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SirCxyrtyx — Illustrator Pony Eye Vector Tutorial
Published: 2012-02-26 23:17:02 +0000 UTC; Views: 25977; Favourites: 348; Downloads: 605
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Description
Previous tutorial: [link]Links:
Pen Tutorial: [link]
Original Screenshot: [link]
Final Vector: [link]
A speed draw of this pony: [link]
Hope this helps people make pony vectors using the greatest vector program! If you are confused about anything at all, feel free to ask. There are no stupid questions.
Suggestions to help me improve this tutorial are of course welcome.
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Comments: 35
Oh my goodness this is beyond helpful! I used to never understand how to use masks and my eyes would turn out somewhat funky. Thank you so much!!!!
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How did you get the eye whites to vanish away from the ponies face so that it was within the brow?
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Use a clipping path. The shape for the mask is shown by the blue line in the last picture.
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This is awesome! My eyes always ended up looking really stupid, thanks for the tutorial!
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Great tutorial! I've been struggling with Eyes the hard way, the last project I did, there were about 50 layers to each eye!
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What about unicorn eyes? They're not eclipses, but rather pointy.
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Never mind, I got it now.
(Sometimes I wish you could delete your comments)
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You can hide them. Nobody will ever know...................
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ya but u will know that u r a total "shit wad in the head " it a family thing for me just saying
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can this method be used for illustrator CS6 cos i cant figure it out
(in the process of converting form PhotoShop CS5 )
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Yes, it can. Aside from some UI improvements there are very few differences between CS5 and CS6
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thanks so much bro i have been stuck on this for a few days now
will credit you in my next vector for putting up this guide that will make it possible
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Great, this is gona help me out a ton. Now if only i could get creative cloud on Adobie and get the right programs and mayby i could do something with ponys and stuff
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I'm trying to get my first pony vector together and was trying to figure out gradients on the eyes. Another eye reference in the club suggests a 7/10ths light gradient, rather than a straight up 50% gradient as shown here. Looking at the show, I feel I agree with the former, but is there any set standard?
On another note: for the eye highlights, I found you can use white fills at 33 and 67% opacity. This just makes changing the iris color easier, but I prefer as little hard-coded values as possible. Is there a significant advantage to using hard-coded colors for these?
Thanks for the tutorial!
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Regarding the gradient, it's often hard to tell, and the position of the stops is really up to you. I do it differently on every eye.
Regarding the eye highlights, i believe that's the method uses, and his stuff looks pretty good. I would say it isn't technically correct, but I'm not aware of any particular downside. I don't know if it will always work, so when doing an established pony, it's probably best just to use the colors from a color guide. It can be an easy way to do irises for an OC though.
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Thanks so much! I haven't worked in Illustrator since High School and CS5 is very different from what I worked on then.
This way to reintroduce myself to the program was about 20% Cooler.
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same method than what i do, but with less layers. like =joeyh3 , i apply the color gradient directly the clipping mask as well as i do with the white of the eyes.
for the eyelashes, you can make them all-in-one instead of using one path per eyelash, which allows you less layers to group.
got it?
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I will admit that I am not the most experienced Illustrator user, but I noticed a lack of Illustrator pony vector tutorials, and figured I should fill the gap.
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yeah, at least, they help.
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I'm a Photoshop user myself, so I can't vouch for your tutorial, but from what I can make out, these tutorials are very well made, so great job on them. It almost makes me want to do some more tuts as well, but I'm pretty sure everyone already did PS tuts for vectoring ponies.
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Well, you can always do specific tutorials like the magic one.
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This honestly couldn't have come at a better time (maybe yesterday, but honestly..), i'm currently vectoring a sketch I did of rarity, and both these tutorials have show me some excellent idea that will speed up my process immensely, such as, i never used strokes, i avoided them like the devil, I always (for the small handful of vectors I've done) drew double lines with the pen tool for my outlines, but anyway. With rarity's eyes they are a lot more pointed at both ends, do I still use the ellipse tool, and just clip a lot more off the white of the eye?
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Rarity's eyes are the exception when it comes to pony eyes. I wouldn't use the Ellipse tool for the whites of her eyes.
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Cheers man 
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Another very nice tutorial. Though I do things a little differently and apply the fill colors/gradiants directly to the clipping mask, as opposed to creating another shape below the clipping mask and aligning it. It makes adjustments a little easier.
An interesting thing about that is that clipping masks also ignore the z-order - if you have a layer or group for the iris with the clipping mask as the top-most element, and then you apply the gradient to the clipping mask, the items below the clipping mask will still be visible - the gradient fill will not cover them up.
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I learned how to do that about halfway through making his tutorial. I'm not sure which way I'm going to do in the future. I was worried about it being an Illustrator thing and causing compatibility issues with Inkscape, but I tested it and it doesn't. Much thought must go into this.
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It's my preferred method. There's not really any speed improvement when it comes to drawing, but if you have to make any adjustments, fewer objects = fewer things you have to edit.
Inkscape and Illustrator generally don't play nice with each other... Ever... Usually whenever I try to open an Illustrator file in Inkscape, it doesn't work right. Sometimes the clipping masks disappear completely, other times it looses all the layer information and condenses it to a single layer, etc. Opening Inkscape files in Illustrator is usually hit-or-miss, sometimes they open file (usually simpler images without shading or a background), while sometimes they refuse to open at all (more complex images with multiple ponies, shading, etc).
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I usually try opening my SVGs in Inkscape before I upload them, just to make sure things don't go horribly wrong. Inkscape won't recognize my meticulous layering at all, so I worry that some Inkscape user will try opening my SVGs and rage because it's all in one layer.
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That one is actually Illustrator's fault - whenever you save a file in SVG format in Illustrator, it merges the layers in the output file. In fact, if you save an image as SVG in Illustrator, and then turn around and try opening that file in Illustrator, none of the layers will be there (and sometimes it won't even display the entire image either).
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That was pretty much my reaction too.
SVG is the industry standard for vector files. Illustrator is considered the industry standard for vector editing... You'd think that Illustrator would be able to handle SVGs better than it does... But no...
Personally, I don't even bother with SVGs unless someone asks. It just proves to bee so much of a hassle, and usually noone asks for the SVGs anyway.
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