How to Draw a Frog: A Practical Step-by-Step Drawing Guide to Creating Convincing Frog Drawings!

Wouldn't you like to learn how to draw a frog? Not only can you learn how to draw frogs that are realistic, but this frog drawing lesson will teach you a wide variety of excellent techniques to master so you can be the skilled artist that you want to be!

You will be dealing with three different types of drawing goals in this lesson: creating the form, creating the skin, and making the skin shine through light reflected off its wet surface.

The ability to see textures and light to make incredible artworks is a flexible and lifelong skillset that will be well received wherever you go!

Surprisingly, you do not require any special custom brushes to draw a frog. Just the basic ones combined with the proper settings should see you through this tutorial without too much difficulty.

When you're ready, start up a new layer in your digital canvas and let's start on this particular lesson on how to draw a frog!

1. Gesture drawing

Like all drawings, learning to draw a frog will be difficult if you focus only on specific details. That's why you need to create a gesture drawing to show the entire form!

Do not worry about details as that will remove your attention away from getting the right proportions. Your frog drawing should focus on all the basic shapes in this stage.

For example, look at the bumps for the throat and the back, round curvatures of the main legs as it folds upon itself, the angle of the front fingers, the huge eyes, where the mouth openings are, where the ear placement is, and a tapered behind.

Don't forget that a frog has four digits at the front limbs and five digits on the back limbs (fanned out in the opposing direction where the big toe is the shortest digit).

Getting this right the first time will make it easier to draw a frog convincingly.

2. Blocking in the form

At this stage of learning how to draw a frog, you will change your initial gesture sketch of your frog drawing into a solid object to work with. The goal here is to create a 'dark' slate for you to chisel the details out.

To do that, create a layer underneath your gesture sketch and fill it in with a 100% pressure brush. Pick a neutral color as you don't want to cover your gesture sketch lines.

Once that is done, merge the two layers together. At this point, you can preserve the transparency of the layer (making it so you can't paint outside of the borders of your frog shape) and start blocking in form.

Begin with areas that stand out the most like a light belly and the limbs. Other things to consider are the lips, the eyes, and the shadows created when the folds of the legs overlap.

3. Creating skin details

This is the part, of learning how to draw a frog, where you will spend the most time on! Before you work on the bumpy sections of the skin, you must first smoothen out the skin.

I recommend smudging using the chalk head and the smooth round brush head. That way, you will get nice smooth textures on some areas without looking like fur (from the jagged edges of the chalk head).

Next, reduce the size of your brush and start painting in the outlines for the eyes, limbs, and the overall body using a lighter color. You want to create separation as much as possible in these areas.

Finally, you are going to simulate the bumpy texture found on the skin. To do that, pick a dark color and set your brush to scatter.

There are two particular settings you should be aware of when scattering: pen sensitivity and shape dynamics.

Obviously, when you put it on pen sensitivity, the size of your brush head doesn't change; only the opacity of the strokes.

On the reverse, when you set it on shape dynamics, the scattering area will change depending on how hard you push on your digital stylus but the opacity remains constant.

I recommend toggling between both options as that will give you the best control.

4. Making a realistic frog drawing

We're almost done! On this step, you want to give the frog drawing a little more depth by making it blend into the background a little.

You have choices here depending on your digital art program. If you have Photoshop, use it to create a clipping mask. Doing so will allow you to paint lighting details on a different layer without altering the original frog layer.

If not, then you can duplicate the frog layer, paint the lighting and shadows, and then adjust the transparency to show the layer underneath.

Of course, if you are comfortable, you can paint lighting and shadows right on the original frog drawing in step three. You can use the dodge and burn tools to highlight certain areas without ruining the textures too.

Once you are done that, the final step of learning how to draw a frog requires you to make the skin shiny to give the illusion of a wet surface. Once again, you will need to set the brush type on scatter.

From there, reduce your brush size to the smallest and set the shape dynamics on only. Now, start painting in little sections of white to give the illusion of wet skin.

Focus sparingly on the limbs, the digits, and the back. You want to create a nice contrast in selected areas where the light will hit the strongest.

If you need to repaint larger sections of light, set your scattering options on pressure sensitivity and glaze over that area.

Remember to preserve the transparency of your frog layer so you don't accidentally spray outside of its boundaries.

I hope you enjoyed this lesson on learning how to draw a frog. When everything is done, you should have learned a bunch of new skills and tools to start illustrating on your own and become a great artist!

Didn't find what you were looking for? Use this search feature to find it.

I hope you liked (tweeted, and +1 too) this site as much as I liked building it!

Tweet