How many eyes on a creature is too many? (feel free to separate "too many to draw" from "too many for comfort/aesthetic/etc")
Forgot to come back and finish this one. It's really going to come down to what's trying to be communicated. I personally don't go to the H.P. Lovecraft School of Tossing Too Many Eyes On A Thing And Calling It Scary, but I think how many eyes you give something impacts its semiotics, or where exactly an anthropomorphic figure falls onto the uncanny valley scale. I do dig no-eyed looks for monsters, especially subterranean or extraterrestrial, and, like, future assassins to help visually dehumanize them. All my favorite Transfomers have one big eye, and I think single-eye robots/tech masks is very good at conveying something a step above being fully removed from humanity but still possesses a level of focus, impassive callousness or being emotionally hollow. Let's say like, more than two less than ten, you start invoking your spiders or big compound eyes, you obviously start moving back towards monstrous vibes but you can also get characters who read as frail, cerebral, tricksters. And then there's just your big mess o'eyes and like. I dunno. It's an easy iconography for eldritch, outsider stuff but I don't really feel like it's saying anything.
And of course these are not like, hard and fast rules, just my read on things, and there are going to be exceptions to all of them. But eye structure and placement and quantity is going to have massive impact on how your character reads.
You know who did do the multi-eye-mass thing to great effect recently? (Spoilers for Stray) Stray