painting an eye or drawing an eye with pencil). 

Since I love working on the computer rather than a parade of different pencils (but I do admire the skill of drawing realistically with pencil), I focused on drawing and pulling the picture into Gimp for further processing.

Links to a Few Tutorials 

• Drawing a realistic eye with pencils. Take note that this is a video and a shop, but I have no affiliation to them and you can easily watch the video without needing to buy anything.
• Plenty of drawing tutorials, also for other facial parts. 
• My favourite Photoshop/Gimp (need to be innovative in Gimp) painting tutorial. I used this tutorial to create the eye in this blog's image. It changed my meager attempt (below) to this new, upgraded version. Thank you Stephanie Valentin.

This was my second attempt at drawing an eye. As you can see, it needs a lot of work.

I will now move on to another facial feature and get back to all of you as soon as I can with my progress! If you have recently taken on the challenge to learn to draw, let me know in the comments below.