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How to draw a puppy
Six frames, one round puppy lying down with a ball. The back and haunch first — no head until the second frame — and the nose, eye and tail last.
This sheet takes one drawing of a small puppy lying down with its front paws stretched out, and shows it six times, each frame keeping everything the last one had and adding to it. It is a different animal from the sitting dog elsewhere on this site, drawn from the side rather than the front, and the two sheets are worth doing one after the other for exactly that reason.
Frame one is the back and the haunch: one long curve rising from the shoulders over the rump, with the chest wedge below it. There is no head. That is the thing to know before you start, because a puppy is a head with a body attached in most people's minds, and this sheet asks you to commit to the body first. It is a good discipline. A puppy drawn head-first almost always ends up with a body too small for it.
The head comes in frame two as a rounded dome with the big pale ring of the eye already inside it, and the long floppy ear follows in frame three along with the folded back leg. Keep the head large. On a grown dog the head is roughly a fifth of the body length; on a puppy it is closer to a third, and that single proportion does more to make the drawing read as young than anything else you can do to it.
Frame four is the stretched front paw, drawn as one long soft shape reaching out towards the ball. Frame five brings the rest of the face — the muzzle with its filled black nose, and the inner ring and pupil that turn the empty circle from frame two into an eye — plus the outline of the ball. The sixth and last frame adds the raised tail, the second front paw and the line that divides the ball into panels.
So the tail is genuinely the final mark on the sheet, and the pupil arrives only one frame before it. If you are copying and the drawing feels lifeless around frame four, that is why: the head has been sitting there since frame two with a blank ring where its eye should be, and everything that gives it expression is still to come. Placing the ring early and filling it late is worth copying as a habit — the ring is easy to move while it is empty and almost impossible to move once there is a pupil in it.
The frames run from the largest closed shape to the smallest, which is how a back outranks a head and a head outranks an ear. That order is easy to follow and it is not a claim about the correct way to draw a puppy. Somebody who blocks in a circle for the head and an oval for the body before anything else is using a perfectly good method and will finish with the same animal.
It is one A4 sheet with the six frames on it, all in plain black outline, so it prints on a tired printer and the finished frame takes a felt tip without the outlines closing up.
The single change that will teach you most here is the ear. Draw the puppy again with the ear standing up instead of hanging and everything else identical, and the animal stops being a spaniel and becomes something closer to a terrier. Nothing else on the page has moved. Doing that twice — once floppy, once upright — is worth more than drawing two different breeds from two different sheets, because it isolates the one shape that is carrying the difference.
Before you start
- Make the head about a third of the body length. Adult proportions are what make a drawn puppy look like a small dog instead of a young one.
- The stretched front paws should reach clearly past the nose. Paws tucked under the chest read as a cat.
- Draw the ball before the second paw, as the sheet does — it gives you something to aim the paw at.
- Keep the back one smooth curve. A back drawn in short strokes gives the puppy a hunched, anxious look.
Published Updated 609 words
The six steps
The steps go from the largest shape to the smallest, which is an easy order to copy. It is not the only order, and it is not a rule — if you would rather start somewhere else on the sheet, do.
Step 1
Step 2
Step 3
Step 4
Step 5
Step 6
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