How to Draw a Realistic Eye with Teardrop | Step by Step Tutorial

Hey, let's draw this teary eye, starting with just a circle. These are the tools I'll be using. More info in the description. It's OK if you only have an HB pencil. Your drawing may just simply turn out lighter than mine. Let's start constructing our eye. Using an HB pencil with light pressure, draw a circle for the eyeball. Doesn't need to be perfect. Mine's roughly 12 centimeters, in case you're wondering. Next, grab a ruler. We're going to draw a slanted line through the circle. The angle is up to you. Here are some examples of different eye slants. Decide on an angle and then draw it lightly. These are guidelines to help us draw the actual eye shape. Let's draw the inner corner of the eye. Position your pencil here on the line, a small distance from the circle. Then draw something like a V shape. Make sure there's less space below the line than there is above it. You can also try drawing a U shape or a droopy U. Navigate to the left, where the line and circle intersect. This marks the outer corner of our eye. From here, draw a big arch for the top eyelid. Keep your pencil marks very light, in case you need to fix anything. Notice how much space there is from the slanted line. For the bottom eyelid, let's minimize that space greatly. Once you're about halfway to the inner corner of the eye, bring your pencil up earlier, then join it with your V. Happy with your eye shape? Let's move on to the eyelid ledge. Just draw a line that closely follows the top and bottom eyelid. Taper your stroke as you approach the right. Finally, draw the upper eyelid crease, spanning the length of your eye or beyond it. You can mimic the curve or shape of your top eyelid. An optional detail is to add some extra creases branching out at the end. Now draw the iris, making it roughly half the size of your eyeball. Doesn't have to be perfect. Place it close to the center of the eye, while making sure the bottom of the iris is most visible. If you want to draw a pair of eyes, keep the circle and slanted line, and then go to this tutorial, which I'll link in the description. If not, erase those guidelines and draw a slight curve here, to separate the inner corner of your eye from your eyeball. For your iris, try to draw a full circle, instead of bracket shapes, to avoid an oblong iris. Another reason why drawing the full circle is important, is that it helps us properly position the pupil, which sits in the very center of the iris. To find the center of your iris, draw a vertical and horizontal line through it. The intersection of these lines marks the center of the iris. Now draw a small circle for your pupil. You can adjust the pupil size based on your preference. Pupil size can change based on reasons such as how much light is entering the eye. For this drawing, I want the eye to be lit by a large amount of light coming from a big window, so I'll keep my pupil on the small side. Once you're done, erase the top part of your circle and the horizontal and vertical line. Alright, take a step back and see if you're happy with how your eye looks. I think my eyelid could close a little bit more, for a more relaxed feeling. If you like how yours looks, please feel free to keep it as is. Tweak whatever you want so it looks good to you. Next, we'll draw some outlines for the highlights inside the eye. These are going to be the brightest areas. They'll help give it that glassy appearance. Before we start, decide on which direction you want your eye to be lit, and what type of light source you want. For example, it could be lit from the right side with a circular light fixture, closer to the middle with a square window, or from the left with two rectangular windows. Use your imagination to come up with some fun combinations. Just make sure whatever shape you choose is stretched and curved to support the illusion of a curved eyeball. I'll go with the two rectangular windows. You can break up the shapes even more to make it look more interesting. Draw it lightly though to see how it looks before you commit to it. I might even change this later on as the drawing starts coming together more, so yeah. It helps to think of every aspect of your drawing as a work in progress instead of being caught up in how perfect it needs to be every step of the way. Let your creativity flow by allowing yourself the freedom to explore and just make mistakes. Now, imagine tears building up and flooding the bottom of your eye. Along the edge of your waterline and underneath your main highlight, draw a squished version of the highlight. And let's put a highlight over in the corner here, where most of the tears are. Make sure you erase any graphite that happens to be inside your highlights, because we want them to be as clean and as bright looking as possible. Are you satisfied with how your eye looks? If so, let's start shading, starting with the pupil. This is going to be the darkest part of our eye. I'm using a 6B pencil because I don't need to press very much to get a dark value. If you're using an HB pencil, just press down harder, but not too hard, or else you might end up with a lot of glare. Next, we'll shade the iris. I'm using my favorite pencil, the 4B. If you want a light iris, use a harder pencil, like an HB. Watch my shading video to learn more about the different pencils and their uses. Instead of using a writing grip on my pencil, which gives me thin strokes, I'm holding my pencil like this to get thicker strokes that will be easier to blend. It's also a quicker way to shade because I'm covering more ground with just a few strokes. Make sure there's a good length of graphite sticking out from the wood, so you can get nice, thick strokes. We need to shade a base layer of graphite in the iris. Try to use a consistent amount of pressure so it's pretty even. Be careful not to shade over the highlights. Once done, you can blend using a cotton swab, blending stump, or a regular facial tissue, for example. Here's an example of using a blending stump versus a tissue. You can decide for yourself which one looks better. Move your finger to a clean spot on the tissue every now and then if you want your iris to be a light shade. When blending around details like the highlights and pupil, a blending stump will work wonders. If you don't have a pointy tool like that, simply fold the tissue over a few times and then fold it to a fine point and make sure that the pointy part is folded in as tightly as possible. Go in at the end and fill in any lighter areas with the tip of your pencil. Don't worry about it looking perfectly even because we'll be layering on more graphite later. Now I'm using a softer pencil, a 6B, to shade a dark ring around the edge of the iris. The thickness? That's up to you. Then blend it in. I'll blend the left side using a blending stump and the right side with a tissue so you can see the difference between the two tools. I'm blending toward the pupil, trying to make the edge fade inward. Once you're done, you can lightly blend along the outside of the iris too. Now let's see how blending with a tissue compares. I'm using a spot that's already saturated with graphite from previous use so I'm also kind of shading and blending at the same time. Now I'm going to blend the outside part of the iris using a clean spot on my tissue so that the effect is subtle. As you can see, they both blended well but the tissue picks up some graphite during the process, making the area lighter. This can be a very useful way to lighten your drawing instead of erasing something that you shaded too dark. If your blending tool does the same thing, just add more graphite. For dark areas like this, I prefer to use a blending stump. If you don't have one, check out my DIY tutorial to make your own. Since our imaginary light source comes from above, the top eyelid is going to cast a shadow onto the eyeball. So let's shade along the top of the iris and blend it down, aiming for a nice fade. Then blend, reducing your pressure where you need the cast shadow to fade out. If you want it darker, just add another layer and press harder. Remember how we have tears accumulating along the bottom of the eye? Shade this area in the iris darker and then blend it. I'm switching back to my 4B to draw the details in my iris. If your drawing is much smaller, try using a harder pencil so your lines don't look blurry. Sharpen your pencil well for this step. Draw a wavy ribbon around your pupil. Then draw radiating lines inside the wavy ribbon. Make sure they converge at the center of the pupil, meaning at a single point, otherwise they may not look as realistic. Think of bicycles, folks. Here's an example of what to do and what not to do. You can see how my pencil goes to the center of the pupil before I draw each stroke to make sure each one is angled correctly. Then go back over and make some of them darker. If there's enough space, you can shade inside the ribbon. I'm going to shade darkest near the ribbon and gradually lighter closer to the pupil. Now draw an identical ribbon around the first one. Where the ribbon sticks out, draw a line stretching outward. You can erase these parts of the ribbon if they're very prominent. Once done, draw random lines, waves, or squiggles between each one of them. Vary the darkness of each squiggle. Fade out as you near the edge of your iris. If your details are starting to blur, make sure your pencil remains sharp or try using a harder pencil grade. Now once you're done, pick a few to darken or thicken to make some areas stand out, adding interest. Besides using your pencil, you can also use an eraser to create spokes. This is optional but can give your details a layered effect, making your iris look more complex. To do this, you can use a solid eraser cut to a fine tip or a pinched slash pointy kneaded eraser like what I'm doing. Sorry, it's really difficult to see what I'm doing so I'll just show you a few quick clips. I dab at parts of the ribbon and line some spokes inside and outside the ribbon using a dabbing or dragging motion. You can create spokes randomly wherever you like. I think there's a lot of detail in the eye but it still kind of looks blah. Some additional contrast around the edge will definitely give it a striking appearance, drawing us in more. I'm using a 6B to darken the edges of the iris like we did earlier. This time I'm pressing much harder and shading a thicker ring. Try increasing thickness just a little at a time to see if you like how it looks. If this looks good to you, stop here and blend it. If you don't mind going even thicker like I am now, keep in mind that the thicker you go, the more you're eating into all those squiggly details that you drew earlier and creating a very obvious unnatural edge. To make this ring blend well and look more natural, make it jaggedy along the inside edge, working your way between some of the spokes you've already drawn. And then when you blend, use the same in and out movement. Let me fix the example on the left. Let's also darken the cast shadow along the top of the iris too, since it looks too light now. Let's tighten up these highlights. Instead of using my pencil, I'm using my dirty blending stump. The next thing we need to do is draw some silhouettes in our highlights. Imagine there's an object between the eye and the window where the light is shining in from. We'll see a reflection or a silhouette of that person, or plant, table, or even a cat. It's up to you. You can even draw an arbitrary abstract shape that continues through both your main highlights, if you have two like mine. Then blend it. You can use a dirty blending stump to draw and blend at the same time. I think it looks better to blend this unevenly. The extra detail makes it look more complex. After more blending, I decided to shrink the two main highlights slightly. These two highlights could be more subtle for my preference, so I'm blending around the edges to create blur and slightly reduce the highlight size. These things I'm doing are totally optional. See if you like the result and decide for yourself if you'd like to apply them as well. I'm actually going to blur this one too because it looks out of place now. And I think it wouldn't hurt to add a few more highlights to make the eye extra teary looking. Now let's shade the rest of the eyeball. We want to avoid leaving it white, otherwise the highlights won't look as poppy. Scribble on a scrap sheet of paper to make sure your strokes are thick, not thin and scratchy because the latter is more difficult to blend. I'm using an overhand grip again. Lay down a light layer of graphite across the rest of the eyeball. To avoid making the eyeball look too dark, stick to a lighter pencil such as an HB or 2B. In the right corner, shade slightly darker. Avoid shading over the highlight outline we created a while ago. Remember how we have tears accumulating along the bottom of the eye? Let's shade this section very, very slightly. Now blend while making sure not to smudge the iris. I'm using a tissue instead of a blending stump to keep my shading on the lighter side. Use a new section on your tissue every now and then to avoid blotchiness. Fold your tissue to a fine point to get into small spaces or to work close to edges without blurring the boundary lines. Now that we have a base layer of graphite down, let's go in and shade a few sections darker to add depth. The inner corner of the eye is deep, so let's shade it quite dark. To make the eyeball look round, let's shade the left and right side to show that the surface of the eyeball curves away from the light. Fade out gradually as you work your way toward the iris. Remember that the top eyelid casts a shadow along the eyeball? We shaded the part along the iris, but not along the rest of the eyeball yet, so let's do that. Shade lighter as you work your way down. Shade along the very bottom of the eyeball to support that round shape. Blend any sections you haven't yet. Look at your eye from a distance to see if you'd like to lighten or darken anything. I think the highlight in the right corner will pop out better if the surrounding area is even darker. I'm gonna shade really dark around this inside boundary, and then I'll blend it to the center with a nice soft fade. By the way, the line we drew here earlier isn't visible anymore. Let's add back one or even two lines, and then blend them out. I'm blending this whole area with a blending stump because the tip is firmer than the tissue, allowing me to be more precise, and it helps to keep the value dark. Shade along the bottom here. Don't make it too thick though. I'm using a dirty blending stump so I can shade and blend at the same time. Press lightly to shade a light value. It's easy to get stuck in the small details, so frequently look over the entire drawing to rework where needed. I want to use a tissue here to get a softer fade. I actually think this highlight could be a little bit more narrow with a few more close by. If you like it the way it is, keep it that way. Now let's move on to shading the skin. I'm using a 4B for this step. Shade both eyelid ledges, making sure the left side is slightly darker. Fade out gradually as you work your way to the right. Let's shade the upper eyelid. We're going to shade from here up and from the crease down, leaving the middle section the lightest. Use pencil strokes that follow the contour of the eyelid. Start from the bottom and shade upwards, getting lighter as you approach the middle. You can use thin pencil marks if you want it to double as skin texture. Now let's work from the top down. Again, lighten your pencil strokes as you get close to the middle. This helps give the upper eyelid a curved contour. Darken your shading close to the eyelid crease. The darker you shade, the deeper the crease will appear. By the way, I talk about shading with the side of your pencil a lot, but if you have good pressure control and can shade with minimal gaps between your strokes, feel free to shade using the tip of your pencil instead. The process does take longer, but I think the end result is much smoother. This amount of shading isn't enough. The skin doesn't look like it's hugging the eyeball yet, so let's also shade the sides. Leave the spot above your main highlight the lightest. I'm going to make this section a little darker. Since the light comes from the left side, we'll shade the right side darkest. Large areas of skin are difficult to blend smoothly if you're using a blending stump. That's why I prefer to blend most areas of skin with a tissue. Now I'm using a tissue over the padded part of my finger to blend along the eyelid crease in one motion. To avoid smudging, move to a clean spot on your tissue once it gets too dark. Try to blend outward from the lightest area of the eye. Otherwise, you could smudge your drawing like this. It's really not a big deal though. I'm going to darken the skin even more later, so I may not even need to fix this blemish. Intensify any areas you want to shape the eye to your liking. If you want a darker eyelid crease, shade it again with more pressure and use a blending stump instead of a tissue to maintain the value. Once you're happy, move to the new section of skin above this. Make your shading darkest near the crease and lighter as you work your way up. So I put together a helpful companion ebook for this tutorial with overviews and printable worksheets for this exact eye so you can practice certain techniques without having to redraw the entire eye each time. You can get a copy of my ebook in the description below. For the area above, I'm just shading a solid light layer of graphite. Don't overthink it. Let's also shade here, a small distance from the inner corner of the eye, just enough to make it look like the skin dips in. Shade lightly to the right and top of this, trying to match the value of the section above. Now blend all of the new shading and decide which areas you'd like to darken further. Shading and blending until you're satisfied. I personally want the skin even darker. What you do with your eye is completely up to you and your artistic preference. Let's shade the last section of skin below the eye, still using my 4B pencil. Test your pencil in case it's scratchy and then start shading. If your shading is not very smooth, avoid shading straight lines. Instead, try shading in a direction that roughly follows the contour of the eyelid, horizontally. This helps avoid the risk of making the eye appear flat. If you notice yourself being too heavy-handed, feel free to switch to a harder pencil. Keep things pretty light for now. Just add a solid layer of graphite, meaning don't worry about where the shadows are just yet. We need to make sure there's graphite all along the bottom eyelid, so when we draw the teardrop later, it will show up well. Now we'll shade darker on the right side of our bottom eyelid, just like we did with the upper eyelid. Blend from the lightest area to the darker one. Sometimes you'll get sections like this that are weirdly darker and very blotchy, no matter how much you blend it out. This can happen if you previously erased something there, for example. It's not difficult to fix. Just roll your kneaded eraser to a fine point and then dab the blemish until the shading evens out. But if you're planning to darken the skin more, it may just blend right in. Something to keep in mind. Keep in mind that a dark under-eye can give your eye a very tired look, which in this case is probably good, since we're drawing a sad, tear-filled eye. I'm just going to darken the shading over here slightly and make the ledge more obvious by shading right up to it. Blend again and smooth out any blemishes with your eraser. If you want to give the under-eye a more skin-like texture, you can erase various lines and dots in a sort of fanned-out pattern. Just a subtle detail. Now let's shade the left side of the bottom lid. A very subtle amount. Also, I want to thicken up this ledge a little bit and I'm going to do that using circular shading. It's called circularism and it's a good technique to try if you find that your skin looks too scratchy. The more dense the circles or scribbles, the better. Blend again. Okay, now take a break to refresh your eyes and your mind. Then look over your entire drawing. Do you want to touch up on anything? The biggest thing is I want to make sure the skin doesn't need any more work because once I draw the eyelashes, it'll be extremely difficult to blend around those details without smearing everything. So lighten or darken wherever you want. Somehow, this part of the eyeball has a light patch. I'm also cleaning my highlights up, increasing the brightness and adding a few more subtle highlights on the right. A little blemish to get rid of over here. I think this line is too apparent, so I'm going to dab it away with my kneaded eraser till it's not as noticeable anymore and then shade the eyeball here very slightly. I could do touch-ups forever, but I'm going to stop here. An optional detail you can add is the appearance of blood vessels. Not sure about it? Here's a preview of what it might look like. It's a very subtle detail. If you're not a fan or think it won't make a difference, please skip to the next step. Anyway, we want to use a very hard pencil like the 2H, which will produce much lighter strokes than the soft B pencils that we've been using. The hardness helps keep our lines thin, making details clean and sharp. The lighter value helps us avoid overdoing it so we don't end up with scary bloodshot eyes. If you don't have the same pencil grade as me, you can use an HB pencil with extremely light pressure. Okay, let's draw the blood vessels now. Sharpen your pencil well. They're just going to look like a bunch of random squiggles. They can be super short and really any direction. It's pretty fun. Once you have a few, you can decide which ones you'd like to darken or erase completely. To save time, I'll highlight where I put each squiggle and then skip to the end because I'm drawing so lightly right now, I'm sure it'll be super hard for you to see clearly. After a short break and seeing this drawing with new eyes again, I think the iris could use some more contrast because it doesn't draw me in as much as I'd like. Since it's already very dark, I'll mostly lighten up some random parts of the ribbon and spokes. Here's a before and after so you can see if you want to do the same with yours. I think this looks much better. Now I'm going to show you what I did. If you want to skip all this, please move to the next section. I'm lightly rubbing the eraser along parts of the ribbon and spokes to make them pop out more. When lightening the spokes, I alternate between pinching my eraser to create thin lines and smushing my eraser using a light dragging motion to create broader sections. This is an easy way to create a layered effect for the iris, making it look even more complex. Let's draw those eyelashes. There are three main elements I think we should keep in mind while drawing our eyelashes. We're basically going to draw different J shapes. Narrow ones, wide ones, and everything in between. So practice drawing these shapes. Just think of the letter J. On the other side, they'll be flipped. We all know that lashes point outward from the eyelid like light radiating from the sun. But drawing each lash transitioning perfectly like this doesn't look all that realistic. However, we do need to keep this general directionality in mind as we draw. So what should we do? This is where number three comes in. Randomness. Naturally, our lashes taper together, cross over each other, or sometimes a random lash points in the completely opposite direction to an extreme degree. You'll see if we zoom out, the lashes still look like they're radiating from the eye like they used to, but more naturally. For your bottom lashes, you can do the same thing but flipped. Want your eye to look very wet? Try tapering many of your bottom lashes together since they are usually more clingy when wet. There are many more details which I'll cover as we go along so I don't bombard you with too much at once. Just keep these three things at the top of your mind. I hope that was also a helpful overview of what we'll be doing. Now let's get into the nitty gritty. Choose your pencil by testing different ones. I'm looking for a pencil that will stay sharp because I'm going to be applying a lot of pressure to draw each lash and I can't have it become blunt after a few strokes. But I don't want a pencil that's too hard because then my lashes won't be dark enough. Choose the pencil that's right for you and your specific drawing. I'm going with a 2B. Make sure you sharpen it well. Drawing eyelashes can be pretty nerve-wracking so get yourself used to drawing J shapes and your hand used to the flicking motions needed to taper the end of each hair. If your strokes are wobbly, try moving faster and limiting the movement of your fingers using your wrist, elbow, or shoulder instead. If your eyelashes look more like check marks, try slowing down. Experiment with your speed to see what works best for you. It may help to split the eyelid into three sections, placing a lash or two in each section and then fill the spaces in between. Or you can jump around randomly which I think looks more natural. For this tutorial, that's exactly what I'm going to do. Okay, ready? I'm going to draw my first lash right here in the middle of the eyelid, starting my pencil stroke along the eyelid's ledge. Don't panic if your first lash doesn't look exactly how you imagined. As we go along, I'll show you how to fix mistakes without having to erase. If you want a longer lash, just extend your stroke from where you left off. Okay, here's a weird kinked one. It's normal even after practicing loads that your hand isn't going to do what you want it to. To fix a kinked eyelash like this without erasing, you could consider turning it into two different lashes. You could redraw the bottom section of this lash the way you intended and then extend this line so there are two lashes. You could also just ignore this extra line for now and wait until the lashes become more dense. There will likely be an opportunity for you to cover up the mistake in a convenient way. If the mistake is too obvious or difficult to work with, simply roll your kneaded eraser to a fine point and dab along the hair repeatedly until it's less noticeable. As you continue to draw, it may not be visible anymore. If you want to thicken your lashes, you can double up on your strokes. You can see how before I draw each lash, I move my pencil above the paper to make sure the movement feels smooth and to sort of visualize the lash before I commit. My mini ebook includes printable worksheets of this exact eye if you want to warm up before drawing eyelashes on your eye. The link is in the description. If you draw a lash that isn't quite as smooth as you'd like, you can slightly thicken it up to tweak the curvature how you want it. These ones could be slightly longer. Now let's fill in the right side. Here I'm trying out different lash directions by hovering my pencil over the page. I think this feels right. Take your time drawing each and every lash. Lashes toward the inner corner of the eye are shorter and lighter. As you continue drawing, try to vary the length of your lashes so that if you drew an outline around all your lashes, they don't create too smooth a curve. Continuing on. Don't forget to add lashes that go in the complete opposite direction. We're going to sweep across the eyelid multiple times so don't feel like you need to draw your lashes too densely on the first pass. If you have a slightly bare section like this, where you want to add lashes without overcrowding, consider adding thin and light lashes. Dip some of your J shapes down really low to add some more variety. See how the eyelid ledge is very visible here? I think it looks nicer when the lashes dip down a little further, covering the ledge, even crossing into the boundary of the eyeball at times. It helps make the lashes look fuller. You can do this by drawing a deeper J shape. Remember to pay attention to how blunt your pencil is getting and sharpen it when necessary. It's a good idea to look at a bunch of different eye photos to get some ideas on lash groupings, stroke angles, etc. Take a step back and check that you have a mix of lashes that cross over each other, taper together, or even stand on their own, J shapes that are shallow and ones that are deep. Try avoiding any patterns which could make the lashes look unnatural. Let's add more lashes. I think I'm almost done with these upper lashes. Just want to lengthen a few of them. I like the amount of eyelashes but the base doesn't look dense enough for my liking so I'm just going to add short pencil strokes to fill in some of the empty spaces around the base of my eyelashes as well as some lighter lashes here and there which help fill in the space without making it look too busy. Once you're done with the top set, let's move on to the bottom set of lashes. Try to draw most of your eyelash roots on or below this edge. We're just doing the same thing as the top except everything is flipped. Can I direct your attention back to the top eyelid for a second? Notice how you can barely see the eyelid ledge anymore? It's now covered by all these eyelashes. We don't want to do that to the bottom eyelid. Since we're viewing the bottom eyelid from above, the ledge should not be too obstructed by any eyelashes. Draw shorter, thinner lashes near the inner corner of the eye. I like to keep my lower lashes to a minimum to avoid making it look overcrowded. If you want to fill in some gaps without overcrowding, consider short, light lashes. An optional detail I like to add is to give the skin around the eyelashes some texture which also doubles as cast shadows. You can do this by drawing around the base of your lashes with light circular motions using the tip of your pencil. Keep it subtle. You can do the same for the top eyelid. This tutorial took me 10 hours to draw so there's a lot I couldn't include in this video. If you want to see a more detailed tutorial on the eyelashes or any other part of this eye, please let me know. Another optional detail you can add is a reflection of the eyelashes on the surface of the eyeball. Before we draw the teardrop, let's take a step back once again to look at the entire eye. See if you want to lighten, darken, fix or remove anything. Usually after the eyelashes are drawn, I'll want to darken some shadows to balance out the values across my drawing. For example, darkening the cast shadow along the top of the eyeball. It's a very subtle difference. Also adding and darkening a few lashes and darkening the eyelid crease. Make sure to blend carefully around the eyelashes to avoid blurring these details. You might be able to get away with not blending at all. Here's what it looked like before and after the tweaks. I didn't do much, but I think the increase in contrast was quite impactful. It definitely draws my attention more. And now let's work on the teardrop. Starting with a close-up example. An important thing when drawing a teardrop is making sure the spot you're drawing it on is shaded so it will show up well. I'm shading the background very dark to make this example extremely clear. Shade and blend well so your skin looks as smooth as possible. Then use an eraser to create a tear shape. A kneaded eraser might not remove enough graphite, so you will likely need a solid eraser for this job. Make sure the shape of your teardrop is clean and the edges are crisp. Feel free to go over it with your pencil to redefine the shape. Next, where is the direction of your light source? Let's keep the lighting in this example consistent with our drawing. For mine, the light is coming from the top left, so we should see a shadow below the tear to the right. Blend this shadow very well, making sure it's darkest near the tear. Since the light is coming from the left, we might see a little bit of a shadow along here too. I'm using my dirty blending tool to create a subtle cast shadow. Once you're done shading and blending, make sure again that your teardrop shape is still clean and crisp. Now let's work on the inside of our teardrop. With my light source coming from the top left, this area will be illuminated, meaning we need to shade the area above. Shade lighter the closer you get to the illuminated area. Shade just a little darker along the very top, making it look like more skin tone is showing through. Then blend it out very well. One key thing is to make sure the top of your teardrop blends well with the skin tone above. This is how we get the tear to look as though it's thinning out and running down the face. Next, add your highlights. I'm going to erase two shapes. If you have a white pen or correction fluid, you can make the teardrop pop more by brightening the lightest areas. Oh, and an extra detail you can add is a little bit of light exiting the teardrop. If you want to change the shape of your teardrop after you've done all this work, it's pretty easy. Say I want to create a Y shape at the top. I can draw a shadow and erase above the shadow slightly, making sure to blend as I go along. I hope this side tutorial was helpful. You can practice it as many times as you need and experiment with different lighting situations. Come back when you're ready to add it to your eye drawing. Ready to add the teardrop to your drawing? Choose where you'd like the tear to fall. Wherever you choose, make sure the area is shaded and blended well. It doesn't need to be dark, just anything but white. We want to make sure the tear shows up well. Erase a teardrop in any shape you'd like. My eye is lit from the left, so I'll draw my cast shadow along the bottom right of the teardrop, opposite my light source. I'm using the same pencil I was using to shade the skin, a 4B. Currently, 91% of people watching this channel are not subscribed yet. If you like this detailed style of tutorial and haven't subscribed yet, please consider clicking that button. It helps keep these tutorials coming and really helps in supporting the channel. Thank you so, so much. If blending this cast shadow makes your teardrop outline blurry, avoid blending right up to it. Now let's work inside the teardrop. Identify the area that will be illuminated, then shade above that area. If you tend to overdo your shading, leave a lot of space for your illuminated zone. And blend it well, making sure the top part matches well with the skin tone. This will make the top section of your teardrop look less dense. Shade and blend several times if you need to. I'm erasing a blotchy area. Once you're happy, add your highlights. Reference the main highlights in your eye so you can create similar ones. I'm simplifying the highlights above into just two lines. Make sure the lighter parts of your teardrop stay that way. I think this teardrop would look better if I make it more Y-shaped. I can do that by erasing a little bit, adding a shadow, and then blend well. If you want, you can add some additional highlights around each eyelash. I'm just dabbing some graphite away with my pointy kneaded eraser in random areas above and around the teardrop. Erase as many as you want, making the skin glisten. If the highlights in your teardrop don't pop enough, make them lighter and shade a little darker around them. Here's a completely optional step. If you want to make your eye look more sad, you can darken the eye whites to make it look red from crying so much, as well as increasing the number of blood vessels and darkening some of them. Take another look at your drawing from far away to see if any tweaks are needed. I'm just applying some subtle touch-ups where the shading looks inconsistent. I do want my teardrop to show up better for the thumbnail, so to fix that, I can increase the contrast by shading dark areas darker and then using a white gel pen to make those highlights actually white. Much better. Touch up your work until you're satisfied. I really hope you found this tutorial helpful. If you need clarification on anything, please let me know in the comment section. Thank you for watching all the way to the end. If you liked this tutorial, please hit that like button to let me know and subscribe to get notified when I drop a new video. Suggestions are always welcome. Thank you for drawing with me.