How to Draw a Hyper-Realistic Eye

Hey, I’m Darlene, and in this tutorial, I’ll show you my unique method for drawing a hyper-realistic eye from scratch. Follow along with me as I take you through the step-by-step drawing process!

Tools I Used

You don’t need any special tools to draw an eye. A regular school pencil (HB pencil) and a regular solid eraser will work fine. Below are the tools I used:

• Mechanical pencil with HB lead for construction lines and 4B lead for shading (Learn about drawing pencils)
• Eraser (kneaded eraser for detail work and electric eraser for speed)
• Blending stump and tissue paper to blend
• Ruler
• White gel pen

How to Draw a Hyper-Realistic Eye Step-by-Step

Step 1: Draw a Circle

Start by drawing a faint circle using your HB pencil. It doesn’t need to be perfect. For steps 1-2, keep your pencil marks very light so they’ll be easy to erase later on. In case you’re wondering, my circle has a 7cm diameter.

Step 2: Determine the Eye Angle

Decide on the slope or angle of the eye. Use a ruler to draw a line through your circle, keeping it fairly close to the center.

Here’s an example of two eyes with different slope degrees.

Step 3: Form the Shape of Your Eye

Try to keep your pencil strokes light for this step in case you want to make changes to your eye shape.

Inner Corner: Draw a unique shape for the inner corner of your eye. Position it along the straight line and just outside of the circle.

Experiment with a “V” or “U” shape. See above for examples. You can also experiment with the angle, depth, or width to get wildly different-looking eyes.

Top and Bottom Eyelid: Now let’s draw the eyelids. Start with the top eyelid, extending the line you drew for the inner corner of the eye, arching it across the circle, and ending where the circle and the straight line intersect.

For the bottom lid draw a much shallower curve. You can use the straight line as a reference – the closer your eyelid is to the line, the shallower it is.

Upper Eyelid Crease: Draw a skin crease above your top eyelid while roughly mimicking its curvature. You can adjust its distance from the top eyelid based on your preference. Draw from left to right, starting at the circle’s edge and ending above the straight line.

Step 4: Erase Your Construction Lines

Once you’re happy with the eye shape, erase the circle and the straight line. I’m using an electric eraser to save time.

Step 5: Draw the Iris

To make an iris, draw a circle taking up about two-quarters of the eye horizontally. When drawing irises, it’s better to draw a full circle and then erase parts that extend beyond the visible part of the eyeball rather than simply drawing two bracket shapes. This method helps make sure your iris is as circular as possible.

Here’s an example of drawing an iris using a full circle versus brackets. It’s very difficult to draw a realistic iris using brackets! It’s an exaggerated example to get my point across 😛.

In the eye, draw a reflection of your imaginary light source. This will be one of the lightest areas in our entire drawing, called a highlight. The reflection can be from a window (eg: rectangle or square), a lightbulb (eg: circle), or any other shape you choose.

Make sure the shape is skewed to wrap around the curvature of the eyeball. For example, use curved lines instead of straight lines when drawing a square to help make the eyeball appear round.

You’ll notice that the bottom left corner of my reflection is missing – that’s because I’ve included an obstruction to the light source (explained below). This is optional, but I think it makes the eye look more realistic.

Step 7: Draw the Pupil

Pupil Placement: The pupil is the black circle in the very center of your eye. To draw it in the correct place, find the center of your iris, mark it with a tiny dot, and then draw your pupil around it.

If you have trouble finding the center of your iris, draw a cross through it – the intersection between the vertical and horizontal lines of your cross indicates the center of the iris. Adjust the pupil size based on your preference.

Step 8: Shade the Iris

Iris Border: Thicken and blend the border of your iris for a softer edge. You can blend using a tool such as a blending stump, tissue, or a cotton swab.

Body of the Iris: Add a solid, light layer of graphite in the rest of the iris while avoiding the highlight. To shade smoothly, keep your pencil strokes close together, minimizing gaps in your shading.

Cast Shadow: Remember when we gave our drawing an imaginary light source? Mine is shining down from the top right, causing the top eyelid to cast a shadow down onto the iris. Let’s shade along the very top of the iris to account for this shadow.

Darken: You can leave your iris as it is or darken it further like I did above. I’ve shaded mostly around the edge and gradually lightened my strokes near the pupil.

Step 9: Draw Iris Details

If you want to keep your iris simple, you can skip this step, but do have a look through it before you decide 😊.

Ribbon: Draw a wavy ribbon around the pupil. Try to make it look random.

Step 10: Shade Everything Else Inside the Eye

Step 11: Shade the Skin

Before shading the skin around your eye, let’s add a few small details such as some extra creases above the inner corner of the eye and an outline around both the top and bottom eyelids to mark the eyelid ledge.

Top Eyelid: Shade the top eyelid, using pencil strokes that follow the shape of your eyelid. It’s okay if some of your strokes are darker or your shading isn’t very consistent here since these can come across as subtle wrinkles later on. If you want your shading to appear very smooth, eliminate gaps between your pencil strokes.

As you shade closer to the eyelid crease, darken your strokes gradually so that the crease comes across as folded skin instead of just a line drawn on the skin. If you want to learn more about shading, please read my shading tutorial.

Bottom Eyelid: Shade the bottom eyelid leaving the eyelid ledge the lightest.

You can add a few subtle wrinkles under the eye using a sharpened pencil or the sharpest part of your mechanical pencil, drawing disconnected strokes while roughly following the eye’s contours. Around these wrinkles, you can shade using the cross-hatching technique to give the skin more texture, heightening the wrinkle effect.

Once done, use a blending tool of your choice to make your shading look more polished, reducing the amount of white gaps between strokes. I’m using a soft tissue wrapped around my finger, gently blending from light to dark areas to avoid streaks. With each swipe, check how dirty your tissue is and switch to a clean spot often to avoid blemishes.

Avoid smudging detailed areas of your work such as the iris because we want to keep those details looking nice and sharp!

Step 13: Draw Eyelashes

First Three Top and Bottom Lashes: Using a sharpened pencil, draw three initial lashes spaced out across the top and bottom eyelid to act as guidelines for the rest of your lashes. Once you draw these, the rest will be easier to fill in. This tutorial is already very long, so I’ll direct you to my in-depth eyelash tutorial where I explain how to draw eyelashes down to the individual lash and how/where to place them on the eye. Please visit that tutorial to complete this step. Don’t worry, it’s free :)

Eyelash Base Details: Now we’re going to texturize the skin at the base of our eyelashes. Shade along the base of each eyelash using a squiggly, circular motion (circulism shading) to make the skin look bumpy. You’ll notice the change in skin texture most along the bottom eyelid, where the lashes are less dense.

Along the top of the eyeball, draw subtle shadows that are cast down by the eyelashes.

Step 14: Make Your Eye Drawing POP!

We’re almost done! Take a few steps back from your drawing to see if you’d like to make any improvements. I’ve darkened some areas such as the pupil and iris for higher contrast and depth.

Next, add some highlights along areas of the eye you want to appear wet, such as the inner corner of the eye, and the bottommost visible part of your eyeball where tears would collect. You can make these highlights using a white gel pen or correction fluid. If you don’t have those items, you can make those highlights by removing graphite using a sharpened solid eraser or a pinched kneaded eraser with a dabbing or swiping motion. If your highlights aren’t popping much, make sure they are the lightest values across your entire drawing.

I hope you had fun following this step-by-step tutorial! Let me know how it went for you in the comments section. If you have any questions, I’d be happy to answer them. Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this and would like more detailed drawing tutorials sent to your inbox, scroll to the bottom of this page to subscribe to my mailing list!