Painting Eyes

Cheers Mottdon. I've actively avoided painting eyes for so long it's probably time to bite the bullet. When I've done it, they've always come out boggle eyed or look like they have blown pupils!

My number one tip is don't do a dot for the pupil, do a vertical line. Looks a lot less like a maniac mass murderer. Try to get the black line in the same place in both eyes.

Basically, I do an off-white horizontal line and a vertical, ideally a bit thinner vertical line. Then use a brown (a bit darker than your flesh color) to neaten up things as needed. Often that means painting over bits of eye to make it smaller.

All of the above is for 28mm models. For big eyes I think it might help to look up one of these high end painter tutorials and adapt from there. Incidentally if anybody has a link, please post...I have a giant on my painting table at the moment.

Cheers all!

I will give these tips a go at the weekend and then I'll have my January promise of an artillery piece and crew done!

I'll give a dissenting view, and say that 90% of the time you don't need to bother painting eyes. People get het up about painting them, because they're tricky to do and can quite easily look terrible, but for a lot of models they're not necessary.

For infantry sized models, anything with a helmet that ends around the brows or has sideguards, there's virtually no point painting them as they'll only be visible close-up, as below:



Even unhelmeted models, it's rarely necessary - for example this is a fairly close view of a unit of dwarves (closer than you'll normally look at them when gaming) and taken from the angle you'll usually see them from - only on the character can you kind of pick out the lack of eyes and that's because he's facing a funny angle:



Bear in mind also that photos of models on forums tend to display them at much larger than the actual size of the model (if viewing on a PC/tablet), making the lack of eyes more noticeable than they actually are in real life.

I often just use a thinned wash of Drakenhof Nightshade (dark blue) around the eyes, which works well for "evil" models like Dark Elves, Chaos Warriors and so on. Don't go too heavy on it, or they'll look really tired, badly made-up, or like they have black eyes.

On the occasion you feel the need to paint eyes on infantry characters, I'd suggest darkening down the recess first with a wash (either a flesh wash or thinned dark blue as above) then use some thinned (but not too much) Celestra Grey or Ulthuan Grey to get a thin horizontal line. Be prepared to manoeuvre the model around so you can get the best angle to access the eye socket - don't approach head on, and you'll often need the model upside-down for one socket. Then very carefully do a pupil in black - and Naitsabes' tip is key; if you just do a dot your model will look surprised. If you do a vertical line it looks much better. Then go back and tidy up... it can take a few attempts but don't make perfect the enemy of good. I absolutely hate painting eyes so do it very rarely, but with some patience you can eventually get something like this:



I'll note that I'm talking about infantry humanoids here - bigger models will generally need eyes as they're much more prominent, and anything beastlike (such as Gors) you can just paint the entire eye red (or yellow or whatever) and it looks fine - no pupil needed.

Oh man, you even posted the same models. You're putting my blind Dwarves to shame! 


One different thing I wanted to add was for bestial eyes, black works well, as that's the colour most livestock's eyes look from a distance.

No worries, it was a good call. You're right that characters are more likely to be closely inspected, so probably deserve to have eyes.