Hello and I hope you enjoy this quick tutorial I put together. I’d like to start by saying you don’t need a super high-tech tablet to achieve what I’ve created in this tutorial. I use a pretty clunky Wacom tablet I bought when I was in college about 5 years ago. I’ve also seen people do similar processes with a mouse, so whatever you have is probably fine.

The first thing I’m going to talk about is how I render my shapes. I usually start with either a shape or a closed path I create with the pen tool. Rasterize it, then select the smudge tool.

Select the middle of your shape and start pulling outwards into open space to extend the shape or do the opposite and pull the open space towards your shape to tighten it up.

Start sketching out how you want your work to turn out. Don’t worry about any of the details yet. Just draw in the darkest portions.

Next, create a new layer. You will be adding some mid-tones right now that will layer on top of the dark spaces you already created. In my example, the black lines are the first layer and the grey sections are the second layer. If I were to turn off my second layer, I would be left with the black shape from above. Just like before, don’t focus on shadows and highlights, just try and get your shapes to look right. You’ll building on them later.

All done? Create another new layer. Now you’re going to do the samething again. Tighten your mid-toned shapes until you’re satisfied that your work is complete and you’re ready to move on to some highlights.

Start by adding some soft highlights where appropriate and then use stronger highlights to focus on the brightest points of those original highlights.

The next step will be to add some depth with some textures and then adding some shadows around the top of the eye socket. Select a soft black brush and paint your shadow then select multiply on your layers palette and adjust it’s transparency. For the texture, there are countless of options available online. Put out a good description of the texture you’re looking for and you should be able to find something useful. Pick one and layer it onto of everything and select the best blending mode in the layer palette. I like to add a layer mask to adjust how the texture works within the artwork.

Now we’re moving onto the eyeball. select the area with the pen tool and then fill in a solid colour. The colour you choose now, will be framing the eye.

Add a layer mask on your coloured eyeball and mask the edges.

In this image, I copied the red eye with the layer mask and changed it to blue. Then I masked out the edges of the eye to bring out the red from the previous layer. So now the blue eye layers over top of the red, but the edges are masked out to bring out the back layer and create this gradient on the eye.

Just like in the previous step, I used a soft black brush to draw in his shadow and used a multiply blending mode.

The highlight was a white line I smudged into place.

The last step is adding a honeycomb texture onto the eyeball. Experiment with different blending modes to get the effect best for your project. Happy painting.

When finished, I added the eye into a poster I was working on for the Abduzeedo World Collabs 4 contest. To view this poster, click here.