Step-by-step drawing sheet: a jellyfish drifting with bubbles beside it, built up over six frames from two end panels of the bell with their round spots to the remaining bell panels and bands, with the long frilled tentacles arriving a few at a time and the bubbles and short arms last, black outlines on white — Step sequence made by us from a single drawing: each step keeps the lines of the one before it and adds to them.

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How to draw a jellyfish

Six frames, one jellyfish drifting with bubbles beside it. The bell is built panel by panel, the tentacles arrive a few at a time, and the bubbles are last.

This sheet takes one drawing of a jellyfish and shows it six times, each frame carrying everything the frame before it had and adding a little more. Print it, put it beside your paper, and copy one frame at a time.

The bell is not drawn as one dome. It is divided by long sweeping bands into panels, and the sheet builds it panel by panel rather than outlining the whole thing and filling in afterwards. Frame one is the two end panels — the left edge and the right edge of the bell, each with round spots already inside it — and the middle is empty. That is an odd-looking first step and it is the honest one: the bell's outline does not exist as a single shape anywhere in this drawing.

Frames two, three and four fill in the rest of the bell: a lens-shaped panel across the top, then the long curved bands that separate one panel from the next. By the end of frame four the dome is complete. Along the way the tentacles start arriving — one in frame two, two in frame three, two in frame four and three more in frame five — so the animal grows downwards and outwards at the same time.

The tentacles are the fun part and they are drawn two ways, which is worth noticing before you copy them. Some are frilled, with a wavy edge down one side, and some are smooth ribbons. Mixing the two is what stops the underside of a jellyfish looking like a mop. Vary the lengths too: the longest reaches nearly to the bottom of the sheet and the shortest stops about a third of the way down.

The last frame is the bubbles and the short arms. Six round bubbles of clearly different sizes rise away to the upper right, and five short curved stubs hang under the bell among the long tentacles. The round spots on the bell get their final weight in the same frame, having been sketched in as far back as frame one — so if you copy frame one carefully you will find the spots are already there.

For proportion, the bell should be wider than it is tall — about half again — and the tentacles should be at least twice the height of the bell. Beginners almost always draw the bell too tall and the tentacles too short, which produces something closer to a mushroom. The sheet's own proportions are worth measuring with a finger before you start.

The six frames are ordered by which closed shape is largest, biggest first and smallest last. That is why panels of the bell come before its outline is complete, and it is not a claim that this is how a person ought to draw a jellyfish. Most people would draw the dome first. The order here is easy to copy from, which is a smaller and different thing.

The download is one A4 page with all six frames on it. It is a plain black outline on white and prints on any printer, because there is no shading anywhere on the page. This is one of the best sheets here for colouring, because the bands across the bell divide it into panels that can each take a different shade without any of them running into the next.

Before you start

Draw the bands across the bell before you close its outline, exactly as the sheet does. It is much easier to divide a shape you are still drawing than one you have finished.
Alternate frilled tentacles with smooth ones. All-frilled is fussy and all-smooth is limp; the mixture is what reads as a jellyfish.
Make the bell wider than it is tall. A tall bell turns the animal into a mushroom, which is the commonest way this drawing goes wrong.
Draw the bubbles in a rising line rather than a cluster, and make them different sizes. Bubbles of one size look like polka dots.

Published 29 August 2026Updated 29 August 2026561 words

The six steps

The steps go from the largest shape to the smallest, which is an easy order to copy. It is not the only order, and it is not a rule — if you would rather start somewhere else on the sheet, do.