Lesson 3: Soul Searching... or "Eyes Finally Gonna Start Drawin' Something."

Eyes can show many traits
and emotions, such as anger...

It's said that eyes are the window to the soul... unless you are wearing holey shoes. Regardless, in caricature, you are not just trying to present a representation of your subject's "look" by exaggerating certain features. Equally important is the ability to capture that person's personality. Nothing is more reflective of a person's (or a dog's, horse's or hurricane's) personality than the eyes.

wisdom...

Eyes come in virtually limitless varieties. Shape, size, color, distance from each other, canting on the face and position on the head shape all make eyes very individual. In our perfect portraiture model the eyes are positioned on the equator, dividing the head shape in half horizontally. People who have the appearance of a large forehead may be drawn with the eye level under the equator to emphasize this. conversely, if your subject has a long or large chin you can move the eyes above mid-line to exaggerate. Remembering Constant Mass... Long Chin = Short Somewhere Else and moving the relative position of the eyes accomplishes this.

and glee.

Eyes show expression and emotion more than any other facial feature. Eyes, along with their counterparts (lids and brows), may be puffy, squinty, wide-open, crossed, or droopy and can convey anger, sadness, fatigue, fear, confusion, age and just about any other personality or physical trait you can think of.


There is more to eyes than a couple of ovals with a couple of circles inside. They actually have quite a few parts that meet, overlap and stretch with expression and age. Sometimes half the battle of capturing a subject's "look" can be found in their eyes. Below are a few different kinds of eyes I tried to draw after reading up on them.


I still don't know if this is going to work out but I am, at least, feeling more comfortable in drawing what I see. Drawing "off the map" may be a different story. In fact, it will be a different story... at this rate I'll be calling it "Lesson 148: My First Post Not Ripping Off Tom Richmond's Book."

Eyes can capture a person's essence like no other facial feature.