I cheat to make things easier.
I don’t really know what to do with eyes. Well, really, I don’t know what to do with faces in general, but eyes are so important to expression that I worry more about them than I do noses. Heartbreak doesn’t lurk within the limped nose of a lover.
No one looks deeply into your nose except for your ENT.
The maddening thing about eyes, to me, is how much they can say crossed with how little inkspace there is for them. I can understand why Walt favored those great big oval eyes on Mickey, Donald, et al—expressiveness galore. But if I don’t want freakish cartoon eyes, it becomes that much trickier. A pupil a bit out of place and he’s not looking where he’s supposed to be. How wide is too wide? How narrow too narrow? Can the difference really be in millimeters? God help me.
And don’t get me started about perspective. I’m not on good terms. I think I met perspective at a party once. So eyes in perspective? Bah.
Swerve! A couple of nice cartooning links popped up on Metafilter last night: Carson Van Osten’s tip sheet, and some breakdowns of Bill Peet drawings. I kind of need theory to go with execution, and I’ve never done enough critical looking or reading in the past.

[…] But they’re hard. All those devils—those details—that stand out under scrutiny. I never took any lifedrawing classes, and I grew up cripplingly shy, so I didn’t so much study faces as steal glances at them. I find I don’t have a well-developed intuitive sense of facial structure when it comes to drawing freehand. Scales get off, proportions come out wonkey. I’ve said before that eyes are hard; in fact, everything else is hard too. […]
Pen and Inklings » Blog Archive » I draw faces a lot - January 25th, 2007 at 8:02 am