How to draw a frog

Six frames, one frog seen from the front. The lily pad first, then the body, the head and the domed eyes.

A frog seen head-on is one of the most rewarding animals a beginner can attempt, because almost everything about it is symmetrical and the parts are large. There is no fur to suggest, no mane to fudge and no subtle proportion that will betray you. What there is instead is a shape with real character, and it comes almost entirely from two decisions.

The first is a warning about frame one, which contains no frog at all: it is the LILY PAD, a wide flat oval with a wedge cut out of the front and the toes already notched into its edge. It is the largest closed shape on the page, so the sheet hands it over first. Copy it as the stage the animal will stand on, and leave the middle empty.

The frog then builds upwards. The body and the hind feet arrive in frame two, the head in frame three, and only in the last two frames do the eyes appear — first as two domes, then as the eyes themselves. That late arrival is worth noticing, because the eyes are the decision the whole drawing turns on: they do not sit IN the head, they sit ON TOP of it, in two domes that break the line of the skull and rise above it. Drawing them inside the head outline is what stops a frog looking like a frog, and it is the mistake nearly everybody makes first time.

The head itself is enormously wide relative to the body — wider than feels right. A frog is essentially a mouth with an animal attached, and drawing the head at the same width as the body, which is what instinct suggests, produces something that reads as a toad-shaped lump. Each eye dome then carries one large round eye with a filled pupil and a ring around it. Leave a small unfilled highlight in the pupil if you want the animal to look alive rather than glassy; that is one tiny white gap and it does a startling amount of work.

The mouth is a single wide curve running almost the full width of the head, turning up gently at the ends. Because it is so wide, its curvature is the whole expression: flatten it and the frog looks patient, curve it more and it looks delighted. There is no in-between worth aiming for, so pick one deliberately.

The body follows as a rounded shape below and behind the head, with a separate belly panel outlined inside it. That inner panel is worth including — it gives the drawing a front and a back, and it is where a colourist puts the pale underside every frog has.

The legs arrive folded, which is the pose a resting frog actually holds and the one that looks most like the animal. The front pair come down from under the chin, short and slightly bowed. The back pair fold up alongside the body with the knee sitting high, above the level of the back, and the foot flat on the ground below. That high knee is the shape that says the animal could jump.

The feet are webbed, drawn as three or four long toes with the web stretched between them and a small round pad at each tip. Draw the web as a shallow curve between toe and toe rather than filling the whole gap, or the foot turns into a paddle.

The lily pad underneath is a wide flat oval with a narrow wedge cut out of the front, which is exactly what a lily pad looks like from above. Let the frog's feet overlap onto it rather than sitting inside its outline, so the animal is on the pad rather than floating above a green shape.

The six frames go from the largest closed shape to the smallest, which for this drawing means lily pad, then body and hind feet, then head, then front legs, then eye domes, then eyes and mouth. It is an easy order to copy, and it is a description of how this sheet was built rather than a claim about how a frog should be drawn. Starting at the eyes, which are the best bit, is entirely reasonable.

Published 29 August 2026Updated 29 August 2026705 words