How to draw a panda

Six frames, one panda sitting up with a bamboo stalk. The head and its eye patches first, then the body, the ears and the bamboo.

A panda is a bear with the markings doing all the work, and that makes it an unusually forgiving subject: the underlying animal is a set of soft rounded shapes that would read as almost any bear, and the black patches are what turn it into this one. Get the patches in the right places and a fairly rough bear becomes unmistakable.

Frame one is the head with its two eye patches already in place, plus the pale belly panel floating below it with no body attached yet. The head is round — properly round, close to a circle, and large relative to the body. A panda's head is one of the biggest in proportion of any bear, and drawing it too small is the quickest way to end up with something that reads as a generic teddy.

The ears do not arrive until the fourth frame, which is later than you would expect for a shape that carries so much of the silhouette. When they come, they sit high on the skull as two round shapes overlapping the head outline rather than perching on top of it, each with a smaller curve inside. Round ears set wide apart are half of what makes this animal recognisable; squash them or move them to the sides and it starts to look like a cat.

The eye patches are the frame that matters most. They are large ovals, and the important thing is that they are tilted: each one slopes down and inwards towards the nose, so the pair sit like two commas facing each other. A panda drawn with horizontal oval patches looks surprised. The tilt is what gives the face its calm, slightly sleepy expression.

The eyes themselves are the very last thing on the sheet, dropped into the patches in frame six. They are small and they sit near the inner end of each patch, not centred. That off-centre placement costs nothing and changes everything: eyes in the middle of the patches make the animal look startled, eyes towards the nose make it look content. Because they arrive last you get five frames of practice at the patches before committing to them.

Below the patches sits a rounded muzzle with a broad nose on it and a small curved mouth beneath. Keep the muzzle short and wide. A long muzzle turns the panda into a dog wearing makeup, and it is a surprisingly easy mistake to make when working from the middle of the face outwards.

The body comes next as a rounded seated mass below the head, with a separate belly panel outlined inside it. The two front paws come forward, one of them raised to hold the bamboo, and the hind paws stick out at the bottom with pads and toes drawn on their soles. Those visible foot pads are a specific gift of the sitting pose — a standing panda hides them entirely.

The bamboo stalk is the last element: a straight segmented stem with leaves branching off it in small groups. Draw the segments as short divisions along the stalk rather than a smooth tube, and let the leaves come off in threes at an angle. It is a plant, so nothing about it should be symmetrical.

A panda is also worth drawing twice for a reason that has nothing to do with pandas. Draw it once with all its markings, then draw the same animal again with none of them. The second drawing is a plain bear, and seeing how little of the shape changed is the clearest possible demonstration of how much of an animal's identity is pattern rather than form.

The frames run largest closed shape first and smallest last, which here means head-with-patches and belly, then muzzle and one paw, then body and hind paws, then ears, then the bamboo stalk, then the eyes and leaves. It is an order that is easy to follow and it is not the correct one — there is no correct one, and blocking in the whole seated body before any marking would be the more usual way round.

Published 29 August 2026Updated 29 August 2026684 words