How to draw a volcano

Six frames, one erupting volcano. The whole cone with its lava streams arrives in frame one; the smoke, the ground and the flying lava come after it.

This sheet takes one drawing of an erupting volcano 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.

Frame one is the cone, and it comes with more on it than you would expect: the whole mountain, its wavy base, and both lava streams already running down its sides. The streams are drawn as long closed shapes with rounded ends, not as lines, and they are part of the very first step rather than something added at the end. If you are drawing along, that is the thing to know before you start — the lava on the mountain is part of the mountain's own shape, and putting it in later means fitting it into a cone you have already closed up.

The smoke cloud is frame two, and it is the second biggest thing on the sheet. It is drawn as a single billowing outline with two puff shapes marked inside it, sitting above the crater rather than touching it. Frame three is the ground: a wide flat ripple of land spreading out from the base of the cone on both sides, which is what stops the volcano looking like it is floating.

The last three frames are the eruption itself, and they are smaller than you might think. Frame four is the inside of the crater mouth — a short trapezoid opening with a bead of lava in it. Frame five is the crater rim, drawn as a curved band across the top of the cone, together with the two boulders lying on the ground. Frame six is the flying lava: rounded blobs thrown out around the crater at clearly different heights, plus the inner lip of the crater.

The two boulders are worth a note because of how they arrive. Their outlines are half-drawn in frame three, as part of the ground they sit on, and only completed in frame five. Half of a shape appearing four frames before the rest of it is a normal thing on these sheets and it catches people out: if you copy frame three exactly you will find you have already drawn most of two rocks without meaning to.

For proportion, the useful rule is that the cone should be wider at the base than the smoke cloud is across. A volcano drawn with a narrow base and a big cloud reads as a chimney. Draw the base line first, as wide as you dare, then bring the two slopes up to meet a flat top rather than a point — volcanoes are truncated, and drawing a sharp peak is the single commonest mistake.

The six frames are ordered by which closed shape is largest, biggest first and smallest last. That is why the mountain comes before the eruption, and it is not a claim that this is the order anybody ought to draw in. If you would rather start with the smoke and hang the mountain underneath it, 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 nothing shaded anywhere on the page. This is a good one to colour: the lava streams and the flying blobs give you somewhere obvious to put red and orange, and leaving the cone plain makes them read as hot.

Published 29 August 2026Updated 29 August 2026586 words