How to draw a monkey

Six frames, one monkey hanging by an arm from a branch. The limbs first, then the branch, the face and the curling tail.

The monkey on this sheet is hanging from a leafy branch by one arm, which makes it a much better drawing lesson than a monkey standing still would be. Hanging puts the whole body on a diagonal, and a diagonal is the cheapest way to make any animal drawing look alive rather than posed.

Frame one is not the body. It is the raised arm and the two dangling legs, drawn as one long connected run of shapes with a gap where the torso will go — which looks strange on its own and is the most useful frame on the sheet, because it fixes the LEAN before anything else exists. Everything after it hangs off the angle you set here. Draw those limbs too upright and the finished animal looks like it is standing in mid-air.

The branch comes second, before the animal has a head, and then the head itself: roughly circular, tipped slightly to one side, with a heart-shaped face patch inside it — a rounded outline covering the eyes, nose and mouth area, separate from the outline of the skull. That patch does an enormous amount of work. It is what makes the drawing read as a monkey rather than a bear or a cat, and it is the first thing to check if the finished face looks wrong.

The ears are big, round and set low on the sides of the head, sticking out clearly rather than lying flat. Draw each as a circle with a smaller curve inside it. Undersized ears are the commonest reason a drawn monkey stops looking like one, and there is very little risk in making them too large.

The face itself is simple: two round eyes with filled pupils inside the patch, a small nose with two nostrils, and a wide curved mouth. Set the eyes about a third of the way down the patch and leave a clear gap between them. A monkey's face is expressive because the features sit close together in the middle of a large face, not because of any detail in them.

The limbs come next, and the arm doing the hanging is the important one. It reaches up and its hand wraps over the top of the branch, with the fingers curling round and down the far side. Drawing the hand in front of the branch instead of around it is the mistake that breaks the illusion instantly — the monkey stops hanging and starts hovering.

The other arm hangs loose, and both legs dangle with the feet relaxed. Nothing about a hanging animal should look tense. Let the free limbs curve slightly rather than hanging as straight lines, and let them be at different angles from each other.

The tail is the last big shape and the most fun to draw: it comes off the hips and curls into a spiral at the end. Make the spiral loosen as it goes round rather than coiling evenly like a spring, and let it curl away from the body rather than across it, so it reads as a tail and not as a rope.

The branch and its leaves finish the sheet. The leaves are grouped in small sprays rather than dotted evenly along the branch, which is how leaves actually grow, and the branch itself tapers towards its thin end. A branch of constant thickness reads as a pole.

The frames are ordered by size, largest closed shape first and smallest last, which here means limbs, then branch, then head, then tail, then the body's inner shapes, then the leaves. That order is easy to copy and it is not a claim about the right way to draw a monkey — building the face first and hanging the body off it is a perfectly good alternative, and probably a more natural one.

Published 29 August 2026Updated 29 August 2026639 words