How to Draw a Realistic EYEBROW

Hey, I'm Darlene and you're watching a Rapid Fire Art tutorial. In this video, I'll break down how to draw an eyebrow into simple steps. If you want to draw the eye that I'm using for this tutorial, visit the link down below. I'm going to use a 2B dollar store pencil, but you can use an HB pencil if you prefer. I'm also using a kneaded eraser, which you can learn how to make in the description, and I'll use a regular facial tissue for blending. Let's get started. We first need to figure out where to draw the eyebrow above our eye. For males, I like to draw the eyebrow closer to the eye. Here's an example of a masculine and feminine eye, with different eyebrow heights, for reference. Once you've decided on the eyebrow height, let's create a few rough guidelines to help us construct the eyebrow outline. Navigate a small distance to the left of the eye, go up to where you want to draw the eyebrow, and make a small tick. This is roughly where your eyebrow will begin. Again, this doesn't need to be exact. Navigate to the outer corner of the eye, go straight up, and then that will be the point where the eyebrow arches. Just add a very light tick to mark the spot. From the same corner, angle outward, for the tail of your eyebrow. Okay, now that we have some guidelines, we can outline the shape of our eyebrow. You can create a number of shapes using the guidelines that we just drew to help you. I'm going to go with something quite angular, not too curvy, to make the eye look more masculine. Instead of drawing a solid eyebrow outline like this, I'll show you a safer way to do it, so that it won't show through in the end. We're going to use tiny little pencil strokes that flow in the same direction that the hairs point. That way, they'll blend right in, and sort of just disappear as we continue to draw. Let's break it down. So along the bottom of the eyebrow, the hair points up, toward the tail. And near the tail end of the eyebrow, they might start pointing downward. Along the side, they'll point more vertically. And along the top of the eyebrow, they point downward, angled toward the tail end of the eyebrow. Use small, light strokes. Don't worry too much about how they look. We mainly want to focus on the eyebrow shape that we're making. These hairs will sort of just disappear as we continue to draw anyway. Tweak the shape however you'd like, before moving on to the next step. Now, to simplify the rest of the eyebrow drawing process, I'm dividing the eyebrow into two zones. Let's call the bottom half Zone 1, and the top half Zone 2. In Zone 1, the hairs mostly point up, and toward the tail end of the eyebrow. At the beginning of the eyebrow, they can even point the opposite way. Zone 2 is simple. They mostly point down, toward the tail of the eyebrow. In the middle section, they're more horizontal, following the same path as the boundary line. Let's keep that in mind as we draw. You can draw a boundary line between Zone 1 and 2 using hair-like strokes, starting from the top left, to the bottom right. Since everyone's eyebrow is different, your boundary line can look way different from mine. Look at some actual eyebrow pictures on Google Images, and you might find a distinct line that runs like this, which I find quite common. Or one like this, where Zone 1 is most prominent. Or even one like this, where Zone 2 is most prominent. Here are some tips before we actually start drawing the eyebrow. To make the eyebrow look as natural as possible, make sure not to draw the hair in a perfectly straight path, and instead, stagger them in a more random pattern. Another thing to remember is to avoid drawing them all straight and parallel to each other, and instead, slightly change the angle or the curve. This is a little exaggerated though. The last thing to remember is to keep your pencil sharp at all times, to make sure each hair is thin, and flick your pencil up at the end of each stroke to feather it out. Let's start drawing the hair in Zone 1, along the very bottom. If you make a mistake, just pinch your kneaded eraser to a very fine point, and dab the mistake away gently. I'm missing a few right here. Over here, we can add hairs that point vertically, and a few that point toward the left. Once you finish this first row of hairs, move up slightly and add a second row. Keep doing this until you reach the boundary line. As you get closer to the boundary line, you'll want to start angling your hairs, or curving them, until they're pointing in the same direction as the hairs we drew along the boundary line. Draw more or less hair, depending on how full or sparse you want your eyebrow to appear. When you reach the boundary line, you can imagine that it's a wall, and that your eyebrow hair needs to curve along this wall. You can of course draw a few hairs poking through. That will actually make it look more natural. Now we don't want to leave the middle part of our eyebrow bald, so make sure to fill it in. Fill in any areas that look too bare. Try to avoid drawing stray hair or unruly hair for now, because we're going to blend our drawing slightly later on. Now that you have some experience drawing the bottom hair, it'll be easier to do the ones up top. You can cross some hairs over each other to make them look natural, instead of drawing them parallel to each other. So for zone 2, we're going to draw the very first row of hair, very very lightly, using very thin strokes. Then for the next row down, we can darken our strokes some more. Keep going row by row, until the full eyebrow is drawn in. Along the boundary line between our two zones, I want the hair to look like they're affected by each other, like they're interacting with each other. I can do that by tapering some of the top and bottom hairs together, like this. You can also draw them like this, where they cross over each other, but I think too much of that can create a very unnatural looking crisscross pattern. So it's up to you and your creative decision, and how you want to go about it. This is just my preference. If your eyebrow is looking too patterned or stiff, make sure your strokes are slightly curved and relaxed, instead of straight and stiff. And remember to flick your pencil up at the end of each stroke, to feather out the very end of each and every hair. The middle of the eyebrow needs to be filled in more, so I'm just going along zone 1 and elongating or adding additional hairs that come together with the hairs from zone 2, in a tapered fashion. If you're tempted to draw stray hairs around your eyebrow, try to hold off until after the next step. Next I'm going to blend the eyebrow, so I can go from this, to this, to this. If you're unsure about this step, you can instead just lightly shade over your eyebrow, making sure the edges are the lightest, and make sure the smoothness of your shading matches the rest of your drawing. So to blend, I'm just using a regular soft facial tissue, wrapped around my finger. Try to avoid the outer edges of your eyebrow, and any stray hairs that you've drawn. Very gently smudge your eyebrow following the direction of the hair, lifting your finger up at the end of each swipe. The lighter you press, the less you'll smudge, and vice versa, so do what feels comfortable for you. If you need to do it a few times to blend the entire eyebrow, use a clean spot on the tissue each and every time. Here's a before, and after, so you can see how much I blended mine, but you absolutely don't have to blend yours as much. It doesn't look pretty right now, and it's not supposed to, because we're going to work the drawing even more. Now, the smudges act as cast shadows, and it makes the eyebrow look bushier, without having to add an overwhelming amount of hair. Let's take a break from the main body of our eyebrow for now, and draw some stray hairs. The reason I'm drawing the stray hair now, is because I want these pencil strokes to be as sharp as possible. You can totally skip this section if you want your eyebrow to look well-groomed and plucked. I'm just sort of expanding the eyebrow in a very subtle way, drawing very light hairs that are shorter than the others that we've drawn so far. I like to draw them even lighter the further they are from the main part of the eyebrow. Try to spread them out, so they're not too close to each other. Along the top, try to get your strokes especially thin. By now, you can probably tell that I've expanded my eyebrow past the original outline that I made, and that's completely fine, because it was meant to be a rough outline, something to help us during the initial drawing phase, so don't feel like you need to strictly stick to that shape. If you think your eyebrow lacks that 3D feeling, you can darken hairs that face away from the light. Here's an example of what I mean, using a diagram of the eyebrow from the profile view, or side view. My imaginary light source comes from the top, so the lightest hair will be the ones along the top, zone 2, because those hairs face the light more directly, while the hair along the bottom in zone 1 are facing away from the light, making them appear darker. So simply darkening the hair along the shadowy side of your eyebrow can make it look more 3D. I'm going to apply that to my drawing as we continue along. Okay, so earlier we used a tissue to smudge our eyebrow to give it cast shadows and make it look more filled in, and that made it a little bit blurry. Now, I want to go in and give it back some definition. In other words, I'm redrawing some of the hair so that they're more apparent and appear sharper. You don't have to redraw every hair, just pick a select few and try not to favor one section of the eyebrow over the other. I'm just redrawing every other one or so, allowing the others to sort of act as fillers. Try to keep your pencil very sharp throughout the process. If you like the hair color or shade of your eyebrow currently, just focus on sharpening the hair. But if you're like me and you want to darken your eyebrow more, you can go ahead and do that at the very same time, by pressing harder with your pencil as you draw each stroke, or use a darker pencil if you have it. As I'm doing this, I find myself elongating some hair or even adding some new ones where there appears to be an odd gap. Just do what you think looks good for your specific drawing. Once you're done, take a few steps away from your drawing and see if you want to make any final touch-ups. I actually want to If my eyebrow looks too overcrowded, one thing I like to do is pinch my kneaded eraser till I get a sharp, flat tip and navigate to those crowded areas and lighten some existing gaps. You don't have to do this if you don't want to. I like to do this especially along the top of the eyebrow, to make it feel less heavy. I'm not doing anything crazy, just lightly dabbing my eraser and lifting some graphite away in just a few areas, still preserving the shape of the original gap. I'm not erasing away whole sections of hair. If you don't have a kneaded eraser, you can make one using the link down in the description, or you can sharpen a solid eraser and use that instead. Continue to apply touch-ups to your eyebrow, like darkening specific areas or even removing some hair, until you're satisfied with how it looks. And that's pretty much it! Here's a slideshow of the process from beginning to end. I hope you enjoyed this tutorial. If you want to see more, please like and subscribe. Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next one!