AKA "something I Doodled While Watching Eureka With My Girlfriend"
I have gone through a couple of eye-styles during my time creating art. I've never been quite satisfied by the minimalist western (.)(.) eyes (NB: for the purpose of this blog post, these are eyes, and nothing else. Get your mind out of the gutter) but I can't do full-on anime style either, cus it'd clash with the rest of my artstyle.
I had to censor this page, cus I had doodled a phone number in the upper-right corner.
These are the sort of doodles I tend to make at any available paper whenever I watch shows. While doodling, I was using a X-shape with intersection to make drawing classic cartoon-esque pie-eyes easier.
I was hit with a brainwave; one of the main differences between "western-style" cartoon eyes and "anime-style" cartoon eyes is that western cartoon eyes tend to have the iris and pupil separated, if the iris is drawn at all. Meanwhile, anime-style eyes often treat the pupil and iris as one unified thing.
This is not universally true, since there are many styles of anime, but see the above picture for one example of how it can look.
Even when you draw the pupil as separate and not part of the shading, the standard practice for anime eyes is to start with the iris and then fill in details, often in the coloring stage (unless you're specifically going for manga-style, in which case it needs to be inked.)
The new eye-style I settled on uses an X-symbol to guide my lines, and an additional cross-section to determine the position of the highlight.
You start on the left corner of the downwards-pointing upper triangle, draw a line down to a point at around where you'd cut the lower upwards-pointing triangle if you where to cut it in half horizontally. Follow that line, then up to the right corner of the upper triangle. That's the basic shape of the pupil. Then you add the highlight, which is simply one half of the upper triangle, cut vertically.
In practice, the lines would not be nearly this straight and stiff, it's simply to illustrate the concept.
Feel free to use this style if it speaks to you! It's not like I could copyright it if I wanted to (and tbh I'm prolly not the first person to think of something like this.)