Eyes Homemade Doll Eyes - First Attempts

I decided to try making some doll eyes for the first time. Instead of focusing on trying to get the 'perfect eye', I had fun testing out different types of eyes, materials that were used, techniques, and other add-ons.

Overall, I used polymer clay as the base and resin for the cornea/dome. I experimented between using acrylic paint, polymer clay, and gouache for the iris of the eyes; resin, paint, beads, nail appliques and polymer clay for the pupils, and finally coated everything with tamiya X-22.



First batch:

Quickly learned that using too much glitter wasn't a good thing.

Second batch:

I think there's already some improvement between the first batch I tried, and the second (both were made on the same day; just started another batch while I was baking/curing the first bunch of eyes).

Note: Using silicone earplugs worked great to keep the eyes secured when I was painting on details or the final glossy coat. Reusable and easy to remove from the eyes once finished.

Best results:

Polymer clay galore~! Used polymer clay and a scalpel blade to score in the texture for the iris, pastel to add in the rainbow colors, and a small black bead for the pupil. The 'warping' in the eye on the left is due an accident that happened during the final curing process and the resin ended up getting warped... Really like how the colours turned out here. I think I'll use more pastels in the future.


For bigger eyes, it was fun playing around with less realistic looks by adding in more embedded beads/nail appliques. The glitter is not actually as distracting when seen with the naked eye. Due to the amount of add-ins, restricted the iris colors to just acrylic paint and added in semi-spherical nail appliques on top of the painted pupil.


Ah... It's quite disappointing that the details don't come out very well with my phone camera. This eye was painted with acrylic (which ended up with a really nice gradient of blue from the center), and there's a translucent rainbow-colored moon sticker in the center acting as a pupil (which didn't show up at all on camera ). Since photography tends to be a big part of the hobby though, I'm glad I learned that these sort of translucent add-ins aren't ideal as the main focus.

Modelled by Eira (14 mm test eyes, 1/4 MSD):

Hm... While the small beads or sunken pupils looked pretty good in my hands, in a doll it'd be really difficult to get good angles with these eyes. Next time I'm going to try fiddling with the height of the iris within the actual eye and use polymer clay to create a 3D sphere for the pupil to see if I can get something that shows up better in multiple angles.

Thank you for taking a look at my first attempts with doll eyes!

 

Thank you!

 

Thank you very much! I really liked how the colours in that one turned out too.

Thank you! I had fun making the less realistic ones too; I think for the next batch I'm going to try making more fantasy-themed ones with some unusual colours and pupils.

 

Thank you! I'd recommend trying it out - it felt oddly relaxing to do a bunch of mini-crafts at once.

 

I'll definitely post more - I have so many different ideas now and really want to give them all a go!