A Study of Eyes

I drew Al's eyes yesterday and spent half of the evening thinking that they were the best eyes that anyone had ever drawn ever, and the other half thinking... 'Ugh... they aren't quite right though, are they?'
So, in the name of self improvement, I am going to analyse each of Al's eyes before I continue...
The Left Eye


  • The eye looks far too wide open and too white. The actual white of the eye is in shadow from the brow. Al Pacino is not a bright-eyed, innocent young man, he has seen the world in all it's grim reality. He has known horror and pain and it has affected the brightness of his pupils.
  • The white reflection is far too pronounced.
  • The lower lid needs to appear more baggy and all the wrinkles need more work.
  • The upper left side eye lash ridge needs to be darker and more eyelash-y.
  • The angle of the dark line - the crease - needs to be slightly more pronounced, it's not a perfect curve.

The Right Eye


  • I think the main thing here is the angle of the dark crease. There are 2 specific places where is needs to bend in more.
  • The wrinkles to the side of the eye (both eyes) are really strong, and weirdly curvy. I think I was not happy putting them in so curvy at first as it just looked ridiculous, but they are just very curvy wrinkles that go up very steeply.
  • To get the impression that the eye sits in a socket, everything around it needs to drape around that socket more, this includes the eye brows and wrinkles.
  • The upper lid needs to be darker as does the eyelash ridge. 

Other Points
He's supposed to be looking straight at you, but he is definitely sneaking off to the left here. I've been trying to move the pupils more to the right, and that's made it a little better, but still Al is not looking at me. Maybe this is not the end of the world for now, at least these things are recognisable as eyes, but I would like to be able to draw them looking where I want.

As you can see from the above pictures, when you enlarge the image you don't see all that much detail. I don't know if this matters - maybe my drawing doesn't need to be that detailed, I shouldn't be drawing in each individual eye lash, just shades of eyelashes.

When I get confused about what I'm doing (as I did with the nose) I need to forget what it is that I am drawing and just see where is lighter and where is darker and try to recreate that on the paper.