How to Draw Eyes, Starting From Two Dots

Put two dots on a blank face and it's looking at you. Nothing else on a face does that much with so little.

Worth saying out loud, because eyes are the feature people are most convinced they can't do. They've seen the tutorials with the eight-layer iris and three separate highlights, decided that's the standard, and concluded their own attempt came out wrong. It didn't come out wrong. It came out at a different level of detail, and at the size a face is usually looked at, the simpler version often reads better than the elaborate one.

So: five levels. Most faces should stop at the second, and I'll say where.

Level 1: two dots

A filled circle each. On a desktop a single click makes a perfect one, which is the most useful thing a mouse does.

Make them bigger than feels right. Small eyes read as squinting or as unfinished, and there's no drawing where you'll wish you'd made them smaller.

What actually goes wrong here isn't the shape, it's the spacing. Leave roughly one eye's width of gap between them. Too close and the face looks anxious, too far and it looks vacant, and both of those are about a centimetre of difference.

That's a working face. Genuinely, you can stop here.

Level 2: a lid over the dot

One short curve across the top of each dot. That's the whole addition.

This is where I'd stop for most drawings. The dot alone is a face that exists; the dot with a lid is a face that's awake, and the difference costs you two strokes. Drop the curve lower and it goes sleepy. Lift it and the face is alert, or startled if you lift it far enough.

The curve doesn't have to touch the dot, and it's usually better if it doesn't quite.

Where they sit on the head

I've written about this one elsewhere and won't repeat the whole argument, but it's the mistake that spoils more faces than anything to do with the eyes themselves.

They want to be about halfway down the head, not a third of the way. Every beginner puts them too high — I did it for about a year — because we mentally file the face as the interesting bit and give it more room than it has.

Level 3: make them look somewhere

Up to now the face has been staring straight out. Pointing the gaze somewhere is one more decision and it changes the drawing more than any amount of detail will.

Draw the eye as a small open shape rather than a solid dot, then put the dark circle off-centre inside it. Shifted left, they're looking left. Shifted up, they're looking up, and a face looking slightly up reads as hopeful in a way that's hard to get any other route.

Both eyes have to agree. One dot sitting left while the other sits right doesn't read as a squint, it reads as an error, and it's the single eye mistake people notice instantly without being able to name it.

Level 4: the white, the iris, the highlight

Only worth doing when the face is large and you're taking your time over it.

Outline the eye shape and leave it unfilled. Put the dark circle inside so that the upper lid cuts across the top of it — an iris floating fully visible with white all the way around reads as alarm, which is occasionally what you want and usually isn't. Then, if you like, one small white dot for a highlight, in the same corner on both sides.

One highlight. Not three.

At small sizes all of this collapses back into a dark shape anyway, which is the argument for level two.

Level 5: glasses

Draw the eyes properly first and put the frames on top afterwards. Drawing the frames first and then trying to fit eyes inside them is how you end up with eyes that are too small.

A pair of frames is two shapes and a bridge. Round, square, or a single line across for the thin metal sort.

Glasses are the highest-return thing on the whole face. Anybody who wears them is recognisable by the frames alone, which is why a drawing of a colleague often needs nothing else to land.

Three things to skip

• Eyelashes drawn as individual strands. Same trap as hair: one small shape at the outer corner does the job and four separate lines looks like a mistake.
• Making both eyes identical. You're drawing by hand and slight asymmetry is what makes it look drawn. Chasing a match wastes minutes and reads stiff.
• Shading inside the eye on a small face. It turns into a grey smudge at the size anyone will see it.

A practice round that's actually useful

Draw the same face four times and change nothing but the eyes.

Same head, same hair, same mouth, four different eye treatments: dots, dots with lids, gaze pointed off to one side, and the full open-shape version. Put them next to each other. Most people are surprised by how much of what they'd call the expression was living in the eyes the whole time, and by how well the plainest of the four holds up.

It takes about ten minutes and it settles the question of which level you need far better than reading about it does.

Our wall is a reasonable place to put them, since the faces sit next to other people's and you can tap one to watch it redraw itself stroke by stroke. Watching someone else's eye strokes go down in order is the closest thing to looking over their shoulder.