How to draw the moon

Six frames, a crescent moon in a night sky. The whole moon and every crater arrive in frame one; the five frames after it are clouds and stars.

This sheet takes one drawing of a crescent moon with clouds and stars around it and shows it six times, each frame carrying everything the frame before it had and adding a little more. Print it, put it beside your paper, and copy one frame at a time.

It is only fair to say at the top what this particular sheet does, because it is not the same shape as most of the others here: the moon itself is finished in frame one. The crescent and every crater on it arrive together in the first step, and the five frames after it build the sky — three clouds and a scatter of stars. If you only want to draw the moon, frame one is the whole lesson, and the rest of the sheet is a night sky to put it in.

That first frame is a generous one to copy. The crescent is drawn as a thick curved band, wider in the middle than at the two horns, and the craters are simple open circles of clearly different sizes spread unevenly across it. Uneven is the important word. Craters spaced regularly look like buttons; craters of three or four different sizes scattered without a pattern look like a moon. Three of them are drawn as double rings, a circle inside a circle, and those inner rings are the one part of the moon that is not in frame one — they are brought up to full weight in frames five and six.

The clouds arrive one per frame: the big one that crosses the moon's lower horn in frame two, the one to the right in frame three, and a small one at the bottom right in frame four. Drawing a cloud is mostly a matter of nerve — a row of overlapping bumps along the top and one long flat line along the bottom — and the sheet gives you three at different sizes so you can see that the recipe is the same each time.

The stars are the last thing and they come in a rush: one large one in frame four, four more in frame five, and the rest in frame six. They are five-pointed stars of noticeably different sizes, and the sheet scatters them rather than ringing them neatly around the moon. If you want the drawing to look like a night sky rather than a diagram, copy that: vary the sizes more than feels comfortable and let a couple of them sit close together.

A crescent is harder to draw than it looks, and the usual mistake is to make both curves the same. The outer curve is a big gentle arc; the inner curve is a tighter one, and the two meet at sharp points. If your moon is coming out looking like a banana, the inner curve is not tight enough. Draw the outer arc first, then bring the inner one in until the crescent is about as thick as you want, and only then close the points.

The six frames are ordered by which closed shape is largest, biggest first and smallest last. That is why the moon is the first step and the small stars are the last, and it is not a claim that this is the right order for a person to draw in. If you would rather start with a star and work up to the moon, the finished drawing is the same drawing.

The download is one A4 page with all six frames on it. It is a plain black outline on white and prints on any printer, because there is no shading anywhere on the page. This one colours in particularly well: the craters give you somewhere to put a second shade of grey, and leaving the sky white makes the moon read as bright rather than pale.

Published 29 August 2026Updated 29 August 2026643 words