How to draw an owl

Six frames, one owl on a branch. The head and both ear tufts first, then the whole branch, then a wing at a time — and the pupils and the tail last.

This sheet takes one drawing of an owl perched on a thick branch and shows it six times over, each frame holding everything the one before it had plus a little more. Print it, prop it beside your paper, and copy a frame at a time. Nobody is asked to draw a whole owl in one go, which is the only real advantage six frames have over one finished picture.

The first frame is the head, and it is the head as a shape rather than as a face: the round skull, the two little ear tufts standing up off it, the small triangular beak, and the wide figure-of-eight ring that runs around both eye discs. The pupils are not there yet. That is worth knowing before you start, because it means frame one is a bird with two enormous blank circles staring out of it, and it looks odd until the rest arrives. Get the width of that ring right relative to the skull and the owl is already unmistakable, because the huge forward-facing eye mask is the one thing every owl drawing in the world has in common.

The second frame is the branch, complete, with the toes already curled over it. That is unusual and it is the sheet being honest about which shapes are big rather than which shapes are important: the branch is a fat horizontal bar with bark marks on it, and it takes up more of the page than either wing. Draw it lightly first. If the branch ends up too high the owl has no room for its tail, and the tail is the very last thing to arrive.

Frames three and four bring one wing each, folded down along the sides of the body like two long leaves. The fourth frame also carries the chest, divided into a handful of overlapping feather panels, and the first of the two pupils. The second pupil follows in frame five with the pale flight-feather tips at the bottom of each wing, and the sixth frame closes the drawing with the last of those tips and the small rounded tail sitting below the branch.

So the pupils are filled in one at a time, a frame apart — the first arriving alongside the second wing, the other on its own a frame later. If you are copying strictly, resist the urge to blacken both pupils as soon as you have drawn the rings — not because doing it early is wrong, but because two pupils dropped in at once tend to end up at different heights, and doing them on separate passes makes the mismatch obvious while it is still easy to rub out.

The order on this sheet runs from the largest closed shape to the smallest, which is why a branch arrives before a wing and why the tail is last. It is a sequence that is easy to copy from and it is not a claim that this is the order anybody ought to draw an owl in. Plenty of people would put the branch in at the end so the bird sits properly on it, and the finished drawing would be exactly the same drawing.

The download is one A4 sheet carrying all six frames, in plain black outline on white, so a whole table can work from a copy each. There is no shading anywhere on it, which means it prints cleanly on a printer that is nearly out of ink and colours in neatly afterwards.

When the perched owl feels comfortable, the fastest way to make a second owl look like a different bird is to change the ear tufts and nothing else. Tall pointed tufts read as a long-eared owl; flatten them almost to nothing and the same head reads as a tawny. The eyes, the beak and the feather panels stay exactly where they are. That is a much better use of a second attempt than starting a different animal, because it teaches you which part of a drawing is carrying the recognition.

Published 29 August 2026Updated 29 August 2026676 words