How to draw a whale

Six frames, one whale above the waves. The whole body first with the eye left blank, then the tail and the big flipper, and the spout and the filled pupil last.

This sheet shows one drawing of a whale six times over, each frame adding to the last until the picture is finished. Print it, keep it beside your paper and take one frame at a time. It is a forgiving subject: a whale is a very simple silhouette with a few unmistakable details hung on it, so the drawing succeeds or fails on one long curve rather than on twenty small ones.

Frame one is that curve. The whole body outline arrives at once — the rounded head, the long back sweeping down to the tail stock, the underside — together with the blowhole ring on top and the empty circle where the eye will be. The pupil is not filled in until the last frame, so for five frames the whale looks slightly startled. Draw the body large and let it sit high on the page; everything that comes later is either above it or below it, and a whale drawn small in the middle leaves the waves nowhere to go.

The second frame gives you the upper lobe of the tail fluke, the big near flipper, and the first of the long grooves along the throat. Frame three adds the second tail lobe, another groove and the first wave under the body. From there the water arrives one wave at a time rather than all at once, which is quietly useful: it means you can stop at any frame and still have a whole picture rather than half a sea.

Frame four is the far flipper and the line of the mouth, frame five brings the two big plumes of the spout above the blowhole and another wave, and the sixth frame closes the drawing with the filled pupil, the middle plume of the spout and the last wave.

The mouth line is the detail most worth slowing down for. It runs from just under the eye forward and slightly down, and it should stop well short of the front of the head. A mouth taken all the way round to the tip turns the whale into a fish, and it is the commonest thing that goes wrong on this kind of drawing. The grooves under the throat should all start at that line and fan backwards.

The order on the sheet is largest closed shape first and smallest last. That is a sequence which is easy to copy from, and this page does not claim it is how a whale ought to be drawn. If you would rather lay in the waterline first so that the whale has something to sit above, that is a perfectly sensible way to work and the finished drawing is the same.

One A4 sheet holds all six frames, black outline on white, no shading anywhere. It prints on anything and the finished frame colours in cleanly.

When this one is comfortable, change the tail and see what happens. Held flat and horizontal, as it is here, the fluke reads as a whale; turn the same shape vertical and the animal becomes a fish, even with the body unchanged. That is worth doing once deliberately, because it is a clear demonstration that a drawing is usually recognised by one or two features rather than by its overall shape, and knowing which feature is doing the work saves a lot of wasted effort later.

Published 29 August 2026Updated 29 August 2026561 words