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Can anyone recomend tips/tricks/techniques to acomplish this feat? My painting skills are decent, but i've never been able to pull this off successfully.

Reaper has an excellent tutorial on their website for painting eyes. I highly recommend it.

I've only got a small tips for you. Paint the eyes as they are looking in a direction rather than straight forward. If the model is looking straight forward both eyes have to be dead centered and only a slight mistake will be obvious. If the model is looking either right or left a small mistake will not be as easily noted.

I paint the socket dark brown with some thinned paint, paint a horizontal stripe of white, then a vertical stripe of the dark brown again.

paint the eye first black then white and add a black dot (not on the center though cause its hard... very hard as Savis already said)

also, the mistake I see most often is the failure to then go back and add the flesh tone back around the eyes. Painting the white and black invariably causes some of those colors to get painted on eyebrows, eyelids, and in general all around. You have to go back in and detail the flesh so that the eye is only where the eye should be.

Here's how I do it...

Step 1: Ignore the eyes altogether until the face is done.
Step 2: Paint the entire eye area white. Do not worry about getting white outside the eye area. It happens.
Step 3: If there is white on areas like the cheek or eyebrow, cleanup with flesh... otherwise, messy white edges in the socket is easily hidden by a dollop of devlan mud. The wash will hug the edges of the socket smoothing out the edges of your eye. I find that using black makes for an overly harsh transition to the flesh tone but YMMV.
Step 4. In order to avoid the "surprised" look, make sure that the iris of the eye touches the edge of the eye. i.e. don't have white all the way around. Also, don't worry about getting even amounts of white on both sides. If you look at yourself in the mirror, you'll note that there isn't that much white showing anyways - so a hint of white on either side will do.

Here's an example.

Easier way to do it, again this is Reaper's method and really helps prevent ruining a perfectly good face.

Paint the face completely white.

Place dots of color to represent the irises.

Paint around the eyes with a darker brown color, blocking them in.

Paint over the darker brown with your fleshtone base color, leaving a slight line of brown around the eye.

Finish painting the face.

Here's mine, a little hard to see the eyes, but using this method:

1) Paint the white bit of the eye using the above method of choice.
2) Cheat and grab a fine waterfast marker to do the dots.

Much easier than trying to stop the paint from drying on your brush while not being runny enough to go everywhere and then managing to give all your eldar cat pupils (although that doesn't look too bad).

First and foremost: Paint the eyes FIRST!

That way if you screw up, you don't have to repaint the whole face. And once the eyes are done, it just takes a little bit of care to do the face around them.

1. Don't use white except for any tiny highlights or as a base to glaze over.
2. Run a wash around the eyelids
3. Make sure the iris is under one of the eyelids to prevent manic staring

4. and possibly controversially...
don't bother. Look at someone at a distance where the perspective reduces the size of the person to that of a 28mm figure in your hand.
If you can see the whites of their eyes good luck to you

I paint the eyes after shading the face. Line with VMC ivory (avoid using pure white, it looks wrong). Then put a shadow line above the eye with a dark brown (50-50 scorched brown / black), and dot either to the side or centred. Then when re-toning the face with the mid colour tidy the eye, and continue highlighting as normal.

Paint on the white.

Then I hold the model upside-down and paint the pupil. I think the perspective change helps me disregard the idea I'm painting eyes and allows my brain to just perceive paint placement.

Or, I just break out the pen.

Zip Napalm wrote:Paint on the white.

Then I hold the model upside-down and paint the pupil. I think the perspective change helps me disregard the idea I'm painting eyes and allows my brain to just perceive paint placement.

Or, I just break out the pen.

Strangely enough, I do this too and I think it's for the same reason. Like Chibi, I've also neglected to paint eyes completely and never had anyone mention it, but there are some models where it can make a difference in quality. I don't use a pure white most of the time, adding a tiny amount of ivory or flesh to warm it. Painting the eyes first is easily the most important step to getting them right. And sometimes you want that surprised look on a model...

i hate painting eyes. seems like such a lot of effort for such a small part and i'm always retouching the iris or the eyebll or the surrounding. thing is if you get it right it looks great.

i've just painted my Be'lakor with yellow eyes, with a bit of yellow gleaming onto the surrounding socket, the iris is white .i dont like the white and i dont want it black either, anyone got any ideas for what might work?

The only thing that I would add is to finish off with a dap of gloss clear to give the eye 'life'. Eyes are wet and reflect light and that little high-light gives life to a model or picture:

My technique is to paint the whole eye area black. Then add a dot of white in each corner. If you look at human eyes you see very little white in general. This techniques scales well and is easy to do.