How to Draw Realistic Human Eyes

Get an ordinary pencil and draw the outline of the eye hole and eyelid. It doesn't have to be too detailed or shaded yet.

Change to a darker sketching pencil. I used 5B on mine, but you can use any type of pencil. You start of by drawing the out line of the iris - it's not quite a whole circle shape unless your drawing some one with a shocked face. when you're happy with that, make a start of drawing the pupil. Remember the pupil should be close to the centre of the eye, but the iris doesn't have to be at the centre of the eye. You can also draw a reflection of a window or light or something if you want to, but that is optional.

Then you shade the edge of the iris really dark and then 1/3 of the way down, blend it slightly so the edge goes a bit lighter. Then if you've done a reflection, you need to shade darkly around that. Once you've done that, shade the top a bit more lightly and carry on until the corner so it looks a bit like a slanted triangle.

Change back to an ordinary pencil if you used a different one and underneath the shaded part under the reflection, do part of the iris. Don't do it in little section, draw it lightly in quick long strokes and go over them a few times. You may not be able to tell because of the picture quality but next to that you need to draw a smaller part of iris around the inside edge of it, but use the technique of moving the pencil in different directions - don't just shade up and down or side to side, make it look neat, but messy.

Shade around the pupil like you did with the outline of the inner iris in step 2, but with an ordinary pencil. You only need to do it a little bit, quite small. After you've done that, you make the iris look like it's getting darker, by pressing a tiny bit harder and sketching in different directions. You need to make it longer than the bit you just shaded though. The image should be big enough to explain. Once you have done this, you go back to the part of the iris underneath the reflection and add a very small bit of the shading in different directions using a darker pencil.

At the top, right hand side of the iris you need to shade in darkly with a normal pencil, diagonally, so it looks like the iris is going around and not just colored otherwise it won't look so realistic. Then you need to shade around very lightly around the rest of the iris - shading in straight lines, but going around the pupil.