How to Draw Lively Eyes with Colored Pencil

Bring the focus to your subject’s eyes and give your portrait life as you learn artist Kerry Brooks’s techniques for drawing accurate eyes that are full of sparkle and emotion. In this lesson, Kerry shares her techniques for creating eyes that capture the specific likeness of your model, while avoiding common tendencies that can create generic drawings, like defaulting to an almond eye shape or creating whites of the eyes that are too uniform in color.

You’ll begin by looking at different examples of eye drawings, showing the variations that can occur across different eyes, and how to observe elements like the eyelid shape and depth of the eye socket to capture your model’s unique character. Then, follow along as Kerry gradually builds up layers of color, pushing and pulling values to capture important shadow shapes, using cool grays to show the rounding in the whites of the eyes, building out eyelids, and creating realistic irises and pupils with carefully observed color variation. Learn Kerry’s trick for making sure your subject’s eyes are looking in the same direction, and how to add eyelashes and “catchlights,” giving your portrait a photorealistic quality.