Eye drawing: How to draw manga tutorials

September 8, 2009 by r2moo2
Filed under: How to draw manga tutorials, News

How to draw manga easily: Eye drawing

Basically I am going to start by giving some hints about self learning manga, hence I am going to introduce a ‘how to draw manga tutorials’ series in this blog. We will touch upon eye drawing for this post.

I am a student of drawing manga comics just like many of you, so I’m letting everyone know that I am not an expert in this aspect. However because I have a manga comic teacher, I could check back whether all these online resources are beneficial or not.

However there is one advice: there may be thousands of resources out there providing information on how to draw comic or manga, but without a good mentor, self learning can become tedious and discouraging.

Why do I say that? Simply because when we self learn:

We tend to practice what we are comfortable with and we seldom challenge ourselves to go beyond what we should be learning.
We don’t have professional advice, so we do not know how much we progress or what to improve on in our drawing.
We give up easily as there is no challenge to improve when we are by ourselves. Mentors or teachers help us to spur on.

And there are many other reasons why self learning has limitations. However I am not saying this is impossible; it’s just a steeper hill to climb that’s all.

Moreover some people may not have the luxury to have a good mentor. Either they are not available, or it may be expensive to have one.

So the upcoming advices and tutorials are for everyone. Let’s get on with it shall we?

Eye Drawing

From my previous doodle art, my manga teacher skipped the aspect of drawing heads in my training. That’s because she thinks that I have a decent amount of skill to survive in that aspect, and will further give me more training next time to do different sets of profiles. (I am only currently doing a front view profile as seen here in my previous post.)

How do I know how to draw if I did not have any background for drawing in the first place?

Simple. Like anyone who wants to self learn drawing manga or comics, going to Google and search ‘how to draw manga’ is just an instinctive reaction.

I chanced upon this video tutorial from my Google search:

Is that all? Just practice what the video suggests?

Nope, that’s because by simply copying how he draws, we just become copy cats! This will help very limitedly when you want to make your own comic book, as we need to be original as we can.

There is a general system in drawing eye/eyes. It’s not a hard rule, but it certainly helps. Here are the steps in order:

Draw the iris of the eye/eyes first. That will give us a rough gauge of the size of the eyes.
Include the highlight of the eye/eyes; either a small circle/oval at the top left hand corner of the iris for starters, or at other corners of the eye, but please be consistent to apply it to both eyes. The highlight of the eye determines the direction of light that is shining upon your character generally, so it gives a lively effect. Please do not ever shade into the highlight of the eye.
Extend the lines from the top and bottom parts of the iris to draw the eye lashes, thus determining the shape of the entire eye.
Draw a line above the eye lashes to indicate the fold of the eye lid. Makes the look real and good.
Add the eye brows.

I was browsing other videos of this author and noticed that this is how he usually draws eyes of his characters. (In the above particular video, because he had guiding lines pre-drawn on his paper, he could start drawing from the eye lashes.) I found it to be very useful and applied it consistently in my doodles.

Creative and Systematic drawing

This will be my final hint for this post. More will come in future posts.

I used to think that systematic drawing and creativity are at odds with each other. Basically I believed that having a system to define my drawings would put creativity in a box.

Actually this is not true. Every professional manga or comic artist would need to draw hundreds of eyes, hairstyles and bodies. And these comic artists have a dateline to meet for their publishers. If they do not have a general system to draw characters so as to allow them to draw fast while retaining quality, they will never meet their datelines.

So if anyone is browsing through tutorial videos on drawing, do take note on small details of how the artist drew their work. Every part of a character’s body has a system by which we can easily follow to aid our drawing. That is why guidelines existed.

So this is the end of my first post on how to draw manga tutorials. Do come back to check for further updates.

Credits

The above Youtube video is by Mike Crilley, author of the Miki Fall series Original English Language(OEL) manga comic. I am not doing any advertising for him, nor have I read his comics, nor do I know him personally, but I do want to recognise his efforts in making these manga drawing video tutorials that helped me greatly.

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