How to draw a palm tree

Six frames, one palm tree on a mound of sand. The fronds come first, two at a time; the trunk is not drawn until frame five.

This sheet takes one drawing of a palm tree 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.

The order here is the opposite of what almost everybody expects, and it is the reason this page is worth reading before you draw. Frame one is one frond and the mound of ground at the base. Frames two, three and four add the other six fronds, two at a time. The trunk — the thing every beginner starts with — is not drawn until frame five, and its top and bottom sections not until frame six. The coconuts are the very last thing on the page.

That is not a suggestion about how to draw a palm tree. It happens because the frames are ordered by the size of each closed shape, and a palm frond is a big shape while a trunk drawn as a narrow banded column is a stack of small ones. But it is a genuinely interesting way to work if you try it: setting the crown of fronds first and hanging the trunk under it afterwards makes it much easier to get the tree leaning the way you want, because the leaves decide the balance of the drawing and the trunk merely connects them to the ground.

There are seven fronds and they radiate from a single point at the top of the trunk. Each is drawn as a long closed shape with a zigzag notch cut into one side, which is what suggests the split leaflets without drawing every one of them. The notches all point the same way along each frond — towards the tip — and copying that consistently is most of what makes them read as palm rather than as fern.

The trunk is drawn as six stacked bands rather than as two long lines, four of them in frame five and the top and bottom ones in frame six. Those bands are the old leaf scars a palm carries all the way up, and drawing them as separate closed segments rather than as lines across a column is what gives the trunk its texture. The trunk curves — it is not vertical — and the curve is what stops the tree looking like a lamp post.

The three coconuts sit in a cluster where the fronds meet the trunk, and they arrive in the last frame. They are simply three overlapping circles, and they are worth waiting for rather than adding early: drawn first, they tend to push the fronds outwards and leave the crown looking sparse.

The six frames are ordered by which closed shape is largest, biggest first and smallest last. That is why a frond comes before the trunk, and it is not a claim about the right way to draw a tree. If you would rather draw the trunk first, as most people do, the finished drawing is the same drawing.

The download is one A4 page with all six frames on it, so a class can work from one sheet each. It is a plain black outline on white and prints on any printer. Once you have copied it, the useful variation is to draw the same crown of fronds on a much shorter, fatter trunk — that is a different species of palm entirely, and it costs you nothing but the trunk.

Published 29 August 2026Updated 29 August 2026581 words