How to draw an octopus

Six frames, one octopus with bubbles rising beside it. The head and two outer arms first, the remaining arms one or two at a time, the pupils last.

This sheet takes one drawing of an octopus 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 gives you a great deal at once: the domed head and body as a single shape, both eyes already drawn as open rings inside it, and the two outermost arms curling away on either side. It is the largest closed shape in the picture plus the two shapes that set its width, and it means the drawing's whole footprint is decided in the first step. If you are working on a small sheet of paper, copy frame one lightly and check it fits before pressing hard.

Frame two is the curved band across the top of the head — a single crescent that reads as the top of the dome catching light. It is the smallest amount of new ink in the whole sequence and it changes the drawing more than its size suggests, because it turns a plain blob into a head.

The rest of the arms arrive across frames three, four and five: an upper arm on the left in frame three together with the right-hand front arm and its row of suckers, an upper arm on the right in frame four, and in frame five the left front arm with its own suckers. Six arms in total, and the two at the front are the ones that carry the suckers — a row of plain open rings of different sizes following the curve of each arm.

The eyes work the way they do on every animal sheet here: the rings are in frame one, and the filled black pupils not until frame six, alongside three small bubbles and a fourth larger one that arrived in frame five. Four frames separate the eye outlines from the eyes, and it is the easiest thing on this page to describe backwards.

The arms are the whole character of this drawing and they are drawn as tapering ribbons, wide where they leave the head and narrow at the tip, each one curling in a different direction. The mistake to avoid is making them all curl the same way, which turns the animal into a wave pattern. Look at how the sheet varies them: two curl up at the tips, two curl inwards, and the two at the front sweep down and across each other.

The six frames are ordered by which closed shape is largest, biggest first and smallest last. That is why the head and two arms arrive together and the pupils come at the end, and it is not a claim that this is how anybody ought to draw an octopus. If you would rather draw all eight arms and hang a head on them, 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 a single sheet each. It is a plain black outline on white and prints on any printer, because there is no shading anywhere on the page. The suckers are the best part to colour, and they are drawn generously large precisely so that a felt tip can get into them without closing them up.

Published 29 August 2026Updated 29 August 2026558 words