Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

I gave up on painting eyes a long time ago as cleaning up
after my mistakes became a huge chore (and if you're not
fast enough, that means touching up with more paint, blech).

So...

Malf,

At the very least I'd recommend painting the eye socket black and then quickly touching back up with your flesh color.

That way from a few feet away it will just kind of look like the eye area is shaded, which realistically happens most of the time in the outdoors with the human face.


But as for me: I think the 'eyes are the window to the soul' and that applies just as much to models. Which means you should definitely learn how to do eyes of some sort because they really help to make the model look finished.

It's why I prefer models with helmets.

i play orks and it sometimes becomes frustrating to taking your smallest teeniest tiniest brush and poking them in a very teeny tiny hole. i usually accidently paint the eyebrows but i always try!

The key to painting eyes is doing it at the right step of your painting process.

Too many people wait until the end when the face is painted and then when they screw up it is difficult to fix.

Generally a good face involves painting a basecoat flesh tone, then washing/inking it to make the crevices darker and then adding one or more lighter flesh tones over the top of that to highlight the face a bit.

If you paint the eyes after the wash/inking, then any mistakes you make you can cover up with your basecoat shade before moving onto any lighter colors.

It really makes the process pretty darn easy.

I'll have to try that next time.

Another reaaaaally easy eye painting technique that looks pretty darn good for any inhuman model (alien, undead, etc) is to paint the whole eye socket area with a big blob of a light shade of whatever color you want the eye to be (green, blue, yellow, red).

Then after the eye dries hit the eye socket with a nice dark ink of the same color (green, blue, yellow, red). That's all there is to it and the ink will give the eye all sorts of cool shading.

Again, the best time to do this is after inking the face but before any kind of highlighting (so any mistakes you make with your eyes can be easily erased when you highlight the face).

Do you dot and highlight the eyes?

malfred wrote:Do you dot and highlight the eyes?

You can (and it will improve the look of the eye) but you don't have to.

for most species, simply applying a dark wash/ink to the eye socket is enough - and gives a better result than the wobbly splot of white then the tiny even wobblier splot of black that the average painter is capable of. My eyesight and coordination certainly aren't good enough to _reliably_ do better than that for a whole army.

A species like orks are harder - they frequently have squinty little eyes, and getting a teeny red splot in the right place is never easy. And grots are even worse, being even smaller. I take some comfort in seeing in WD that even the GW painters get it wrong sometimes.

Sometimes it's enough to make me want to start a MEQ army, just because helmet eyes are relatively easy

I get all my skin done on the whole face, then do the eyeball straight white, take a micron .005mm pen, 2 dots, watered down black ink for eyeball/socket death and I'm done, takes less than 3 minutes if its all dry.

I don't do eyes (save some shading of the eye socket, as Yakface suggested), in part because of scale and distance. When you (or at least I) look at someone 30-ISH feet away, I don't see anything of the eyes except the socket area, MAYBE a little white. At 25-32mm, you SHOULDN'T be able to see the whites/colors of the person's eyes.

Now, big monsters (40mm+) is a different story, and I'll paint the eyes of, say, ogres, giants, etc. Other 'exception' (sorta) would be alien/monster-type creatures who'd have different eyes, where instead of painting the socket black I paint it red/green/whatever. But basic human troops? Forget it.

Clang wrote:for most species, simply applying a dark wash/ink to the eye socket is enough - and gives a better result than the wobbly splot of white then the tiny even wobblier splot of black that the average painter is capable of. My eyesight and coordination certainly aren't good enough to _reliably_ do better than that for a whole army.

Species-ist!

I try to paint eyes the best I can, but my hands shake too much. I have to settle for what I get.

I once managed to do the original Felix Jeager sculpt with blue iris's and a pupil. My eyes were a lot younger and my hand steadier!
I now do what stormtrooper x does....

I used to be really good at doing eyes... but then I developed a bit of palsy in my right hand, which was enough to really mess things up. After making a squad of cross-eyed / lazy-eyed slaaneshi warriors, I gave up and went for the color/ink suggestion proffered by Yak.

I recommend trying on your rank & file soldiers... so that way you'll get really good at painting your centerpiece figures (as those are the ones likely to be picked up and scrutinized... everyone else really is going to get the 3 foot glance).

Cheers!

Eyes can give your model focus and emotion ...Both of which can really improve the 'feel'/appearance of the model in my opinion. However when you have 150 guardsmen, you don't always feel like taking the time to give every single one detailed eyes...so I USUALLY reserve such detail for Characters and Officers.

Yeah, I second Malfred's comment on having a reason for using mostly closed-helmeted minis. My hands used to be a lot steadier for things like that, but too many years of rock-climbing and drumming have done bad things to my wrists and finger joints.

I can't paint eyes. the more I try, the worse they look and the more frustrated I get. If the eyes must be done, I get help from younger players. My astygmatism makes it very hard to see the area to paint. Shoot, if I get enough light in the area to see properly, everything starbursts anyways. I can't win for losing.

I got pretty good at eyes after 60 SoB's (and came to love it when they have helmets.)
I sort of follow Yak's approach, but edited.

1) Apply dark skin tone, usually in my case the Foundation Talaran Flesh.
2) Apply off white color to eye.
3) Apply vertical swipe of black.
4) Laugh because it looks like a poorly drawn anime chick.
5) Use either Talaran Flesh or whatever normal skin paint I am using to re-draw on the eye lids/shape eyes. This is easier than applying the white and black carefully since I am going away from the eye color.
6) Highlight with lighter skin tone, leaving some dark in the crevasses.
7) Highlight with really light skin tone over the oily T zone, cheek bones and chin. Maybe a little more if I want them to be really fair.

Sounds like a lot, but with a little practice I can do ~7-8 girls in 2-3 hours. Probably less if the cat and wife didn't want attention in that time.

Which reminds me: I am told cat whiskers are awesome for dotting the pupils in eyes. I can't get my cat to hold her head still enough for it, so I just use a tiny brush, but others have told me it works.

There's a cat where i live, might try holding it down later, it gets a bit vicious sometimes through.

*if* i do eyes i go for the off white and black swipe approach as above, but do my eyes before the skin. when i make mistakes they tend to be quite big (black scar down the whole head) so do skin after, leaving a black line around the eye. on reasonable sized eyes i am pretty good, the problem I find is getting them to match, they either lok different ways, or when they are the same on pupils much bigger than the other, or failing that the white is a different size. To get it right usually takes me 4 attempts so tend to stick to characters. Still unable to 'dot' eyes

My hands shake too much to do eyes. Plus, when I'm looking down at the table of minis, I can't tell anyway.

Table-quality FTW!

Ozymandias, King of Kings

Sounds like a lot, but with a little practice I can do ~7-8 girls in 2-3 hours. Probably less if the cat and wife didn't want attention in that time.

Sigged.

He's a trooper, that's for sure.

I think this poll is a little biased. Most of the people who would lurk around these parts are more likely to be interested in doing a good job painting. If you posted it in the tactics section I feel you would get a different result.

i simply paint the eye white and maybe add a black dot with a single hair brush, but that's only if i'm not lazy after everything is painted, and let me tell you after 132 guardsmen yes i am lazy.

smart_alex wrote:I think this poll is a little biased. Most of the people who would lurk around these parts are more likely to be interested in doing a good job painting. If you posted it in the tactics section I feel you would get a different result.

I bet the people who post in tactics read the modeling forum as well.

So... I am thinking I will change my name to "Capt. Unintentional Double En'tandre".
The funny thing is, in normal conversation I constantly make little puns and jokes, but intentionally. Here it is like some subconscious daemon slipping it in without my notice.

Ok... I caught that one before hitting submit.

I do the fourth option, shading and full eyes, but it's still only to a tabletop quality. I'll spend quite a bit of time making sure that each eye is looking in the same direction too (for some reason, my lazy-eyed models really stand out).

Great tip, painting the eyes before finishing the face. I will try doing that.

With my High elves I used to paint the eyes by first painting them black followed by white with a thin black frame still visible.
Then I added a black vertical dot/line to finish it.
But I only did this on my heroes and lords, and high elves have largish eyes...

My Dark Angels get red eye pieces, with a small white dot...