How to draw a fish

Six frames, one striped fish with bubbles. The head first, then the striped body, the fins and the fan tail.

This is the fish most people picture when the word comes up: a rounded body, a fanned tail, a cheerful mouth and a few bold stripes. It is an excellent first animal to learn because almost every part of it is a simple closed shape, and because the proportions are forgiving in a way that a horse or a dog never is.

Frame one is the head, not the body: the front section of the fish with the eye and the smiling mouth already in it. That is unusual for a drawing sheet and it is genuinely helpful here, because the head sets the height of the whole animal. The body follows in frame two as a wide oval that keeps that height and narrows towards the tail. Keep it plump — a fish drawn too slim reads as a minnow, and the charm of this shape is that it is generous enough to hold stripes, a fin and an eye without anything getting crowded.

The mouth goes at the narrow front end as a short curved line with a small lower lip below it. Turning that curve very slightly upwards is the entire difference between a fish that looks alert and one that looks like dinner. It is one of the highest-value single lines in any drawing on this site.

The eye is large and round, set high and well forward, close behind the mouth — and because it is part of that first frame you are committing to its position before anything else exists. Fish eyes are proportionally big and they sit near the front of the head. Placing the eye towards the middle of the animal is the mistake that makes a drawn fish look like a balloon with a face. The pupil is filled in right at the end, in the last frame.

The dorsal fin rises from the top of the body as a tall triangle with a slightly curved leading edge, and the side fin sits low on the flank as a smaller rounded shape. Draw the side fin as a fan with two or three ribs in it rather than a plain blob, because those ribs are what make it read as a fin rather than a fold of skin.

The tail is the shape that carries the personality. It is a broad fan, wider at its outer edge than where it joins the body, with three or four ribs spreading from the join to the edge. Let the outer edge be gently scalloped rather than straight. A straight-edged tail looks cut off with scissors.

The stripes come next, running from the back down across the belly. Four is a good number. The important thing is that they curve — a stripe drawn straight across a rounded body flattens it instantly, while a stripe that bends to follow the belly makes the fish read as a solid three-dimensional thing. That single decision does more for the drawing than any amount of detail elsewhere.

The bubbles finish the sheet, three of them rising above the fish at clearly different sizes. Vary the sizes and do not line them up. Bubbles in a neat vertical column look like a diagram of bubbles; bubbles scattered at different heights and distances look like water.

A useful extension once this one is comfortable: draw the same fish six times with a different tail on each. A long trailing tail gives you something like a guppy, a short stiff one something like a perch, a huge flowing one a fantail goldfish. The body barely changes, and you learn how much of an animal's identity lives in one part.

The frames run from the largest closed shape down to the smallest, which here means head, then the striped body, then the dorsal fin and tail with the first bubble, then the side fin, then the remaining bubbles, then the pupil. It is an order that is easy to copy and it is not the correct method; there is no correct method, and blocking in the whole body before any detail is what most people would do.

Published 29 August 2026Updated 29 August 2026686 words