How to draw a bunny

Six frames, one bunny lying down with its paws stretched out. The head first, then the body, the long ears and the fluffy tail.

This bunny is lying down rather than sitting up, front paws stretched forward, and that pose is the reason the drawing works as well as it does for a beginner. A resting animal is mostly horizontal shapes, and horizontal shapes are far more forgiving than vertical ones — a sitting rabbit that leans looks wrong immediately, while a lying one that leans just looks relaxed.

Frame one gives you the head and cheek as a single curved shape, and it looks like an incomplete fragment because it is one — the sheet reveals closed shapes in order of size, and this is simply the biggest one. Copy it as drawn. It is the anchor everything else is placed against, so if yours comes out larger or smaller than the sheet shows, scale the rest to match and the drawing still works.

The eyes go in next, and then the rounded haunch at the back arrives as the second big mass. Set it close behind the head rather than far from it: a resting bunny holds its head near the ground and the gap between head and haunch is short. Leaving too much daylight between them stretches the animal into something closer to a ferret.

The ears arrive in the fourth frame, later than instinct suggests, and they are the shape everyone recognises this animal by. They are long, upright, and each one carries a separate inner shape — a narrower version of the outer ear, not touching the edge. That inner shape is what makes an ear read as an ear rather than a leaf, and it is the detail most often left out.

Set the ears slightly apart and let them lean very slightly away from each other rather than standing exactly parallel. Perfectly parallel ears look like a costume headband. A few degrees of difference between them is all it takes.

The face arrives in the middle frames: two round eyes with filled pupils, set fairly far apart and low on the head, and a small muzzle below. A rabbit's eyes sit towards the sides of the skull, which is why the animal can see almost all the way round it, and drawing them too close together gives the face a forward-looking, predatory look that is subtly wrong for a rabbit.

Then the paws. The front pair stretch forward from under the chest, drawn as two long soft shapes with small toe lines at the ends. The hind leg folds underneath the haunch and shows only as a shape tucked in behind the front ones. Keeping the hind leg mostly hidden is what makes the pose read as lying rather than crouching.

The tail is last, a small round fluffy shape at the back of the haunch, and it should be drawn as a bumpy circle rather than a smooth one. Three or four bumps around its edge is plenty. It is the smallest shape on the sheet and the one that most reliably makes people smile at the finished drawing.

If you already have the sitting rabbit on this site under your belt, drawing this one is a genuinely useful exercise rather than a repeat, because it is the same animal with every proportion rearranged. The ears and the head barely change; the body flattens and lengthens, the legs fold, and the silhouette becomes horizontal. Learning that a pose changes the body and not the parts is most of what learning to draw animals is.

The six frames run from the largest closed shape to the smallest — head, then eyes, then haunch, then ears and front paws, then the tail, then the small toe lines. It is an easy order to copy, and it is not a claim that this is how a bunny ought to be drawn. If you would rather begin with the body and hang the head off it, the finished drawing is the same.

Published 29 August 2026Updated 29 August 2026652 words