Sea Urchin Drawing: Cute, Easy Cartooning

Ready for another installment of adorable, easy drawing ideas? Buckle up for the most cute sea urchin drawing around!

We’ll go over three different methods for cartooning this aquatic animal, so get your pen and paper (or digital drawing tools) ready. As an artist and teacher who loves easy animal drawings, I’m excited to guide you on this lesson…

Method #1: Easiest

Here’s the simplest way to draw a sea urchin (pictured above). First, start with the eyes and mouth — the basis for all cute drawings. Then, make a series of zigs and zags to indicate the spikes around the perimeter of the body. Color it in and add a few extra zig zags above the eyebrows to indicate more spikes… and you’re done!

What Color are Sea Urchins?

Here’s a wonderful fun fact to help our creative drawings: sea urchins actually really do come in a wide range of flashy colors. Under the seas of planet Earth, there truly are urchins in hues ranging from purple, to red, to green, to brown, and of course to black! I thought I was being all wild, making a purple urchin, but I could have been even crazier with a bright red one, and still have been accurate.

Method #2: Medium Easy

The second sea urchin drawing technique is pictured above. Start with the eyes and mouth, and then draw a circle around them for the body, and color that black.

Next, take a thick, tapered pen, and begin adding spikes around the whole urchin, pulling the pen from the body outward, and decreasing pressure as you go, so as to create the sharp points at the end. Woo! This method produces a far spikier urchin, with loads more spines. One of the benefits of drawing is there are so many ways to draw the same thing!

Method #3: Slightly Harder

The third urchin sketching method is a marriage of #1 and #2, and is pictured below. Start with the eyes and mouth, then begin drawing very acute V angles outward, starting close to the eyes, then moving outward. This takes some precision as you begin layering the spikes, so that they have a natural flow, and don’t overlap too much. (This is somewhat similar to the layers of scales we created in our mermaid tail drawing.)

For the final layer, make sure you sketch a fully enclosed shape, so there’s a clear boundary to the sea urchin’s body. For advanced bonus, add some shading to give each spine depth! Aww… so delightful.

Spikey or Spiky?

As an English teacher in addition to an artist, I feel compelled to insert a quick spelling lesson here, amid the cute drawing ideas. Though I’ve named my urchin in my illustration, above, “Spikey,” the correct spelling of the adjective that goes with “spikes” (as in spines) is “Spiky” — no “E.”

I just used that incorrect spelling, above, as a play on the name “Spike,” and apologize if it’s confusing! Don’t worry — I spelled it correctly in our cactus drawing tutorial.

Drawing Sea Urchin Anatomy

If you know the truth about animal anatomy, you may have realized that these easy cartoon drawings of sea urchins are not biologically accurate. Whoopsie! And yet — what makes them cute is what makes them wrong: their eyes (just like our cute frog drawing) and mouth. Let’s examine both.

Do Sea Urchins Have Eyes?

In fact, sea urchins do not have eyes (!!!), but rather “see” with their feet! WHAT?! Yes, just as we ran into this issue with our cute snail drawing, where the eyes were far more adorable to draw on the face instead of on the tentacles where they should be, you have a choice here.

What’s the dilemma? Well, you can either draw the sea urchin as anatomically correct and leave out those sweet, expressive eyes, or you can add them in — and make the viewer smile. (You know which side of this choice I’m on!)

Where is Their Mouth?

The mouth of real sea urchins is not where we placed in here on these cartoons, but rather on the bottom of their little spiky body. Indeed, we are now have the same situation as our easy octopus drawing, since cephalopods also have bottom-body mouths. Useful for their lifestyle? Sure — just not as cute to draw.

VIDEO: How to Draw a Sea Urchin

https://youtu.be/WTyUVLjNeRI

Sea Urchin Drawing, in Sum

I hope you’ve enjoyed this tutorial on easy, cute sea urchin drawing, and that it has satisfied all of your urgent and essential questions on the topic. Why is art important? Because you never know when one might have an urchin sketching emergency!

Love art prompts and tutorials? Check out “Drawing the Wind” and “Rainbow Drawing,” plus “Treble Clef Drawing” and “Cloud Drawing.” What other drawing prompts would you like me to create? Do share…