Did you do the eye, or the whole face there? either way, thats a great one

Good bid on the eye work Claf!

Sorry Mason but your wrong. My eye was rendered completely in photoshop.

Awesome Claf. Great mood. Mikey that eye is looking terrific too.

I made only the eye.
Like ReyRey, it's all drawn in Photoshop.
Only used brushes & layer masks & added noise.
But I used a reference... and old black & white picture of Björk from a magazine.

Nice one ReyRey too!

hey claude! awesome job!

Don't get me wrong Claf. I used reference too. About three of them, but the finished product was all rendered and drawn in Photoshop.
I work a lot in photorealism. I always use reference. Sometimes if I can not find what I am looking for I will set it up myself and shoot it. In one way or another we can all draw an eye but to really get all the little details that make something look real nothing beats looking at the real thing. Is a landscape artist cheating because he is outside looking at a tree and not painting it from memory. Nature can create so many things that the human mind would never think of. When I went to art school, life drawing class started with anatomy we had to learn every littlle bone and muscle that effected how someone looked. My instructor lived for this stuff. He could name every part of the human anatomy and tell you what it did. He thought of all this while he was drawing. He would sit and draw the most wonderful characters from his head but when it came down to doing a painting he used reference. Norman Rockwell was one of my favorite artists. He used photographic reference all the time.
But remember. Photographic reference is useless if you don't know how to see. You must know what it is about the image that gives it it's realism and use that. There is a lot of extra stuff going on in photos that does not add to an image but takes away. Many cameras distort objects, yet when we look at the photo, our mind knows what that object is so it does not care about the distortion but if you draw it that way, with the distortion, your image will look wrong. Reference is a good thing but use it wisely.

By the way Claf, all this extra comment was not directed at you. It was more of a general statement.

Yeah! I thought that you used references too, ReyRey! Like you, I get used to do hyperrealistic illustrations, and most of the time I need good references, and anyway I never saw a great hyperrealistic illustrator drawing without good references.
Sure it's possible to do easily a realistic orange with water drops without any references,
but with human anatomy, it's really better to search for some sources.
Yes, Norman Rockwell was a very impressive talented artist.
Nice comment!

Hmm, interesting, I agree, I can't think of anyone who doesn't use references.
Still, I don't use references often, I like what's caught solely by the imagination in
free drawn images. Some things may be left 'un-caught' but others
will be 'exagerated' because they are what stands out in the mind's eye.

Optical illusion, quantum string theory, combined with nature's complex and enigmatic way that photons of light absorb and reflect hot, warm, cool and cold colors,into the viewers eye that lead to an interpretation of the shape of an object and the form and shadow it exibits" uhm" From the divine creative invisible formless substance flows thoughts and idea's seemingly out of the void, that birth into existance things which were not but now are" "selah" from the unseen to the seen, from the dark to the light, from a seed to a harvest, we are the creators instruments of creation from our first to our last breath so enjoy your life and be a creator of the source of all sources

I recently made something anatomical in one of my entries without any references.
I had a lot of comments, but I think nothing like "it's beautiful" or "pretty well done"!
I figure I'm better using references than doing free drawn images... anyway when it's about something realistic!

err...it was VERY well done and very convincing--
technically it was one of the greatest chops ever....wiseguy

How am I wrong? You said yourself that you did not draw the face, only the eye. I didn't say you didn't draw the eye, i said you didn't draw the face. Sorry, but you're wrong!

Also, when I said I didn't use any references, I didn't mean that I am somehow better than anyone for doing so...I said it mainly to excuse the cartoon-ish look to it. I wasn't going for 100% realism, I did a more anime-ish style of drawing for my eye.