How to draw a dog

Six frames, one dog sitting upright. The head alone first, then the body and front legs, and the ears, tail and eyes last.

This sheet takes one drawing of a sitting dog and shows it six times, each frame carrying everything the frame before it had and a little more. By the last one you have the whole animal. Print it, put it beside your paper, and copy one frame at a time — the point of the six is that you are never asked to draw the whole dog at once.

The first frame is the head on its own — the rounded skull, the broad muzzle sitting proud of it, and the two eyes already in place. The body does not arrive until the second frame, and the proportion between those two shapes is the one to settle before anything else: get the head and the body the right size relative to each other and the rest of the drawing tends to come out looking like a dog whatever else you do. A head drawn too small is the commonest reason a beginner's dog ends up reading as a horse.

The front legs come with the body in frame two, and the haunches that the sitting pose folds underneath arrive one at a time after it — the left in frame three, the right in frame four. The ears are late rather than early: one in frame four, the other in frame five beside the nose and the mouth. The tail curls up in frame five as well, so the last frame holds nothing but the two pupils, the tongue and the line dividing the front paws. Those small marks are worth waiting for rather than hurrying, because they are the whole difference between an outline and a dog.

Dogs come in shapes that barely look related, which is a gift when you are learning: nobody can tell you your dog is wrong. Lengthen the muzzle and you have something close to a collie. Shorten it and round the head and you are near a pug. Make the ears stand up instead of hang and the same body reads as a shepherd. The sheet gives you one dog; the shapes it is built from give you most of them.

If you want the drawing to feel alive rather than posed, the two places to spend your effort are the eyes and the set of the head. Eyes placed slightly lower than you think, and a head tilted a few degrees off vertical, do more for a drawing than any amount of care spent on fur. Neither costs an extra line.

The six frames are ordered largest shape first and smallest last. That is an order that is easy to copy, and it is not a claim that this is how anyone ought to draw a dog. If you would rather start with an eye and work outwards, the finished drawing is the same drawing, and plenty of people do exactly that.

The download is one A4 page with all six frames on it, so a class can work from a single sheet each rather than six. It is a plain black outline on white and prints on any printer, including a tired one, because there is no shading anywhere on the page to clog up.

A dog drawn from this sheet is a starting point rather than a finished thing. The obvious next step is to draw the same six frames twice more at different sizes: once small enough that you have to simplify, and once large enough that you have room for the fur along the chest and the fold where the ear meets the skull. Copying a drawing three times teaches more than copying three drawings once each, because the third attempt is where you stop tracing and start understanding what you are looking at.

Published 28 August 2026Updated 28 August 2026626 words