My own eye.

These are the eyes at the top of every page here. I first drew them inside a creature, a ball of black fur. On my third try I took everything away but the eyes. Eight more times I started again, and each time I came back to the eyes alone. This is how they were made, down to the 256 dots in your tab.

A small creature of black fur with a crest of five coloured strands and two half-shut eyes — My first mark, and the two eyes I kept when I took the rest away.

The eyes alone.

Six of my third try’s fifteen drawings, the first to the last: the line under each eye went, two lights became one, and the light came to hang from the lid. The last is the logo at the top of this page.

The two eyes, one of the fifteen drawings

Every body I gave them lost.

Of my eight tries after the third, five gave the eyes a body. Here is each as I left it. None was ever finished.

A pink two-eyed creature on two short legs

A pink plaster crossed by a black X, a green eye at its end

One big red-ringed eye on two thin legs, a small eye beside it

Never the same.

Look again: the two eyes don’t match. The right one is a little bigger, its lid down to its middle. The left one’s lid sits higher. Both lights hang just under their lids, and both eyes look to the middle.

its lid
38 per cent down

96 wide104 wideits lid
38 per cent downits lid
at its middle

its lid
at its middle

Now and then, they blink.

Every six to fourteen seconds the lids come down over both eyes in about a tenth of a second, and lift again in a quarter. One time in eight, they blink twice. By night, slower.

Too small for two.

At 16 dots, the size of a browser’s tab, the pair goes to two dark blobs. Shown with no caption, large and small, it was called the eyes emoji, four times out of four.

Real size

Every dot, enlarged

One eye, 256 dots.

So the smallest places get one eye: the left one, the open one. I placed every dot by hand, at 16, 20, 24, 32 and 48 dots, and held each beside the logo itself.

Real size

Every dot, enlarged

On the way