Squirrel Drawing Tutorial: Best Drawing Techniques to Help Learn How to Draw a Squirrel Convincingly!

Would you like to create a realistic squirrel drawing that you can be proud of? This lesson will help you create a squirrel picture drawing of your own in a few simple steps! Not only that, you will learn some techniques on drawing fur to be used beyond your squirrel drawings!

Whether in real life or in cartoons, squirrels are cute creatures that we are familiar with in one way or another. How do these animals relate to you?

For some, they help bury acorns that could grow into a full tree. For others, this animal is just relaxing to be around!

As for drawing a squirrel, it's not too difficult. Rather, it's a practice exercise of controlling different lengths of brush strokes to get fur!

Follow along to not only create a squirrel drawing, but to improve your eye-hand coordination with the digital brush and create wonderful artworks that is desirable for extra income!

1. Gesture drawing and base

We should start off the squirrel drawing with a gesture sketch. This is to make sure you have an accurate representation of form and proportion!

Make sure to do this on a new layer so you can easily correct it! Think about the circles, triangles, and squares that comprise the main body. Near the tail, think about creating simple gesture lines for the tail and how the fur will fan out.

Once you are done with that, create a new layer underneath and paint it into the shape of your gesture sketch. This will be the base where you will paint the details on!

You may want to start working one some quick light and shadows of the squirrel by blocking in simple shapes to form the body.

Make sure to lock the shape ('preserve transparency' option) so you don't accidentally paint outside of its boundaries! When you are satisfied, go ahead and merge the layers together.

2. Smudging in the details

This part of learning how to draw a squirrel will require you to smudge your squirrel drawing with a chalk brush!

On the body, proceed with smudging in the same direction as the gesture lines with a medium sized brush. You will discover that you will get nice variations of tone to work with on top of simulating small bits of fur!

At the same time, you may want to start working on the details! Start with a light brush and simply block in shapes for the fingers, ears, and any other anatomical features.

Once you are done that, you can also refine the entire object by erasing some of the boundary areas is you have smudged too far out.

3. Painting details and fur

Now that you have a good base to work with, the next step of the squirrel drawing is to detail in some fur! But first, make sure to lock the squirrel layer so you don't accidentally paint outside of it.

After that, then you can switch to a smaller brush and start doing the fur. You want to do short bursts as outlined by the smudge lines. Add more short brush strokes around the edges of the limbs to separate it from the rest of the body!

For the tail, you can even try painting with the smudge brush! To do that, put the pressure on 100% and choose a small brush. Then, go ahead and 'push out' the colors from the tail to create long thin fur!

Using this method, you can create many tonal variations in the fur strands because you are using the colors in the tail rather than a set color from your digital brush!

4. Light and shadows

The squirrel drawing should be coming out very nicely at this point! There is one last step and that is to give it more depth by drawing in a proper light source.

Focus on where the light will hit and where the shadows will appear in the absence of light.

If you're using Photoshop, create a new layer on top of the squirrel, change it to a clipping mask, and then paint in the light and shadows. You can adjust the opacity of the clipping mask to hide or show the details of the squirrel layer underneath!

If you are using other digital art software, continue to paint the light source on a different layer, and then merge it to the squirrel layer if you are happy with it!

Otherwise, if you're comfortable, you can paint the light source right on the squirrel drawing!

From the regular brushes to the smudge brushes, you have learned many ways to create form out of a simple shape. Practice these techniques well as it will allow you paint even more amazing things that are desirable!

This concludes our drawing tutorial. I hope you enjoyed this lesson and learned some new skills you can incorporate into your future projects!

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