How to draw a deer

Six frames, one young deer standing side-on. The spotted body first with no head at all, then the ears — and the entire face arrives in the last frame.

This sheet takes one drawing of a young deer standing side-on with its head turned towards you, and shows it six times, each frame carrying the last one's lines and adding a few more. Copy it a frame at a time. The finished animal is the sixth picture; the first five build the body it hangs on.

Frame one is the body, and it arrives with all its spots already on it. The back, the rump, the short raised tail, the belly line, the near front leg and the near hind leg are all there, scattered over with the pale round spots down the flank. There is no head, no neck and no face. That is the single most surprising thing about this sheet and it is worth reading twice, because the spots feel like a finishing touch and here they are the very first thing you draw.

It is also the most useful thing about it. Spots on a fawn are not decoration applied at the end; they follow the curve of the back and the swell of the flank, and putting them in while the body is still empty is much easier than fitting them around legs and a neck later. Vary their size deliberately. A scatter of identical circles reads as a pattern; a scatter of different-sized ones reads as an animal.

The two tall ears and the outline of the head come together in frame two, and the curve of the throat follows in frame three. The far hind leg is frame four and the far front leg is frame five, so the animal is standing on four legs only in the second-to-last picture. Take care with those far legs: they are set slightly behind and slightly apart from the near pair, and drawn directly behind them the deer looks two-legged.

The entire face is in the last frame, and so is the join. Up to and including frame five the head floats above the body as a detached pair of ears and a blank forehead, not connected to the neck at all — it is worth knowing that in advance, because frame five looks like a mistake and it is not. Both eyes, the dark mask around them, the filled nose and the small mouth then arrive at once, in one step, on a head that has been empty since frame two. If you want the drawing to look right, spend as long on that final frame as on the previous three together. The eyes are large, round and set wide on the sides of the head rather than forward, and the mask is what makes the face read from across a room.

The frames run from the largest closed shape to the smallest, which is why a whole spotted body comes before a pair of ears. That order is easy to copy from and it is not a claim that it is how anybody ought to draw a deer. Someone who starts at the head and works back along the spine is using a method with a long history, and they will finish with this same animal.

The download is one A4 page with all six frames on it in plain black outline, no shading, so a class can work from a sheet each and colour the last frame in afterwards.

The change worth trying next is the neck. Lengthen it and lift the head and the same body becomes an adult doe on alert; shorten it and drop the head towards the ground and the animal is grazing. The legs, the spots and the ears do not move at all. Doing both from this one sheet teaches more about drawing animals than copying two different pictures would, because it shows you that posture lives in one or two joints rather than in the whole silhouette.

Published 29 August 2026Updated 29 August 2026642 words