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Step 6Painting the iris
Painting is not as daunting as it seems. Talent and experience help but there are some basic techniques that will get reasonable results, and those results will improve with practice. If you have never painted before I recommend practicing on a paper plate or the back (unslick) side of a piece of poster or bristol board first until you feel comfortable with it. The technique I use is a method of brush loading which causes the paint to blend in ways which would otherwise be very difficult to achieve.
When you have house paint mixed, it is very important to have it well mixed, in nature there are very few continuous colors. I usually mix a base color and then use dabs of other shades and load my brush with multiple colors at once to drag and swirl them to mimic nature. The simplest form of this is to load one side of your brush with one color and the other side with another. The action of applying the paint causes the colors to mix in the middle revealing a multitude of different shades which would take hours to blend otherwise. If you wet your brush before loading it you will intensify this effect. Using a relatively dry brush will give you a narrower band of blend. Using these methods it is important to thoroughly clean out your brush between each application as the paint from previous strokes will cause your colors to become muddy and dull.
-To do my irises I used a semi dry brush technique, to load my brush I pressed the side of my brush into the wet paint, then pressed the other side of the brush into another shade or color. I repeated this, building up layers of paint with similar effects.
-Since the patterns in the eye radiate outward from the center, the pupil, I made all brush strokes radiating out from the center in this manner.
-in between each layer, I used my hair dryer on a warm medium setting to speed the drying of the paint.
-using the brush I trimmed down, I pulled it through blobs of color adding detail.
-I then used my sand paper to sand down through the layers, revealing the swirls of color which are similar to those seen in a real eye.
-A tiny light dab of paint applied it interesting spots can provide a place for another addition of realism. I dabbed a little paint here and there and then using the colored chalk and my knife I scraped off some chalk dust. Once it had adhered to the paint I blew the excess away.
When you have house paint mixed, it is very important to have it well mixed, in nature there are very few continuous colors. I usually mix a base color and then use dabs of other shades and load my brush with multiple colors at once to drag and swirl them to mimic nature. The simplest form of this is to load one side of your brush with one color and the other side with another. The action of applying the paint causes the colors to mix in the middle revealing a multitude of different shades which would take hours to blend otherwise. If you wet your brush before loading it you will intensify this effect. Using a relatively dry brush will give you a narrower band of blend. Using these methods it is important to thoroughly clean out your brush between each application as the paint from previous strokes will cause your colors to become muddy and dull.
-To do my irises I used a semi dry brush technique, to load my brush I pressed the side of my brush into the wet paint, then pressed the other side of the brush into another shade or color. I repeated this, building up layers of paint with similar effects.
-Since the patterns in the eye radiate outward from the center, the pupil, I made all brush strokes radiating out from the center in this manner.
-in between each layer, I used my hair dryer on a warm medium setting to speed the drying of the paint.
-using the brush I trimmed down, I pulled it through blobs of color adding detail.
-I then used my sand paper to sand down through the layers, revealing the swirls of color which are similar to those seen in a real eye.
-A tiny light dab of paint applied it interesting spots can provide a place for another addition of realism. I dabbed a little paint here and there and then using the colored chalk and my knife I scraped off some chalk dust. Once it had adhered to the paint I blew the excess away.
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