The time has come in our escapades in cute drawings to get festive. Why? Because it’s party hat drawing time! Get psyched for an easy, cute cartoon tutorial that you can use for a birthday or other special celebration.
My name is Ms. Marshall, and I’m an artist and teacher who loves creating easy drawing ideas for all ages. I hand-draw each and every illustration on this site (hundreds and hundreds, at this point, since I started in early 2020), and my goal is to help you get confidence in your creative expression by realizing that every line we sketch doesn’t need to be perfect, as long as the art is bringing us joy! On to the lesson…
Party Hat Drawing
A quick note: I like to anthropomorphize everything I draw by adding a cute face in, but feel free to sketch your own drawing without the eyes and smile. Art is all about making your own creative choices!
1. Draw a triangle with an oval at the bottom.
To create your party or birthday hat shape, start with a triangle for the body, then draw an oval at the bottom for the opening. As I emphasized with our top hat drawing, your lines don’t need to be perfectly straight — we’re going for general cartoon representation, not robotic perfection.
2. Consider a pom-pom or ribbons.
Many party hats have joyful poofs at the top of the point (I made mine look like a sea urchin!) and ribbons at the bottom to tie on the hat. Consider adding these, as they create opportunities for more color and excitement.
3. Create a design on the hat, following its curves.
As we did with our Easter egg drawing, make sure that any designs you ink onto your hat follow the curve of the shape. You may even want to add erasable guidelines in to help. As you can see in the time lapse video below, I ended up changing my plans of diagonal stripes like a candy cane because the angles were too difficult to achieve.
4. Shade the sides of your party hat drawing for depth.
As we learned with our cherry drawing, adding darker shading to the sides and lighter highlights in the middle is the key to making a piece of art look three-dimensional. Don’t be shy with the highlights, here — birthday hats are supposed to look shiny! (Speaking of birthday, if you want a tutorial about how to make a birthday cake drawing to go with your hat, there it is.)
5. Make a festive background!
To really pump up the party atmosphere, add bright colors to your background, including dots that look like celebratory confetti. Congratulations — your drawing is done!
Let’s now check out the time-lapse video of my art process in the embedded video, just as we did for our chef hat drawing…
Party Hat Drawing, in Sum
I hope this easy party hat drawing tutorial serves you well, whether you’re preparing for a birthday, or for New Year’s Eve. What would you like me to illustrate and teach next? Do share!
Want more? Check out my big round-up of how to draw easy hats of different types…
The author and artist, Lillie Marshall, is a National Board Certified Teacher of English who has been a public school educator since 2003, and an experienced Reiki practitioner since 2018. All art on this site is original and hand-drawn by Lillie. She launched DrawingsOf.com Educational Cartoons in 2020, building upon the success of her other sites, AroundTheWorldL.com (established 2009), TeachingTraveling.com (founded 2010), and ReikiColors.com. Subscribe to Lillie’s monthly newsletter, and follow @WorldLillie on social media to stay connected!