This tutitorial involves animation, please read the tutitorial on that first. Also, this tutitoral takes some knowledge of shading and freehand painting. It may take some practice, but it isn't real hard! And if your picture is small enough, most people don't notice any "mistakes"! Choose a graphic/photo of a anything with eyes! I am using this one, so you can see it clearly. But you can use a photo of your pet too!

You can save this graphic to practice on.

You need to start by painting an eye lid, in freehand painting ...PAINT & COLOR EFFECTS/FREEHAND PAINTING.

Choose your AIRBRUSH

The go down to CUSTOMIZE PAINT SETTINGS

Find the paint tranparentcy slider

And slide it over

Now go back to your painting area. Click on MORE COLOR CHOICES

You will notice your cursor will turn into an eye dropper, when you go over your graphic. Go to the the darkest color on the pet and click there. Your color wheel will go to that color.

Now go back to your work area, and paint over the eyeball with your airbrush paint, until you can't see the eyeball any longer

The eyeball is rounded, so you need to show some shading, by making the middle a light color and the outside a darker color, you will use your color scale to your left, the tiny little boxes of different colors to do this. You will paint light layers, if at any time you go out of the lines then use the eraser tool

You add the light color in the middle, then blend around it with one of the darker colors, paint dark around the outside and blend with the more medium color. So this will happen...

Also remember that the lower part of your eyelid would maybe have eyelashes, so it should be darker than the rest of the eyelid, but blend it up to the middle with a medium color.

Once your eye lids look good to you, you are done! You will now click OK and go out of the painting area.

Now you need to save the parts for the animation, by slowly moving your eyelids up with the green ball at the middle of the bottom of your eyelid box.

With each movment, you will go to FILE/SAVE AS a gif, and a name like cat1 cat2 cat3 cat4 etc. You don't have to resize it, just save each time you move. And WATCH the top of your eyelid, sometimes they slide up, so you have to reposition it down!

And then you have to reverse your eyelid, to go back down. To do this, I just go up to the top and click EDIT/UNDO and save each of the undos.

NOTE: if you have repositioned your eyelid for the top moving, don't save those movements! Try to keep your eye blink saves to around a total of 9 or so, only because that makes it easier later when you open them for animation! I also save the wide open eye balls in the middle of the eye going up and down, about 4 or 5 times, this makes it look like the eyes are open for a while. That part is optional of course! You can get extra copys of your wide open eyes by going to the top and clicking EDIT/DUPICATE PICTURE or click CTRL+u.

Once you have all your copys saved, close everything. You might want to save your picture with eyelids in PICTURE IT format, incase something messes up! Now you will go to PROJECTS/WEB/FLIPBOOK ANIMATION. Here you will need to read the animation tutitorial if you don't know how to animate!

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