How to draw different eye shapes

Most names for eye shapes point at one thing you can measure: upturned and downturned at the tilt of the corners, round and narrow at how far the eye opens, hooded at the crease and the fold above it, close-set and wide-set at the gap between the eyes. This guide shows how far each one moves on ten drawn heads, so you can change one on purpose. None of the heads drops its outer corner below the inner one or draws a hooded fold, a round eye with white above or below the iris, or a monolid, and depth wasn't measured, so those sections say where the plates stop.

The heads are the ten bald heads in the free head rotation reference, on their front pencil plates. Every number comes from our measurements for eyes from the front, eyelids and face width proportions. We take the outer corner as the point where the two lids meet. The corners taper, so a very small difference in their heights is too uncertain to count as a tilt. These are one artist's drawings with neutral faces, so the numbers show the range of these ten, not of real faces.

Start from one eye

All ten heads share a base eye: about three times as wide as it opens, a high upper arch over a shallow lower lid, and an iris touching both lids. Eyes from the front builds it step by step. Draw that first, then move one thing.

Upturned and downturned eyes: the tilt

Tilt is how high the outer corner sits against the inner one, both eyes of each head taken together:

• Upturned: the full-lips, deep-folds, soft-planes and high-cheekbones heads lift the outer corners clearly, the minimal and hard-plane heads only just. Within each group they're too close to rank.
• Level: the gaunt-planes, heavy-jaw, square-jaw and heavy-brow corners sit almost level, within what we can read.
• Downturned: none. No eye of the twenty drops its outer corner below the inner one.

The most upturned eye lifts its outer corner about 6 degrees, about a tenth of the eye's width, and a typical eye about half that. The inner corners don't move: on nine heads the two sit almost exactly level.

For a downturned eye, tilt the corner line down past level on purpose and check it against a photo. A view from below also turns the corners down, so it can make a level eye look downturned.

To draw any of them, set the line between the corners first and tilt that, then hang the lids on it.

Round and narrow eyes: the opening

At the iris, the opening runs from a little under a third of the eye's width on the heavy-brow head to a little over a third on the minimal head, both eyes taken together, and about a third on most; heads close together can't be ranked. Eye by eye, the narrowest is about three and a half times as wide as it opens and the roundest, one eye of the minimal head, about two and a half times.

Most of the opening sits above the line between the corners, about two thirds on a typical eye, so the upper lid does most of the work. The four heads whose upper lids arch highest (minimal, hard-plane, deep-folds and heavy-jaw, a fifth to a little over a quarter of the eye's width) are among the most open, and the minimal head both arches highest and opens widest. The heavy-brow head arches lowest and is among the narrowest. On these plates the opening comes from the upper lid, so to open an eye up, raise the arch first; to narrow it, flatten the arch.

On these plates the tilt and the opening don't go together: the most upturned head, full-lips, is among the narrower ones, and the most open, minimal, lifts its corners about as much as a typical eye.

None of the ten is round in the sense of showing white above or below the iris. The upper lid covers the top of the iris on 19 of the 20 eyes and touches it on the last, and the iris guide finds no clear white under it on any. A rounder eye means lifting the lid off the iris, which these plates don't show.

Hooded eyes and the crease

The eyelids guide sorts the crease four ways: separate on the gaunt-planes, square-jaw and full-lips heads, with a clear gap above the lid line at the iris; close on the heavy-jaw and high-cheekbones heads, with only a narrow gap; faint on the deep-folds head; and fused on the hard-plane, minimal, soft-planes and heavy-brow heads, where crease and lid line are one thick stroke over the iris.

A hooded eye is one where a fold of skin under the brow hangs over the crease and hides part of the lid. By eye, none draws that fold as a shape of its own, so we don't call any of them hooded. The fused heads come nearest, because no lid shows between the lid line and the crease over the iris; the close heads leave only a narrow strip. On the heavy-jaw head the lower edge of the brow also comes down close above the lid line. To push a drawing toward a hooded eye, start from the fused version and bring a fold down over the outer part of the lid, and check that step against a photo.

A monolid has no crease line at all. On the other fused heads a second line leaves the lid line toward the inner corner, so the crease is still there. On the minimal head we couldn't see that line clearly, which makes its single thick lid line the nearest thing to a monolid here. To draw one, keep the thick lid line, leave the crease out and check it against a photo.

Close-set and wide-set eyes

The gap between the inner corners runs from about one and a sixth eye widths on the heavy-jaw head to about one and a half on the minimal head, about one and a third on most. None is as tight as one eye width, the usual rule, so here close-set and wide-set mean closer or wider than about one and a third. The ratio mixes spacing with eye size: the gaunt-planes eyes are among the smallest of the ten, and its gap is almost the same size as the heavy-jaw head's, yet it reads about a seventh wider. The minimal head is wide-set either way, with the widest gap of the ten.

To draw either, set the gap first (about one and a third eye widths for these heads; wider for wide-set, closer to one eye width for close-set), then build each eye from its inner corner.

Deep-set eyes

How deep an eye sits depends on the socket and the brow, and a front view shows it only through shading. Our socket measurements cover only two heads, too few to rank the ten. By eye the gaunt-planes and heavy-brow eyes look the most deep-set to us, but we haven't measured it. How to draw eye sockets shows the shading on the hard-plane and deep-folds heads, and how to draw a brow ridge on the heavy-brow and soft-planes heads.

Common mistakes

• Tilting an upturned eye far past a tenth of its width without a reference that shows it.
• Opening an eye by dropping the lower lid alone; most of the opening sits above the corner line.
• Floating a separate crease high; the highest here sits under two fifths of the iris's width above the lid line.
• Leaving the crease out of a fused eye when you didn't mean a monolid.

A short exercise

Open the minimal, heavy-brow, full-lips and heavy-jaw heads from the front. Draw one eye of each at the same width: tilt the corner line as the plate does, arch the upper lid to match the opening and place the crease by its type.

What these numbers don't cover

The heads were read only from the front, and the hard-plane front is seen slightly from below. Each head gives two eyes, so the counts come from ten heads. All ten are bald, with no eyebrows, and none is smiling or squinting, which changes the lids.

The heavy-jaw, minimal, full-lips and heavy-brow heads are Study Packs 03, 04, 08 and 10; packs 01 to 04 are in Volume 1 and 05 to 10 in Volume 2.

This guide is one step in how to draw the head at any angle, which puts all the head guides in order.