How to draw a lizard

Six frames, one lizard basking on a rock. Frame one is the rock and two legs; the body comes second and the head not until frame three.

This sheet takes one drawing of a lizard lying on a rock 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.

Frame one is the rock, and two of the lizard's legs. That is the whole first step: the wide flat stone the animal is lying on, plus the near foreleg and the near hind leg, each already complete with its splayed foot and separate toes. There is no head, no body and no tail. The rock is the largest closed shape in the picture, which is why it comes first, and starting with it is genuinely useful — it fixes where the animal will lie before you have committed to any part of the animal.

The body is frame two, and it arrives with the five round spots along its spine already outlined and the tail already drawn. Frame three is the head, with the eye drawn inside it as an open ring and the small ear mark behind it. So by the end of frame three you have a whole lizard, and the last three frames are the far legs and the finishing marks: the far hind leg in frame four, the far foreleg and the throat line in frame five, and in frame six the filled eye, the shoulder wedge and four of the back spots brought up to full weight.

Those spots are worth a sentence because the sheet draws them twice. They are outlined in frame two as part of the body's own surface and thickened in frame six, which means a page that said the spots arrive at the end would be wrong and a page that said they are done in frame two would be wrong as well. They are sketched early and finished late, and both halves are on the sheet.

The legs are the part most beginners get wrong, and the sheet makes the fix obvious by drawing them in two pairs. A lizard's legs come out sideways from the body and then bend down at the elbow and knee, so the foot sits well away from the belly rather than underneath it. If your lizard looks like a small dog, the legs are tucked too far under. Copy the angle in frame one exactly — it is doing more work than it looks.

For proportion, the tail should be about as long as the head and body together. That is longer than it feels while you are drawing, and it is the single change that makes a drawn lizard stop reading as a newt. The head is a rounded wedge, wider than the neck, with the eye set high and well forward.

The six frames are ordered by which closed shape is largest, biggest first and smallest last. That is why the rock comes before the animal standing on it, and it is not a claim about the order anyone ought to draw in. If you would rather draw the lizard first and put a rock underneath it afterwards, the finished drawing is the same drawing.

The download is one A4 page with all six frames on it, so a class can work from one sheet each. It is a plain black outline on white and prints on any printer. Once you have copied it, try the same six shapes with the tail curled the other way — it takes two minutes and it is the quickest way to find out how much of the drawing you were tracing and how much you had understood.

Published 29 August 2026Updated 29 August 2026609 words