Today we have a post dedicated to eyes-making.
Inventions, solutions, mistakes, material peculiarities, as well as painting techniques – everything is here.
You are free to make either spherical eyes or more simple, flat ones. Such eyes cannot be adjusted (what limits the adjustment of gaze direction), but at the same time you don’t have to bear in mind fitting, chinks and wandering eyes. You may use any baking plastic (Fimo, Cernit, for example), heat up a little bit on a radiator and cut it into small chunks.
Than attach one of the chunks to the inner side of the eyes and powder it with talc.
Press slightly to achieve the effect of bulgy scleras.
Take out the adjusted piece of plastic and bake it in the oven at 115 degrees for 15 minutes.
If you want, you may round off the edges with Dremel * (multi-functional tool that is capable of performing drilling, grinding, sharpening, cutting, cleaning, polishing, sanding, routing, carving, and engraving) and sand-paper the surface.
Insert the chunk of plastic back into the head and mark the iris and pupil.
Afterwards take it out and drill the bulgy sphere for iris:
Then drill out the pupil, but bear in mind that if you drill too deep, it will be really complicated to fill it with epoxy glue without bubbles.
Put the plastic back into head and check the gaze (it must not be asquint):
Now let’s color the eyes. It’s better to use acrylic paints. We should take into account that the natural palette is not easy to pick. That is why you’d better use the reference (for example photo of green eyes) to avoid too saturated and bright, unnatural color. Let’s get started: we color the iris using an even middle color:
Then we lighten up the inner ring putting the radial touches with a one-shade lighter color.
Next lighter layer at the lower part of the iris:
Then we pick up a several shades darker color and darken the iris outlines as well as put slight radial touches.
Afterwards we color the pupil:
Darken the iris upper part (imitation of the eyelid shade)
Don’t forget to imitate eyelid shade on the sclera as well (I used black pigment) and apply a little bit of pink on the eye corners:
Now lets make an imitation of the cornea. Firstly we cover the sclera with the thick layer of glossy acrylic varnish and fill the pupil hollows:
After a number of trials ans errors I’d chosen a two-component transparent epoxy glue for cornea imitation (it preserves substantial drops, although you may face a “bubble problem”, so you’d better be careful):
Then we squeeze out identical drops on any smooth surface (metal, aluminum) and leave it on a radiator for a minute.
Warm glue is more pliant and easier to stir – less stir motion, less bubbles. Then we stir the glue very slowly and carefully. It stiffens quickly, therefore we have only a couple of minutes for all our manipulations:
Take a toothpick and apply a drop of glue on the iris, keeping an eye on drops to be symmetrical (and don’t forget about bubbles):
It’s how we get such vivid and expressive eyes.
