How to Draw an Elephant: Four Easy Steps for Creating Realistic Elephant Drawings!

Are you looking to learn how to draw an elephant so you can create a cool and realistic elephant drawing on your own? Just follow along this lesson on how to draw elephants and see just how fun it is!

With elephants, there is always this sense of grandeur and wonder because these are socially intelligent animals that we have come to respect.

We love elephants because these are animals that are a subject of countless stories and a sacred animal to certain cultures. Perhaps this animal has a special meaning to you!

Whatever the reason, build your own elephant drawing by learning these easy steps needed to create this amazing land mammal! All you need is just an understanding of the form and let your basic drawing skills carry the rest.

Follow along and let me show you how!

1. Gesture drawing and base

The gesture phase of learning how to draw an elephant will be the most important! Here's where you decide the proportions and the stance of your animal.

Start by drawing circles and lines on a new layer in your digital art program. Think about the length, the pivoting points of the limbs, and any other features like the nose and the ears.

At the same time, do some simple gesture lines of how you think the muscles will flow on the animal. We will turn these flow lines into actual muscles!

From there, create a new layer underneath your gesture sketch and fill it with a neutral color to the dimensions of your gesture drawing. Make sure that it's 100% solid!

Once you are done that, go ahead and preserve the transparency of the solid object layer (so you don't accidentally paint out of its boundaries) and gently block in forms for the muscles with a large chalk brush.

Merge the gesture layer and the other layer together to keep things simple and to work on the next step of cleaning up the gesture sketch!

2. Cleaning up your elephant drawing

This phase of learning how to draw an elephant will require you to clean up the elephant object. But first, let's create some muscle mass!

Using your smudge tool, smudge the gesture lines along the side of the animal so it flows with the muscle groups. For example, smudge vertically when you are doing the limbs but smudge horizontally for the large body mass!

Once you are satisfied with it, go ahead and clean up any gesture lines that are out of place with your eraser tool. You may want to work on the outline of the elephant as well to make sure that it conforms to the form that you are trying to portray.

Obviously, repaint and block in any parts of the animal that seems out of place. Remember to toggle the 'preserve transparency' option on and off according to your needs!

3. Adding details

This phase of learning how to draw an elephant is extremely fun! The details are not as hard as you think. Just make sure to preserve the transparency of your elephant object!

Using a very small brush tool, draw random horizontal lines lightly around the limbs and sections of the body. Then, repeat this step drawing vertical lines.

Do you see what happened? We are actually drawing the wrinkles on the skin! Adding more lines means you are drawing an older elephant! Don't forget to put age lines on the nose!

For the ears, you may want to use the lasso tool to outline the ears. That way, you can paint within the confines of the lasso tool using a lighter color. This is to make the ears stand out more!

You can use the lasso tool technique to isolate the long tusks as well so you can paint out the tusks without the colors leaking out to other parts of your elephant drawing!

4. Final steps

At this point, you are almost done. All that is left is creating light and shadows to truly create a realistic elephant drawing!

In other words, this final phase in learning how to draw and elephant just takes your drawing and blends it with the background that it's in!

Since every object in the real world will be affected by a light source, choosing how you want the light to hit the elephant will yield different results in terms of light and shadows!

Using a large round brush, go ahead and glaze in sections of light and shadows on a new layer. When you are done, change it to a clipping mask at 50% (Photoshop only option) to reveal the details underneath.

If you do not have that option, simple cut out the shape of the shadow layer in the shape of your elephant and merge it together once you have a good balance of light and shadow.

Else, you can just paint right on the elephant layer if you feel comfortable with doing it right the first time!

I hope you enjoyed this lesson on how to draw an elephant realistically and digitally. Just using these simple steps, you can make anything look realistic and give it a professionally drawn look!

Just practice on other animals to further understand the process or to create one that works for you!

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