How To Draw A Stick Reindeer

Design Tutorial

How To Sketch An Adorable Reindeer In Time For Christmas

You don't need to celebrate Christmas in order to get creative with the holiday mood. Sketch an adorable reindeer, and sharpen your drawing with Pixlr Pro. There's no pressure to be a professional artist—just grab a pencil and follow me!

How To Sketch An Adorable Reindeer In Time For Christmas

Here's How to Sketch Out Your Reindeer

Draw a vertical teardrop shape. This will be the torso of the reindeer. Draw these guidelines subtly, pressing as lightly as possible. This will help you hide them after the drawing is finished.

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Sketch the long legs and the circular head on a long neck.
Add another circle to the head to sketch the muzzle. This contrast between a tiny muzzle and a huge head will make it look very cute! Then, mark the joints on the legs. The back "knees" should be placed a little higher than the front ones.
To give the legs proper volume, draw circles around the joints. This will keep the legs from looking like sticks!
Draw a rotated ellipse over the shoulders and connect it to the rest of the torso. That's roughly the shape of the front of shoulder blades.
Let's work on the head for a while. Imagine the big circle as a sphere, and cut it in half. Then cut this half in half again, creating a wide band.
Place the eye sockets inside this band. Draw the nose in front of the muzzle, and connect it to the eye sockets. Sketch small, rounded ears.
Put the circular eyeballs inside the eye sockets. Draw round cheeks under the eyes.
Draw the shape of the eyes by adding the eyelids. Draw the mouth, too.
Time for other details: add some simple antlers and the tail.
With all the guidelines in place, you can finally outline the whole body. If you want, you can add a collar with a little bell on its neck.
Time to finish the drawing! Draw all the details now. Feel free to press harder, to make these lines more visible than the guidelines.
Shade the reindeer subtly by imagining its body in 3D. You can use hatching, or tilt your pencil to draw with a side of it for a softer effect. You can also use a blending stump (or a cotton swab) to blend the shadows.
If you have a softer pencil (2B, 4B, etc), you can add some more levels of shading for a better contrast. You can also use a softer pencil to accentuate the main outlines.
Finally, use the eraser to remove any visible guidelines. Do it carefully, to not affect the final lines with it.

If you want to share your drawing online, there's a risk that it will lose contrast in the digitalizing process. If your scan/photo looks dull, you can easily fix it in a photo editor, for example, Pixlr Pro . Just open your image, right-click its layer and select Duplicate Layer . Then go to Image > Auto Contrast . If the result looks too strong to you, just lower the Opacity of this layer to adjust the intensity of the correction.