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How to draw a spider
Six frames, one friendly spider. The patched round body first, then the head, then the legs two at a time — and the pupils and the thread right at the end.
This is one drawing of a cheerful cartoon spider, shown six times, each frame carrying the lines of the one before it and adding more. Copy one frame at a time and the eight legs stop being the problem they usually are, because you never draw more than two of them in a single step.
Frame one is the body: the big oval abdomen, and the three round patches on it arrive at the same moment. There is no head yet. That is the most useful thing to know about this sheet, because the instinct with any animal is to start at the face, and here the face is the very last thing that happens. Draw the oval big and low on the page and leave a clear gap above it for the head, which is smaller than most people expect — roughly a third of the body, not half.
The head circle comes in frame two, with the first leg beside it. From there the legs arrive roughly two at a time, one from each side, and by frame five all eight are down. Working in pairs like that is genuinely worth copying rather than just following: a spider drawn left-side-first almost always ends up lopsided, because by the time you start the right side you are matching against four legs instead of one.
Each leg is drawn as its own long closed shape with a bend partway along it, not as a single line. That is what makes the drawing colourable, and it is also why the legs read as legs rather than as wire. The bend should be roughly two thirds of the way out from the body, and the section beyond it should angle back down towards the ground. A leg bent in the middle looks like an elbow; bent late, it looks like a knee, and a spider has knees.
The two eye circles appear on the head as plain outlines partway through, but they stay empty until the very last frame, which fills in both pupils and adds the short thread hanging above the head. Those are small marks and they are what turn the drawing from a shape into a creature, which is a good argument for taking them slowly after five frames of fairly quick work. Set the eyes wide and low on the head circle. Eyes placed high and close together give the spider a worried look; wide and low reads as friendly, which is what the rest of this drawing is aiming at.
The frames go biggest closed shape first and smallest last. That produces a sequence a beginner can copy without ever facing a blank page, and it is not a statement that this is how a spider should be drawn. Somebody who starts with the eight legs radiating from a dot and hangs a body on them afterwards will finish with the same spider, and that method has the advantage of getting the spacing right first.
Everything on the sheet is outline with no shading, so once you have copied it you can colour the finished frame in, and the six frames sit together on one A4 page at a size you can work from without leaning over the table.
A spider is one of the best subjects there is for learning to space repeated shapes, and the way to get that practice is to draw this one three or four times rather than moving on. Try it once with all eight legs the same length, then again with the front pair longer than the back pair. The second one looks alive and the first one looks like a diagram, and the only difference between them is about four centimetres of pencil line.
Before you start
- Mark four small dots down each side of the body before you draw any legs. Spacing is the whole difficulty and dots cost nothing.
- Bend each leg late, about two thirds of the way out. A leg bent in the middle reads as an arm.
- Keep the head clearly smaller than the body — around a third. Equal circles read as an ant.
- The three patches are much easier to place before the legs are in the way, which is exactly why the sheet puts them in the first frame.
Published Updated 625 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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