Caricature Masterclass: Jeepers Peepers

Tips on Rendering Eyes Successfully

In Douglas Adams’s novel, The Long, Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, one of the characters muses inwardly on the nature of human eyes:

Kate wondered for a moment how it was that eyes conveyed such an immense amount of information about their owners. They were, after all, merely spheres of white gristle. They hardly changed as they got older, apart from getting a bit redder and a bit runnier. The iris opened and closed a bit, but that was all. Where did all this flood of information come from?

It’s an excellent question, and not one I can answer definitively. But for a caricaturist obsessed with capturing character, the eyes are the human face’s most essential conveyor of mood and personality, firing a constant stream of emotion into the outside world. They aren’t so much windows to the soul as they are the soul’s laser cannons.

There are a few tips I’d like to offer that will help you render some types of eyes more successfully…