Our cute animal drawings round-up is getting a festive new friend today, because it’s reindeer drawing time! We will use an easy line art cartoon style to create our red-nosed friend, Rudolf.
As background, I’m an artist and teacher named Ms. Marshall who hand-draws every illustration on this site. This lesson is part of a big, jolly compilation of winter drawing ideas. Ready for the tutorial? Let’s go!
Reindeer Drawing
Before we dive into our instructions, a quick reminder: as I explained with our snowman drawing, please remember that you can alter or change any of these steps to suit the kind of art YOU want to make. Part of the point of creativity is that you’re free to make your own choices! Now let’s proceed.
1. Start with erasable pencil.
As I urged with our drawing of a candy cane, always start sketches with erasable pencil whenever possible, because getting the curves right takes some trial and error! I began with the reindeer’s eyes and Rudolph nose, then added mouth, ears and antlers, then face and body shape.
2. Leave room for tall antlers.
If you look at photos of real reindeer, you’ll see that the antlers are gigantic! They tower above the animal — so if you have room on the page go wild with them! I added softer curves than reality to boost cuteness.
3. Add contrasting color, then shading and highlights.
If we’re going for a cute Christmas drawings theme, the most important color feature of our picture today is making Rudolph’s nose red! Going closer to reality for the rest of the body, I used tan and a lighter beige for the body, snout, and belly, and black and gray for the hoof. Shading and highlights (shown below) give 3D depth.
What about the background color? Conveniently, the opposite of red is green, so not only does making the surroundings green look complementary, but it also produces a holiday effect…
4. Make the background sparkle!
Now here’s the problem: the brown of the antlers and the green of the background are a little too close in color to really “pop” — so let’s add some yellow sparkles as we did with our Christmas tree drawing. I also put in magenta and light blue for excitement.
Reindeer Drawing, in Sum
I hope this tutorial for how to make a reindeer drawing (red-nosed Rudolph!) has brought festive holiday joy. For further artistic inspiration, check out my easy holly drawing tutorial. What should I illustrate and explain next? Do share!
Want more? Bop on over to my Christmas tree ornament drawing instructions, and to the links below for my big round-ups of all my holiday drawing tutorials and free printables for coloring activities.
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!