[English] Drawing Eyes with Inkscape

Hi to all of you. This is a beginner tutorial (and my first try to do a tutorial overall) about how to draw vector eyes with Inkscape. This tutorial is written for Version 0.48 available at www.inkscape.org.

On the very left side you see a preview of what we are going to accomplish within this tutorial. As mentioned before, i would be very happy to see comments which help me with either draw better, optimize my workflow or making my tutorials look better.

If you dislike or like my english feel free to tell me. I am considering german original versions. Enough of the talking, now lets get started!

The Eye

Step 1:

Since i love the Bezier-Tool (Shift+F6), i first create the eye and the eyebrow with this tool. But you are allowed to draw those basic outlines with other tools, too! Speaking of outlines, we always deactivate outlines unless i might tell you overwise (which i wont in this tutorial) and only use the fill. Some things you might consider while forming the shape of an eye and the eyebrow are:

• The thick side of the eyebrow is on the nose side
• The tear sack has a spiky end, is on the nose side and moved down a bit
• The rest of the eye is basically an oval shape

Step 2:

Now we use the gradient tool (Ctrl+F1). This tool is repeatedly used in my tutorials, so you better get used to it. You basically select a shape, then select the gradient tool and press "radial" on the tool-specific bar. Now you have to click somewhere within the shape and drag a radial gradient. You can drag the gradient nodes out of the limits of the shape selected and select nodes with either the gradient tool itself or the node tool (F2). Now you choose colors which might seem fitting for the eye you wanna draw. The picture on the right side shows what you should have accomplished by now. Step 3 will tell about further usage of the gradient tool

 

Step 3:

Now we want some shadows around the eyes. The golden ratio is hard to find. Sometimes you might find the eyes you draw by my ways to look very overslept . Just make this shadows a bit brighter if this happens. So what we do in this step is drawing another bezier spline right through the eyebrow and way around the eye. Then make another gradient from something darker then then the skin color you have chosen to transparent. You might find yourself still seeing way to rapid changes on the boundary of the shape. Simple trick to avoid those: Blur the shape!

Lets now begin with the drawing of the actual eye or iris, as an educated person might say.

Step 4:

The iris is a circle, so nothings is better then circle tool to draw the iris. Use a tiny bit of blur to soften the edges. Use the gradient tool to color the iris in whatever color you like. In the middle of the iris is this black hole thing. Double the shape of iris, fill it black. Now select the basic mouse icon tool (F1), press  "Ctrl+Shift" at the same time and change the Size of the doubled shape. It will stay in the middle of the bigger object. Now double the black hole or "pupil" again, take the blur to the extreme and choose another color for this shape. Also move it behind the pupil. Picture below on the left side shows what you should have accomplished by now:

Step 5:

The following 2 steps show how to add highlights to the eye. Lets first add those stripes which you see on the picture above on the right side.Those can easily be added with the stars tool (*). On the tool specific menu bar we do approximately the following adjustments:

• Edges: 30
• Spike-Ratio: 0.2
• Rounding: 0.04
• Distortion: 0.03

Add another Gradient which goes from transperent to white or another color (depending on your eyes) and which starts from within the eye, of course.Done!

Step 6:

There has to be a white shiny bulb within the black part of the iris! This is an absolute "Have to" in my humble opinion. Just draw another circle, fill it with white, make it smaller than the pupil and put it somewhere into it. Now just tune up the blur extremely and maybe add some transpiracy. Add other shiny parts to the iris as you wish. For that i used the Bezier-Tool, avoided sharp edges and added another gradient from white to transparent. See picture below for what you should have accomplished by now:

Step 7:

Now to finalize the picture we make a group with all the different stuff in the eye by making them an object. Scale the object to fit into your eyeshape. Depending on where you want the eye to look at, you can freely move it wherever you want to. We use "Masking" (im not sure if this translates to clipping but if there is both in english client use masking) to let the iris stay in the eye.  Masking cuts out the object(s) you selected along a path. The masking-path has to be above all other paths which you want to be changed and the masking path will get lost in process of masking. So what we do is

• Set the Iris-Object to whereever you want within the eye-shape
• double the eye-shape and bring it to the very front
• select the iris-object and the doubled eye-shape
• go to Object->Masking->Set

And we are finally done! Congratulations. You have just drawn your first basic vector eye (by this tuturial)!