Gemini73 wrote:I'm enjoying painting my Skink priest. Popped in a touch of white for the eyes in readiness for the yellow/orange they'll eventually be. Question: Should I do a slit or a dot for the pupil? I've been looking at pics of real lizard eyes and can't decide.
Fun fact: most reptiles are nocturnal and have the slit pupil, but it does dilate like any other almost to the full circumference of the iris. However, diurnal lizards mostly of the distinct day gecko genus have almost perfectly round pupils, allowing them to see in the actually darker environment of the rainforest (cast in shadow by the canopy compared to, for example, basking in broad daylight in a desert). These dilate almost to a solid black eye in the dark.
Most mythical monsters are based on the common lizard (basically a skink, a smaller type of thin, flat lizard with tiny digits, almost insect like and extremely fast), or those evocative of a more prehistoric period, such as komodo dragons (largest land lizard in the world) and crocodiles (largest reptile).
In myth, reptiles especially bad ones have nearly always been represented with the slit pupils because as humans never have that we inherently distrust them, and it's for this simple reason that a lot of people still fear reptiles owing to ridiculous depictions in for example the Bible. So if you want your character to go with a more menacing flair, and it would indicate a skirmish during the day (bearing in mind a reptile would in principle have an advantage at night), you can use that justification as well.
So anatomically the correct reference would be something like that.
That said, that sculpts head resembles something more frog like as well, where frogs have round eyes and most toads have slit ones. The nostrils look like that too, but it's probably an exaggerated scale interpretation of dinosaurs, that had obviously much more pronounced features. Geckos, being a much fuller build with distinctly thiker legs, neck and jaw, of the Madagascar distribution also of the colouration you're using also have features a bit more like that. So maybe use a Gecko as reference? I'm very biased!
The variation in images you see online has largely nothing to do with the anatomy and almost everything to do with the photography conditions - in particular, flash. In more natural conditions, the pupil is actually ovular, so somewhere in the middle a dab of a cowliked brush or coming at it from a 30 degree angle, or if you can handle drawing a diamond-like oval with a 000 brush or similar will get you most of the way there.
Personally, I find that round eyes depicted in lizards are not only probably wrong, they end up cartoonish. Because as the scale goes down we find those more exaggerated body features, the scale needs to go in the other direction for the eye. So I'd err on the side of a slightly dilated slit eye rather than a round one, because at a small scale, whatever you do is going to give the impression of being bigger than it actually is.
Hope this helps!
Looks great so tar.
Edit: I just registered that they literally called it a skink lol, so look them up. The colour you have used reminds me more of a Green Common Lizard, which is a larger and chunkier skink essentially, with a mixture of green and greeny blue colouring (especially around the tails).
You could maybe experiment with dark speckles and stripes common in those species but take care not to get lost in the details and end up with coverage that essentially turns the body black, resembling something more like a snake.