We City Folk: Boy 2 - WIP 1

Here's a headshot of the flats of the second boy character. While I do like the design of this character, that's not the subject of this. It's his scleras.

The scleras are basically the eyeballs, the whites of the eyes. In cartoons, it's common practice to just make them white. I may have seen a very light grey here and there, I think. In illustrations, however, you usually have more flexibility with the amount and kind of details you can use due to the genre's nature of being stationary. Actually milk white 255, 255, 255 #FFFFFF is perfectly serviceable as a sclera, you don't have to feel boxed in to using white.

I watch a fellow speedpainter, Kiwi Byrd, and when they do eyeballs, they do not use white. They use other, more thematically relevant colors. Not always skin color or the hair color, but it's always in the picture somehow. Reminds me of the painting technique of using all the the hues around the canvas in some way or another. Well, anyway, their subjects' eyeballs, because they match the hues of their surroundings, they feel more characterful, more stylized, and overall, just more aesthetically pleasing. Yet somehow, also more real. Since it's not a stark, artificial white, it looks like an actual body part. When things don't look fake, they look real! Imagine that!

Not sure why it took me so long, but I started experimenting with making the scleras non-white recently. It's a subtle yet effective stylistic change, I think. There aren't any shines here yet, but the non-whites of the eye make any eye highlights stand out.

#boy #flats #cartoon #genrechowderstudios #wecityfolk