Eye pictures and eye thoughts

The raptor figures have eyes!

After the green base coat had dried well for a day, I started on the details. Each eye got a shadow of darker, bluer green at the top, and a vertical streak of bright, yellowy green in the middle. After those had dried enough to touch, I carefully painted a black pupil inside the light green streak. I messed up a few times, but fixed it with some more green, and brown/orange where I went over the eye.

The exception to this was of course Leader's injured eye.

That eye at first got just got a second coat of light, greyish green over the whole eye (it spilled onto the lower lid a bit there, but again I touched that up later, getting an even coat was more important than staying within the lines).

Then the pupil, which is a thin line of darker green-grey.

[cw: discussion of specifics of an eye injury]

In the game her eye has a round pupil after she gets the cut on her face, but I think it might just be the game developers reusing a texture they already had instead of making a new one, while still making it look different from before. I don't think the pupil turning round as a result of her injury makes much sense, and a blurred slit pupil is how I draw it in fanart.

I'm not sure in what way exactly her eye is damaged. That she loses any vision in it is never confirmed in the game (it's from humans' point of view, after all, and no one wants to get close enough to diagnose her, lol), but in Last Queens of Thieves I had her initially go completely blind in that eye, and eventually regain a little bit of her vision but still mostly have to rely on her right eye and other senses.

What I had in mind when making her eye kind of clouded over here is maybe the eye itself healed at least mostly from whatever blunt trauma it took from the cut through the eyelid, but her nictitating membrane developed scar tissue, and as a result became more opaque and unable to retract. So she has a barely transparent film constantly covering the eye. Although her pupil is also narrower than on the other eye, so it might also not be able to dilate as much as it used to.

[end cw]

But anyway, the eyes are done! After the second coat on Leader's stripes also dries, she'll be finished, and ready to join her kids on the raptor shelf. These three are still getting a big photoshoot once they're all done, which will hopefully be soon, but Swiftdive and Treeclimber still need some work. I gave them a first coat of paint on their tails, and I guess we'll be doing some more sculpting next.