EbonyShroud In reply to Lugia20711 [2018-02-05 06:51:12 +0000 UTC]
Warning, long and probably boring explanation ahead. I wrote a lot more than I expected to, sorry!
I typically start by setting aside a color palette for the irises, the main color I want for the irises and a darker color for the shadows. You will want to keep these around in case you need to start over, that way you donβt need to guess to find the colors you want.
I fill in the iris with the main color and use a small soft brush to shade slightly around the edge of the iris. Then I paint the shadow on the iris. I always make sure to shade the white of the eye first on another layer so that I can make sure the shadows line up. Then I create a separate layer and create the pupil for the eye.
With the pupils in place, I would switch back to the iris layer and lock the transparency pixels. I switch to a small hard brush, reduce the opacity of the brush, and start painting outwards from the center of the pupils, alternating between the two colors that I had originally set aside. Even though you can restart easily by this point, you can also use another layer to paint and maintain the original shading on the main layer. Make sure that if you create a new layer, you clip it to the main iris layer so that it doesn't bleed into the eyeball.
Once I like how it looks, I set up another layer and clip it to the iris. This is my adjustment layer, which allows me to change the hue/saturation, add a glossy or another shading layer, or just to mess around with the effects. For this one, I used the overlay effect to adjust the saturation to make it look more blue and give it the glossy glow I was looking for. Once everything is done, I either mask the main iris layer or move it so that the irises don't bleed into the skin layer. This particular piece used four layers: the iris layer, the detail layer, the overlay layer, and the pupil layer.
I hope that makes sense. Itβs hard to explain without pictures. Β
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