How to paint an eye digitally- step by step process with detailed description

In this post i will be showing you how i paint an eye in photoshop while painting all those portraits that i post almost everyday.
Drawing eyes and painting the details is one of my favorite part when i am painting a portrait. Although if i focus too much on details each portrait would take too much time. So when its a big piece i do things fast and try to do them easily.

Below you can see the process shots and read the description of how i go from scratch to an eye like that.

Process:
Start by drawing an eye shape.

Draw the eyeball, pupil and the skin fold above the eye.

Take a new layer and place it below the sketch layer. Color it with your desired color.

Add almost white color to the eyeball and your desired color for the iris. I chose brown because i want to paint a brownish red eye. you can go with whatever color you want because its art and you are free to modify things as you want.

Start shading the eyeball with red and whiter colors and add darker and brighter color to the iris.

Add the strongest highlight, this is where the light source hits the eye directly. sides of this place will be darker and the opposite side of the light will be lighter because of the reflected light.

Start defining the lines with colors. As you go, keep dropping the opacity of the sketch layer because we don't want a messy lineart at the end.

Draw details in the iris with a darker brush with a lower opacity. that should help.

With the same brush setting pick a lighter color and set the brush mode to linear dodge or color dodge and draw some more details.

Take another layer and paint even higher contrasted linear dodged lines, take another layer so if this gets too bright we will set the opacity down to match it.

Draw the eyebrows and eyelashes.

Add some colored textures to for a better look.

And there you have a gorgeous looking eye.

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