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Anyone got any good links or tips for painting eyes on humans/astartes?

I suck

With no gallery images it's impossible to give you any critique and hard to pitch any advice.
Seeing as you're a relative newcomer to dakka I'll assume you've not been doing this for too long so I'll keep it simple.

Here's my top 3 or more tips.
1- Practice, plenty of kits come with spare heads, mount some on cocktail sticks, prime a few and prepare to make mistakes.
2- Get good lighting
3- Rest your wrists on the desk whilst painting and exhale as you paint
4- Paint the socket dark/black first then place a dot of white either side rather than having to paint the pupil.
5- Paint the face and eyes first- If you mess up you can strip without undoing all of your work on the model
6- Have fun.

Regarding the pupil: I so far only painted IG guardsmen and have used a very sharp fineliner to some success.
(Faber Artist Pen XS, https://www.architekturbedarf.de/stifte/fineliner/faber-castell-fineliner/artist-pen-xs---199-schwarz?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIzKT48YLw5wIViOd3Ch2XWwt7EAYYASABEgKEmvD_BwE)

Its also useful if you have made tiny mistakes painting the white part and it is just that little bit out of shape that it looks dumb. Often I can "save" that by correcting the outline with the black fineliner. It helps that half of my models have dark skin.

First off, I don't use pure black or white. This can look very stark, like they're wearing heavy eye liner. Paint the socket a dark brown, or add a small amount of darker shade to your flesh tone, and use an off white (an ivory shade, or I use Vallejo Off White) to describe the shape of the eyeball.

Once this is done, draw a fine line top to bottom where you want the eye to be looking, don't try to dot a pupil in, as if there's white showing above or below the dot it looks like the model has been surprised on the toilet. Pay attention to positioning so it doesn't look like the model is boss eyed. My cheat for this is I use Reaper liner paints, which are very densely pigmented, slightly transparent and relatively thick, as well as being very dark but not completely black.

Paint the eyes very early in the process of doing the face, you can then tidy up the eyes and paint them back into their sockets, rather than relying on a steady hand to create a perfectly shaped eye, you can paint a slightly wonky one and cut in, which is much easier to do.

I use black and white. On a small scale like 40k it helps define them better. On a larger scale you'd use off white.

But yeah, practice, lots of effort and a little luck is the best I can offer you.

I've tried several methods, but mostly it boils down to putting down the base skin tone first, then painting the eyeball, then cleaning up around the eye and then finishing up the skin. Because if you do the eye last and screw up, you've got to usually fix the skin up a lot more. It's easy to avoid the eye once it's done.

I find eyes to be my critical test of whether a brush can hold a point or not.

I use a Raphael 8404, size 1, for basically everything from basecoating to painting eyes. The size of the brush doesn't matter nearly as much as whether it can hold a good tip.

If you're using synthetics it's an uphill battle.

Black magic, sorcery, and other forbidden rites.

I paint the white, and add a colored dot to the middle. Avoid whites around the pupil, unless going for the mad and crazy look. I generally then use the skin tone to help clean up my sloppy work and get the eye back into the socket.

Hope they end up looking the same direction.

Thanks everyone

I do eyes as the very first thing after priming. If I screw up and can't recover it, no other work is lost by stripping it off.

Other than that, well, practice, practice, practice. And a good brush.

With eyes, I generally find that 'less is more.' Stark black and white, trying to cram every detail of a normal eye into a minuscule space, etc. tend to give you the 'crazy eyes' look. Darkening the area around the eye for definition and dotting an off-white over a dark base, as others have described, reads much better, at this scale. Enough contrast that it doesn't look like their eyes are closed or simply unpainted, but not so much that they look like light bulbs.

Ooh and don't paint the eyelid as the eye.. That always looks weird.

Option 1: Don't bother. Just use a bit of wash to make a shadow. If the model is part of a large group and the eyes are small enough, this is perfectly acceptable for many people.

Option 2: Dark grey/brown wash to make shadow, white eyeball, black pupil. Often results in the perpetually surprised mini. Tip: don't allow white to completely surround the iris.

Option 3: A "simple" method that is more than enough for tabletop standard. e.g. Vince Venturella's tutorial

https://youtu.be/-5s0OGUMV8M

Option 4: Watch Squidmar's video on painting eyes "made easy". He goes into a lot of detail about eyes on larger models, but skip to the end and you can see how he does a simplified version for smaller eyes.

https://youtu.be/9bQkQiMKex0

After done over 1k eyes, I can tell you most people make the iris too small, making the figure Commander eyeballs with the entire iris shown.

First paint the skin tones, then dot the eye socket with black; then white leaving a thin line encircling the white; then dot the iris; then fix the skin around the eyes; flesh wash to blend.

For female makeup around the eyes: you can add a watered down ice blue encircling the eyes.

Only advice I can give is simple; if you can't do it well...don't do it. Lack of eyes is 149% better than huge googly eyes or terribly painted eyes.