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and it's painting SM/DA eyes.

I consider myself a good painter, I can paint all sorts of detail, and graduated shading on armour is a pleasure. However, I can never seem to get eyes looking right. They either look too 'full' or uneven, and it's driving me mad. Has anyone got a decent technique for doing these?

Well I only do green eyes on red helmets. I use a plain flat colour as a base (in my case Goblin Green) and then mix it with another colour to produce a highlight. I use a 3:1 mix using Sunburst yellow: Goblin.

For DA who are Green, Bone and Black, I recommend Mechrite/Mephiston red base, then mix with yellow or orange to produce a highlight. Highlight the eye lense's centre.

Stage 2 is a wash. Glaze a chosen wash over the lense and into the recess to produce shading. If you go with red I recommend Nuln Oil/Badab Black or Devlin Mud/Agrax Earthshade.

Stage 3 is a glaze of the similar colour. Green glaze over green, red over red, etc. Bloodletter if you decide to go with red.

Optionally you can put a tiny white dot on the lense to represent reflection, before you glaze but after the wash. Athe back of the lense.

Finally, gloss varnish.

Various examples can be found in my gallery and while I don't claim to be a great painter, IMHO it is a nice design.

I do green lenses mostly (very rarely use reds so can't help much with them there), but I try to go for more of a lens look than glowing eyes. I just paint them like gems.
Hopefully it helps a little.


If you meant actual eyes its easier to just paint them black, then to use small white dots on the edges. If you're worried about them being cross eyed you can simplify it by making them look in a certain direction. Which I think makes the model look better than just straight ahead usually anyway.

Oh man.... Paint them black and put white around the edges... Why... oh why... did I not discover this sooner. Thanks

 GrimDork wrote:
Oh man.... Paint them black and put white around the edges... Why... oh why... did I not discover this sooner. Thanks

^This, for helmetless eyes paint them black and then paint white around it, also do the eyes/lenses before you paint the main skin/armour colour - it will help alot!

Another method is to paint the eyes white, then just use a wash or glaze on it. You'll usually get darker around the edges, and lighter in the middle. You can see how green with biel-tan green turns out on my minis in my gallery. You can also see the effects of not cleaning up the edges afterwards haha(there's some green bled on the yellow of the helmet).

cheers for the responses guys, I do like the white/wash/glaze idea though, will try it when I'm back to painting in a couple of weeks

Unless you're really good at painting (as in "I regularly win painting contests" good) don't paint eyes at all. Look at some pictures of real people taken from a distance (preferably so that they're about 28mm tall), the eyes are barely visible as more than just dark shadows. To see any white you have to be pretty close, much closer than you'll ever get with a 28mm model. So unless you have professional-level brush control it's almost guaranteed that you're going to make your eyes too white (it's NEVER pure white from a distance) and too big, and they'll be completely out of proportion to the rest of the face. Just paint the base flesh color and let a little wash settle in the eyes, and skip the white entirely.

Before I got proper brush control I just left the eyes (of bare heads) black, especially GW sculpts since they didn't really have that much eye sculpt to work on. Mostly it's just recessed area.

http://www.acrylicosvallejo.com/en_US/dates/blog/1291161600/26
http://www.reapermini.com/Thecraft/12

Now I'm using a combination of those two techniques above: the procedures of the Reaper tutorial (paint the "white" first before the dark parts) and the colors used in Angel Giraldez's tutorial. It's still a bitch to paint, though. But it is rewarding if you get it right.