How to Draw & Color Helmets

Military helmets are perhaps the easiest helmets to draw and are interesting to color.

At the most basic level, helmets exist to protect the human head from injury. Helmets come in many different forms -- from football helmets to dirt bike helmets and the like. Drawing a helmet is not terribly involved because the basic shape is always the same. The details, however, can vary because of the variety of features, such as the face mask on football helmets, to the full-protection covering and darkening lens of the welding helmet. The military helmet is the one of the best helmets to first learn to draw because of the simplicity of its shape.

Things You'll Need

• Pencil
• Camouflage-colored markers, including greens, browns, tans and black

Instructions

1. Draw the main part of your helmet by drawing a short, wide, upside-down "U."

2. Put your pencil on one side of the bottom of the upside-down "U" and draw a slight outward curve. Repeat on the other side of the "U," making sure the curve goes in the opposite direction.

3. Draw a downward-sagging line that connects the two outward curves. Your drawing should now have the basic shape of a helmet.

4. Put your pencil at the point in which the "U" meets the downward curve and draw one very slightly downward sagging line across the helmet until it meets the respective spot on the other side. Move your pencil a fraction of an inch below the starting point of this line, and draw another line just like it all the way across.

5. Determine the exact top center of the upside-down "U," which is the top of the helmet, and make two pencil marks a few millimeters to the left and the right of the center. Start at the leftmost mark and make a dotted line to what appears to be the corresponding point of the center of the bottom of the helmet. Make a duplicate dotted line from the rightmost line, ending at the corresponding point of the center of the helmet's bottom. Make a slightly upward arching line connecting the top points of the dotted lines and erase the original line that falls slightly below this new line. Your helmet should now appear to have stitching down the middle.

6. Draw an unbuckled chin strap by drawing two long, thin rectangles on either side of the bottom of the helmet. Keep in mind that perfectly shaped rectangles will not look authentic, so try to add variations such as angled ends or slightly curved lines to the basic rectangle shapes.

7. Color the helmet with camouflage marker colors. Alternate using green, dark brown, khaki and black markers on the helmet, creating odd, wavy shapes throughout. Camouflage can vary greatly, so use your imagination.

Resources

• How to Draw a Cartoon Football Helmet