Summary: Drawing butterflies begins with the segmented body, drawing a circle for the top portion of the wing and one for the bottom portion of the wing and outlining the main shapes with marker before erasing unnecessary pencil lines. Sketch a butterfly, giving it an expressive face for a cartoon look, with creative tips from a professional illustrator in this free video on drawing.
Joel Hickerson has illustrated more than 50 books, including "The Complete (Rugby) Referee" and "I Can Draw Foods I Like to Eat." Hickerson has acted on the PBS children's series,...read more
"Joel Hickerson, grindog.com. Today we're going to learn how to draw butterflies. First thing you want to do is you want to think about on your page where you want to draw your butterfly. And start with the middle part of your butterfly which is the body. And like any insect it's going to be segmented. Start with a shape, get you an action line. And then maybe break it into the elements like the head, the upper torso and the lower torso. Draw one circle for your upper wing, another circle for the bottom wing. Circle for the top, circle for the bottom. Okay. Keep it simple. Draw your construction lines very lightly so you can come back and erase the lines you don't want after you come back with your marker, okay. So now that we have all our construction elements in place, we want to stop, get your marker, and come back and just outline the lines you want to keep. Okay. You got your butterfly's head. Another wing. Now you'll need to look at a picture of the butterfly specifically that you want to draw. If you want to draw a specific butterfly. And that way you'll get the wing shapes and the wing markings just exactly how you want them. Now this is our more cartoony sort of butterfly but all the elements are still the same. So once you have the major outline in place you can come back and if you can draw on your construction lines light enough, very easy to come back and erase the lines that you don't want anymore. So there you have like a basic shape. Now you can come back and especially on a cartoon if you wanted to make a cartoon butterfly, you could give it eyes, maybe a big old grin. And again if you have a specific butterfly in mind you should look at the picture to get your wing decorations. And you can color it instead of doing a pencil, kind of like I'm doing. And that's pretty much your basic shapes of your butterfly. I usually shadow just the lower side to kind of give it a little weight and you might do a motion line if they're flying or background. And that's how you draw butterflies."
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