Step 4: Drawing the Eyes

Eyes are the mirror to the soul. Or so they say. In cartooning eyes are the way your characters express thier emotions. Eyes alone can't do this. Your entire cartoon does this. But you have to spend some time getting to know eyes. If you look at the first eyes in the diagram above you can see that they are angry. But you can't really tell why or what kind of anger. Is it hurtful anger? Is it rage? The rest of the cartoon will tell. But already, with just the eyes, the story begins to unfold.

Eyes can be very simple or they can be very complex. Eyes can be large or small. Sometimes the eye is just a dot. The eyes above represent a very small number of eyes. There is, in fact, an infinite number of eyes. When you throw in eye brows the possiblities are boundless. Note: Because eyes and eyebrows work together I refer to them both as eyes.

As per usual, there are no concrete rules to eyes and what they mean. But here are a few guide lines to help you express what you want. Angry eyes will slant(top edge of eye or eye brow) toward the nose. Sad eyes will slant the opposite direction. Alert or startled eyes will be wide open with larger pupils. Where as sleeply or apathetic eyes will be half open. Take any eye, add eye lashes, and you have female eyes. Also, put eye lashes on very small children, even boys. Shady or untrustworthy characters have small slanty eyes with small pupils, usualy in the corner(shifty). Someone who has just recieved a blow to the head might get one eye larger then the other. A common practice in cartooning is to draw the eyes of a dead body as a couple of X's.

Don't forget that brows are part of the eye. In the figure above look at the bottom row of eyes. The eyes themselves are copy and pasted. The only difference in the eyes is the eyebrows.

The placement of the pupil is also important. Pupils indicate the direction the character is looking. Try to emulate what real people do. Such as rolling thier eyes or looking out the corner. If it is really important to show what the character is looking at draw two little dotted lines to indicate it.

Another thing about eyes is lines around them. You can use lines to the outside or below the eye to show age. You can draw "bags" under eyes to show sleeplessness.

Our character is a mad scientist. So we want eyes that are crazy and at the same time a little evil. Notice that in the image above I have just pasted the front view eyes from the first diagram. I had to cut a little from the eye on the right. This is a good technique becuase we can use the same eyes(and nose) for front, partial side, and side views. If we make a comic strip the character will look the same no matter which direction we view him from.

As you can see the character is already a bit menacing. If we give him a loud yelling mouth, he'll have a lot to say. And it probably won't be nice.

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