make more realistic eyes tutorial
 

and clicking here will take you to it. Sharing the love, accept no cheap alternatives.

Very nice. Can't wait to get my studio back up and running so I can try this!

nice!! thanks for sharing!

o this is so cool :biggrin: thank you for sharing.

Excellent! Thanks!

Thanks.....I love your eyes

Thanks Chris. This is great.

Thanks a million or sharing this! I have been trying to figure this out for the past few years and came pretty close, but this is the icing on the cake!

Chris,
Once again I have to thank you for sharing this, you are just awesome! Here is a picture of some eyes that I made up yesterday using your explanation. These are soft glass, but your info and technique made all of the difference.
THANK YOU!

Wonderful, thank you so much! I needed something new&fabulous to play with, tomorrow I'll give it a shot. Love your work! *sharon*

I am totally gonna try this!! cool!!

nice eyes, Roger, and good to see you have the blood vessels going the right way, too!!!
I've been wondering about soda glass, I only use it when I'm doing furnace work, seems to take to it very well, I must say.
Thanks for posting those!

Can open link
 

Is is just to busy do you think? I keep getting a network error.

That's great! I'm going to try it today. Thanks a zillion!!

Polly

something's up, I can't get on it either so here it is ...

here's a quick tute I did with a shitty camera, it's a little focus challenged, but I think you will get the idea.
This is how I do my eyeballs, I learned this tech from a glass eye maker years ago and adapted it to boro (glass eyes are made with a certain kind of glass made for eyes in Lauscha. I've found it to be pretty effective.

here's what I used for the tute and the samples,

Momkas Lightning Blue (for iris colour ... others work too, but Momka's LB is the shitz for blue irises ... I think so anyway)

NS Onyx (iris backing ... also used for pupil, prepare a 2 mm or 3 mm rod)

clear rod
3mm for encasing stringer
7mm as punty
10mm for lensing

1 x marble mold
1 x inner fire of my Mirage


1. - 4.
Take 3mm rod and put one layer of casing around the end of a Momka's Lightning Blue rod and pull into thin stringer. This will keep the colour lines in the iris sparated. Obviously you can use thicker or thinner rod for casing, 3mm is just the standard diameter I use.

5. - 6.
Pop a gather of onyx on the end of your 7mm punty and melt it on.

7. - 8.
Apply stringer onto your Onyx gather lengthwise, do 2 or 3 layer of this and take care to cover most, if not all of the onyx, depending on the effect you want. Melt it all in!

9.
This step is very important, as it makes the lines in the iris finer ... pull away the end of your gather and flame cut it. Make sure everything is on center, or it will all be off in the end.

10. - 13.
Heat your gather and gently push it into a large-ish marble mold. If you use a very small mold, the curve will be to much, you want a nice gentle curve which makes your gather come out looking similar to a military brass button.

14.
Let it cool to stone cold* and then heat the very apex of the curve.


15. - 16.
Push your Onyx rod (of suitable size for the iris usually 2mm or 3mm for me is good) into the center of the heated apex. Let it cool a bit and snap off. It's better than adding just a blob of black on the surface (Pushing it in ensures the pupil will stay the size you want it to be without getting larger once you lense your iris up). Melt it all in nicely back to the brass button shape. Use your marble mold again if needed.

17. - 20.
Heat a gather of 10mm clear and blob it onto the front of your iris. Melt it all in and use your marble mold once more to get it back to the brass button shape.

And that's it, if you've done it right and on center you will have a circular iris with a pupil in the middle. I don't have a photo of this as my camera ran out of batteries.

From this point you can just pop the iris onto a round white gather and turn it into an eyeball marble. You can also add a triangle of whit on either side and from there add eyelids etc.
I included some sample end products below, but once you have a handle on making the irises, I'm sure you will know what to do with them.
Try encased exotic green, aurora or exotic red stringers for other colors ...

Hope all that made sense in spite of the crappy pictures.
If you try this and it helped you, please post some of your results in this thread, I'd love to see what you make from it.
If you have any problems doing this technique, please feel free to send me a message.

cheers,
Chris




*by stone cold I don't mean cold, I mean cold enough for the glass to be solid but still hot.

and some examples

Wow! Thank you Chris, both the tutorial and your eyes are great!

yeah i tried the tutorial and here is my eye ;) thank you so much Chris.

This rocks! Thank You :)

Wild! Thanks for sharing!

Awesome and Wicked. Thanks.

Bonny

Great Tutorial! I hope I can do it justice when I try it on one of these guys here in this post. They were last years fun and I want to now expand on it. I have dreamed these guys since I was a kid.... so they HAVE to have the right eyes! I think your kindness in sharing this tutorial will give me the tweak skill I needed. This is just soooo COOL of you! :koolaid:

.
.
.
.
.
.

I'm kind of lost. You make a dot of black on the end of a punty,
then add cased stripes of color around the black 'overlapping' the
black part and a bit of the clear? Then you pull back on the rod to
stretch the color part out. What happens after that???

Ugh, I'm confused and I WANT to make cool eyes!!!

Here is another one i am hooked LOL.

OMG, Marcel, that is the coolest eye ever!!!! I'm going to go look at that tutorial if that is an example of a successful result, WOW!

And thanks, Wicked, for sharing such a neat technique!!!

Anyone care to share what other colors they're using successfully for their eyesses? I don't have blue lightning but my studio is going to be set back up this weekend - on tanked :) I want to try this!

hi Chris
anything that will give you a bit of a fume will work, even colours that don't (such as canary). Personally I prefer the fumier colours.
Here's a few

Any of the fumy Momka colours .... coz they rock!
NS Amber Purple, Yellow, Exotic Green/Blue, blue/green/normal caramel

I'd say try anything you want, it's not that hard to find a colour that works. I just used lightning blue for the tute because it gives me a really nice blue iris.

also try different backgrounds for your iris, such as turbo cobalt, onyx, elvis, star white for different effects. Amber Purple for example will give you a blue when you put it over black or cobalt and a subtler yellow colour when you put it over white.

play around, have fun :)

These look fantastic! Do you have to have a marble mold to do this? Sorry if that is an idiotic question^.^