Eyeballs for special effects, Halloween, or animatronics really cheap.

Step 9 The Cornea

 You may have been wondering why I bought googly eyes when I am intending to make fairly realistic effect eyes.  Well, here it is.  I tried several methods of making a cornea and none of them were satisfactory.  Either bubbles would get trapped in the details of the iris or it picked up color from the iris of the early experiments and ended up looking like crud.

-Taking the 18 millimeter googly eyes and my knife, I carefully cut along the seam between the clear part and the white backing.

-I placed the clear part dome up on the sand paper and moved it back and forth while rotating it to remove any irregularities from the edge and also to reduce the straight sides so that it would look more cornea like.

-I used the crystal clear craft glue to make a line of adhesive around the edge of the iris.  If the iris extends outward just a little past the bottom of the cornea its okay, it just adds depth to the eye.  Using my sharpened paint brush I shaped the craft glue and then let it dry.

-Once the glue was dry I brushed on another coat of white paint and used the hair dryer to dry it.  then more clear polish and top coat to blend it in.

-When this dried I mixed the clear and the melon nail polish and dabbed some on giving the eyeball character.  A little diluted red added towards the back would also help I think