Animals with Human eyes? Hate em? Love em?

[indagold]

I notice most people with animal characters give them human eyes. Personally i'm ehh about it. Sometimes it works, sometimes it falls between cheesy to uncanny valley territory. I like the good old animal eyes with big pupils and the sclera very tiny or not showing. It's really cute.

I don't draw animals much but here are some of my own depictions:

[Strontium]

Guilty as charged! Haha! Well, if I'm going to play devils advocate, I personally feel that human like eyes are easier to draw, and easier to create expressions with. Small black eyes with white shines just make me think of Pikachu. When I see them on my own characters all I see is Pika...

I do have an animal character pet peeve though. It's when anthro artists draw hair on top of their character's head. Like, a grey wolf with red hair, it almost looks like a wig. I just use fur on their head as hair or something like it. I think it looks more natural and less like a hairpiece on an animal.

[sorrelma]

ehh i started as an artist by drawing sparkledogs + cats from the warriors series so i'm SUPER biased but personally i love animals with personified features ??? maybe that's the furry in me

at the same time, i've totally started doing the "big black eyes w sparkles" look

big puppy eyes

[Michelle]

I love little beady black eyes :> It's why I think rodents are so cute, hehe. Though I do agree with @Strontium in that it's harder to get a clear expression out of those sort of eyes. I think it works for more realistic depictions of animals, but for more human-like anthro characters, human eyes work better for expressiveness.

[60Six]

I'm with @sorrelma, I had my beginnings as sparkle dog trash on DA and was even a part of the huge wolf comic fad 2007ish (I at least had a DOG comic though! Not wolf!)
But yeah... Guilty of drawing most of my animals with "anime" eyes.


Though honestly... I don't draw it a ton anymore (Mostly because I rarely have time to draw anything that isn't my comic). But even when I do, anything remotely "furry" leaves a kind of bitter taste in my mouth for some personal reasons involving a pretty bad falling out with a former friend. I feel bad because I have nothing against the art or most of the community, but every time I even see just sparkle dogs come across my dash on Tumblr now, I just find myself scrolling faster to get past them.
Mostly these days, I just draw cartoony white eyes since it's the design for one of my comic's main characters. I'm not really sure which category that falls under though!.

[indagold]

yeah those always bugged me, weird hair pieces on animals that look out of place. I would understand a mane or something.

[jessiepolfliet]

I like it, but I think that has to do with Disney movies and cartoons using them so I am used to it.
My characters are half animal and have there for human eyes
But I also like the normal animal eyes, but I can see from a animator or cartoonist point that it would be difficult to convey emotion with them.

[quakeulf]

Eyes: fine
Eyebrows: not fine

[indagold]

i've found too many animal anatomy reference online with eyebrows XD

[maelstrom51210]

Depends on the art style, really. In real stylized things realistic animal eyes would really clash.

On the other hand, I'm imagining a super-realistic animal with super-realistic human eyes. If only I could do Photoshop.

[Zanreo]

Really depends on the style - having cartoonish animals with cartoony/more simple human-ish eyes aren't usually that bad. If you were going for a more realistic style however... yeah, probably go for animal eyes instead. Realistic human eyes on animals can look kinda creepy and weird.
I don't draw a lot of animals (as in actual animals, not anthros/furries) but I tend to draw them with more animal-ish eyes (though more cartoony/simplified but still clearly "animal" eyes)

I do have an animal character pet peeve though. It's when anthro artists draw hair on top of their character's head. Like, a grey wolf with red hair, it almost looks like a wig. I just use fur on their head as hair or something like it. I think it looks more natural and less like a hairpiece on an animal.

Haha, guilty of this for my furry characters xD I just think it fits the "style" of anthro I draw more. Though one thing that seemed weird about this was when artists would only do this for the female characters while the males wouldn't have this kind of hair. For me, I just gave them hair regardless of gender x3 (unless they were supposed to be the equivalent of bald)

[adamdevis85]

hard question. We need to think twice)

[haleymewsome]

I have a few animals in my comic Unfamiliar that need to emote like humans, so they don't have normal animal features, but tbh even my human characters don't really have 'human' eyes, my style is so cartoony it's kinda hard to tell haha.
For Example

[MissMagicGirl]

I just added some raccoon characters to my series: https://tapastic.com/series/magicadvisor
And I thought really long and hard about how they should look. If they where going to be realistic or overly "cute" like anime characters or what. But I decided to make them more realistic looking since raccoons already look pretty awesome in real life anyway

@Strontium Oh I agree about the wig thing... That is almost never good looking ^^

[joannekwan]

Eyes: fineEyebrows: not fine

This really. As a kid whenever I would look for a stuffed animal I always specified "NO EYEBROWS!"
The only exceptions were plushes of already existing characters like Balto, Nala, etc.

Natural fur patterns don't count tho, so little spots over the eyes like in Dobermans, or Rotties like Shnee are all right.
And sometimes I'll add eyebrow whiskers to my animals to add more detail to the face. But they'll never emote as humans do.