Winter Hat Drawing: Easy Cartoon Steps

Our winter drawing ideas have a cozy new friend: this easy winter hat drawing — with a poofy pom-pom on top, too! This tutorial will cover how to create a simple line art cartoon, without getting bogged down in some of the aspects that can make it more complicated.

As background, I’m a teacher and artist named Ms. Marshall who loves sharing easy drawing ideas with people around the world. I hand-draw each and every one of the illustrations on this site, and that’s an important detail because in this age of robot-generated art, I want us to embrace the heartfelt, imperfect lines our own hands create! On to the lesson…

Winter Hat Drawing

Before we get to the instructions, a reminder about this drawing tutorial: As I explained with our witch hat drawing, you can feel free to change or alter any of the steps to fit YOUR desires. For example, if you’d rather not personify this hat via my signature googly eyes, just leave them out. Art is about embracing your own unique creativity!

1. Use soft curves for the hat.

Unlike our present drawing, which required precise parallel lines, we can — and in fact need to — use soft, curved, and even wobbly lines to sketch our winter hat. As always, I recommend starting the cartoon in erasable pencil (see my video below for how I did it), because even though our lines aren’t straight, we want them to pleasingly fit together.

2. Add a pom-pom up top, and a ribbed, folded up edge.

Two elements that give winter hats their character are a puffy pom-pom up top (use curves like our cloud drawing), and the double folded thick bottom edge. To simulate the ribbed knit of the latter part, pull your pen in and out to created undulations.

3. Pick colors that contrast with blue.

Because we’ll want our background to be blue to simulate ice and snow for winter, you’ll want to pick a color for the body of the hat the contrasts with it. Since the opposite of blue is orange in the RYB system, and yellow in the RGB and CMYK models, try to incorporate at least one of those pairs in for a nice juxtaposition that helps your artwork “pop!”

4. Color in shading and highlights.

Add a lighter hue to the center of the pom-pom to show three-dimensional softness, then darker shades around the sides of that and the hat itself to create the illusion of depth — much as we did for our snowman drawing.

5. Don’t stress about texture.

Hats usually have a ridged knit texture, but that’s actually relatively challenging to draw, so I give you full permission to just leave it out — just as I left out texture in our cute mushroom drawing. People will still know your drawing is a hat, as long as you have the basic soft and curved shape, the pom-pom up top, and the ridged bottom.

6. Make it snow in the background!

Ensure that your sky is adequately dark blue to contrast with white, then let it snow, let it snow, let it snow (that’s a song allusion!) by splotching white or very light blue along the background! Slant the snowflakes at an angle to show that the wind is blowing the flakes in a dramatic, wintry manner.

Now our hat is complete, and ready for winter weather (not spelled “weither“)! A cozy congratulations to you. Time to see my drawing process in the embedded video…

Winter Hat Drawing, in Sum

I hope this tutorial on easy winter hat drawing has been useful and fun, and that you stayed toasty warm while doing it — maybe with the help of a candle drawing! What should I sketch next? Do share!

Want a fun winter art activity for the holidays? Check out my free printable Christmas coloring pages for kids… and adults, too.

Hungry for more hat art? Bop over to my big round-up of different ways to draw easy hats…