How to pixel cute eyes for your dolls and pixel bases
Posted: Tuesday, July 24, 2007
When you're making a base for pixel dollz, you want it to look pretty and stand out.
There is no single 'most important' part of pixeling doll bases, but making pretty eyes is a great way to grab people's attention and make your doll base look great.
Have you ever noticed that most of the doll site banners and doll base thumbnails you see tend to include an eye? Well, that's because eyes naturally draw our attention.
The eyes are the most important part of the face, in people, and in pixels. When people look at photos of others, they notice the eyes first, and focus on them longer than any other feature. So, in this tutorial I'll show you how to make cute pixel eyes that POP in just a few steps, with lots of pics, and easy to understand explanation.
Getting started
I'll be pixeling on a slightly downward facing head in ¾ view, although most doll bases have a head with a straight frontal view. I'll be writing about what each step means, so you will be able to apply the techniques to a doll in any view. /p>
I'll be using Paint Shop Pro in this tutorial, but I won't be using any specific features of it to draw. You can use any program from MS Paint to Adobe Photoshop and get the same results.
I already have my head, but I've blanked out the eyes since I'll be redrawing them for this tutorial. I've also blown up the head 200% just so you can see the pixels better. So let's do it!
Drawing the shape of eyes
You can see that I still have a nose and mouth. I'm going to use these as guides to draw on my eyes. The nose is going to cut a little bit off the right eye, so it will appear smaller and thinner. Since the head is facing down, it'll also be about 5 pixels lower. The position of eyes is important. There is no one 'right' position, but there are a few ways that eyes can look 'off'.
(I actually think that the 'too small' one looks really cute.)
I've pixeled the eyelid in black, and the bottom in grey because, as we go on, we'll be erasing the grey because we don't always want eyes to be fully outlined.
Tip: A fully outlined eye looks like very heavy eyeliner. Look at the difference in the same face with eyes fully outlined, and eyes with the top lid lined only:
Eye shapes have a lot of room for variation, but eyes should not be perfectly round on most dolls. The shape should be kind of like a fat flower petal on most cartoon doll eyes. (Of course, some cute bases have completely round eyes, but these are usually stylized chibi bases.)
Tip: When you're drawing eyes on a pixel base, always make sure that you leave room on the top for eyebrows and a hairline. It's easy to forget the hairline, since you don't draw hair on a base, so try to take a moment to draw a test hairline on your face to see if you have room. Here, I've drawn in a hairline and eyebrows in grey:
Experiment with your eye outline to find one that looks good, and fits your style.
Drawing Irises 
Now that you've drawn your eye outline it's time to draw in the most important part of the eye, the iris, or colored part.
At this point you'll have to decide what color you want the eyes to be, but you won't have to decide on a palette until the next step. In all human eyes the iris is perfectly round, but in anime eyes it's often sort of oblong, since the eye itself is bigger. I flattened the iris for the right eye since it's slightly smaller.
In humans, you usually can't see the top and bottom of the iris, because it's underneath the top and bottom lid. How much of the iris you see depends on the shape of the eye. A more thin, almond-shaped eye means you see less of the iris.
The pupil
There is no mandatory size for the pupil in cartoon dolls, I've drawn kind of a big one here.
In this step, I'm also going to choose a palette for a blue eye.
You can also see that I've drawn in a light source to get ready for the next step.
Tip: The blue starts off navy and becomes lighter and more cyan over 4 colors. This makes the eyes look cartoonish and very bright and beautiful, compared to using a palette that just moves from blacker to whiter along the same hue.
Coloring the eye
This step comes in two parts:
First, fill the iris with your middle color, the main color for the eye. Second, draw a ring around your pupil with your highlight color. Eyes usually have a ring around the pupil. It can be lighter or darker than your highlight color. I'm going to make mine dark, so I'll put the highlight ring 1px away from the pupil, but you can draw it directly against the pupil, if you want.
Don't worry about the light source that we've drawn in yet. The colors we're shading on now are the natural colors of the eye without any light. 
Second, shade the shadow of your top eye lid, considering your light source, using your second darkest color.
Your highlight color should now be along the bottom. Notice how, even though it's supposed to be darker on the bottom left because it's facing away from the light source, it's still bright? That's because we drew the eye's own highlight before considering the light source.
We could call out pixel eye finished with this, but you may think something is missing when you look at this eye. Read on.
Putting Shine on the eye 
Often, there's a bit of a reflection in a person's eye from lights in a room. It's a convention when drawing anime eyes to draw this in. The main reflection is usually in the top right or left side of the eye, and can extend further than the outline of the iris. It doesn't have to be perfectly round, but when we're dealing with such a small eye, it's easier to make the shiny bit look nice and sparkly if we make it perfectly round. Start by outlining in your lightest blue, and put it on the corner near your light source. Then, fill with white.
You now have the option of putting secondary reflections in. Pixel Dollers often do, so let's try that now, by putting another reflection on the other side of the eye for balance.
We come close to ignoring our light source in order to give the eye a more 3D shape, if we make too many of these rogue reflections it starts to make the base look weird, but just this one should be OK. 
This one will not be perfectly round, it'll actually be curved with the shape of the eye a little bit, since it's there to give more shapeliness to the eye. Let's color in the cornea or 'white' of the eye while we're here. Use white, of course, but also remember to put in a bit of light grey to shade, paying attention to your light source.
And there you have it!
Pretty pixel eyes for you base, easy as pie!
I hope that you can use this tutorial to make even better pixel bases for dolls! If you found this helpful, you can leave me a comment, and if you are able to use this in a base, I would love it if you link me and show me the base!
Thanks, for reading, bye!