How to draw a dolphin

Six frames, one dolphin leaping over the waves. The whole animal in the first frame, then the waves and the splashes around it.

A dolphin is a single smooth curve with a beak at one end and a fluke at the other, and it is one of the few animals where the whole drawing succeeds or fails on one line. That line is the back, and this sheet asks you to commit to it in frame one before anything else exists.

It is also, unusually, almost the whole drawing. This sheet is honest about being a weak sequence: the dolphin arrives essentially complete in frame one and the five frames after it add the sea. That is a consequence of how the frames are derived — by revealing closed shapes largest first — and on an animal drawn as one flowing outline there is simply no smaller piece to hold back. So take frame one slowly. Draw the back as an arc, not a straight body tilted upwards: a leaping dolphin bends, the nose points up and forward, the middle of the back is the highest point, and the tail curls down behind. A straight torpedo at an angle looks launched rather than alive, and nothing added afterwards will fix it.

The body is deepest just behind the head and tapers steadily to a narrow stalk where the tail joins. That taper should be gradual and continuous. A dolphin that stays the same thickness and then suddenly narrows reads as a rubber toy.

The beak comes off the front as a short blunt cone, clearly separated from the forehead by a shallow crease. That crease is one of the most recognisable things about the animal and it takes one small curve. Above it the forehead rises into a rounded dome, and the dome should be generous — a flat forehead turns the dolphin into a small whale.

The mouth line runs back from the tip of the beak in a long shallow curve that lifts very slightly at the end, which is why dolphins always look like they are enjoying themselves. The eye is small, round, with a filled pupil, set just behind and slightly above the corner of the mouth. Both details are tiny and both are the whole expression.

The dorsal fin sits at the top of the arc, curved backwards like a wave about to break, with a long leading edge and a hollowed trailing one. The flippers come off the lower body behind the head, angled back, flattened and slightly curved. Neither should be symmetrical; every fin on this animal sweeps backwards.

The tail fluke is the last big shape and the one worth drawing carefully. It is horizontal, not vertical — a whale or dolphin's tail lies flat, which is the opposite of every fish. Two broad lobes sweeping out sideways with a small notch between them, and the whole thing set at an angle to the body rather than in line with it.

Underneath, three simple wave lines run across the sheet, and the dolphin's tail passes behind them so the animal is coming out of the water rather than floating above it. That overlap is doing real work: without it the waves are a decoration at the bottom of the page and the dolphin is nowhere in particular.

The two splash clouds sit where the animal broke the surface, drawn as rounded bumpy shapes rather than spikes. Water thrown up in a leap is round and heavy, not sharp. Making the two splashes different sizes and setting them at different distances from the tail keeps them from looking like a pair of clouds someone stamped on.

The six frames go from the largest closed shape to the smallest, which for this drawing means the whole dolphin, then the three wave lines one at a time, then a flipper detail, then the two splashes. As a step sequence that is thin, and it is fairer to call it a finished drawing with its setting built up around it than to pretend the animal is being taught in six stages. Nothing here claims this is the order anyone ought to draw a dolphin in.

Published 29 August 2026Updated 29 August 2026676 words