Tuesday 5 August 2014

How to Draw Eyes: Sketching You-Know-Who


My people-sketching book project has been a bit drawn out. I am still creating the presentation spreads, but it's going well. My art director is working on lots of projects at the same time, so I have to do things in stages and wait for feedback, but we are getting there and the spread layouts she is sending back are looking great.

I've been working on the 'how to draw eyes' spread.


As well as my step-by-step for the 'colour before line' spread, I also needed to do a step-by-step for the spread about drawing eyes. Guess who was my model? At least this demonstration piece was more straight forward, as it was a basic pencil sketch. I still had to keep stopping to scan in what I had done so far, but it was nothing like as stressful, because it was more like portrait drawing than speed-sketching. This is the finished drawing:


The rest of the spread is made up of eyes I have selected from existing sketches, which demonstrate various different things to be aware of, which I can talk around, like the distance between a person's eyes (more or less the width of another eye), the structure beneath, how glasses relate to eyes, the way shapes change when people are tired, where to shade to get the sculptural quality right etc, etc... 


Before the spread is designed, it's hard to know how much material I am going to need, so I did plenty and let my art director choose which to use and which to drop. I have just had the layouts back for this spread, so I now know which of my eye sketches she could fit in. 

I sent them originally at low resolution, cropped from people sketches from my website. Now I have to create high res scans, so... it's scanning time for John again!


2 comments:

Capt Elaine Magliacane said...

This is going to be a MUST HAVE book…wishing it was ready NOW!

Anonymous said...

Eyes and glasses - such a headache! definitely a must have book. Could you include hands and feet too?