Emblems 097: Lesson 2, Eyes

So, in our last installment, we saw how you can make a passable pony silhouette with just a few layers. Eyes, unfortunately, take rather more layers, mainly because there aren't any good ways I know of to do the iris/pupil/light reflex complex in fewer than three layers. This means that each eye on a round-eyed pony will take 4 layers, minimum, and probably more like 5 or 6 once you put on eyelashes. That is, the eyes on a pony with both eyes open and visible will be roughly a third of your layers. But, let's save the details for after the jump.

Before we get to them, it's worth thinking about what exactly a pony's eye looks like. Let's start with one of Lauren Faust's original concept sketches:

PONI

The first thing I notice is that their eyes are freaking gigantic. They have big, round heads, and each eye is taking up between 10% to 25% of a face. Almost half of Twilight's face is eyeball.

Next, we start thinking about shapes. I see three shapes: round eyes like Pinkie, AJ, and RD, almond-shapes like Rarity and Twilight, and stoner eyes on Fluttershy. Let's take each in turn.

As I alluded to above, the round eyes are the simplest to draw: ovals within ovals within ovals. The most important part is orienting the white of the eye properly; if this isn't placed correctly, the iris/pupil/light reflex (IPLR) complex you put in it will look weird no matter what. Here's a good anatomy study I picked up somewhere:

As you can see, if the eye is an ellipse, the long axis points roughly from the corner of the mouth to the anterior/superior junction of the ear and the head (it points a little bit more vertically/anteriorly than that particular line, but it's a good mental landmark). Keep that in mind when you're drawing/placing eyes, and if you get the size right you're basically done.

So, that said, here's a quick mockup of a pony with round eyes:

My OC's cutie mark is a GIANT, UNBLINKING EYE

If you understand what I'm talking about above, it should be pretty clear what I used and why I placed the ovals where I placed them. To get even fancier with the eyes, you can add more light reflexes. It's worth noting that if a pony isn't cross-eyed, the light reflexes should be in the same relative position on each IPLR complex; putting them in different places actually indicates that the eyes aren't looking at the same spot.


So, pretty simple. What about almond eyes? These are kind of a bitch to draw with the emblem editor.

The problem is that there are no shapes which provide two good, convex curves meeting at a just barely acute angle. The best I've been able to do is to use the No-Wind-Windsock shape, or whatever it's called; you make a sort of yin-yang shape and then fill in the gaps (a diamond shape works well for this. Here's a breakdown of one of Rarity's eyes; it's 10 layers for a single eye.

Besides the windsocks, some tricks I used were making her eyeshadow be a windsock copied from the upper eye windsock and recolored, then slightly enlarged and moved to match the contour of the eye. The upper corner is masked behind a windsock with wind, colored the same as the rest of her face. Her eyelashes are an Ice Star shape masked behind the rest of the eye.

The same slightly larger/slightly different color trick is used to get the contour of her nose. Her right eye (our left) is made from ovals the same as any other pony, both to save layers and because they often do that in the show.

Anyway, I hope that this discussion makes proper eye placement and design a little easier! Happy embalming embleming!