DRAWING IN DETAIL Part 1: Eyes

Award-winning artist LAURA SMITH presents the first in a new four-part series that takes a closer look at details within masterpieces to help you improve your own art

- LAURA SMITH

If you were an apprentice artist in a large 15th-century workshop, perhaps in Italy or Japan, you would know exactly how to paint eyes. There would be a recognised way to approach the subject and a specific method to follow. These days however, there are almost as many ways to treat painting an eye as there are pairs of eyes in the world. This is both a help and a hindrance when it comes to actually painting a portrait, because we have wonderful artistic freedom yet almost too much choice.

I believe what we are all searching for is our own way of responding to a particular problem. A good strategy for finding that unique path is to be inspired by other people’s attempts and then experiment ourselves. The exercise at the end of this article is about doing the first part with the hope that it will give rise to the second.

It can be useful to investigate paintings with regards to a particular topic. Whether from life or from another artwork, drawing to me is just a slower, deeper way of looking at something and I think we can learn so much from the experience. Over the next four issues, we are going to look in turn at eyes, hands, animals and flowers, while comparing different ways of painting them. In this first exercise we will be looking at eyes. I have selected four depictions of eyes from four different portraits; two are from the 17th century and two are from the 19th century.

Tiny changes