How To animate eyes? (Help needed)

[DaSquirrel]

For starters, I do know how to draw, and I actually have done a flash animation.

My question is this, how do you guys make eyes that are easy to animate?

My last flash had eyes that were just big black blobs, but now I'm making the characters on my next flash. They actually have pupils that move around, and the eyes change shape according to the emotion of course.

Now, I know easy is subjective, but just any god eye techniques you've done in the past would be a great help. If you find some good tutorials, that would be really appreciated. Anyways, thanks for the help.

PS: If your explanations involves masking, please go into detail. Masking is something (God knows why) I still struggle with, though it does seem like an easy way to make eyes. Just give me more info if possible.

[Snow-Fox]

I have symbols for the eyes, inside the symbol is quite a few layers though. top is basic outline of eyes, second is mask(which should be the exact replica of bottom layer), third is pupils (being masked), and bottom layer is the backing to the eyes (the white part). I can animate inside the eyes, change em into different emotions by modifying the top layer.

The other way I saw is to have the face, and cut outs for the eyes. outlines of the eyes would obviously be on the face layer. Then have pupils on seperate layers below the face layer, and a white backing to the eyes on a layer below the pupils. same idea with changing the eyes as before, you have to manually change their shape.