How to Draw a Cactus

With lovely shades of green and with prickly bits. Today you will learn how to draw a cactus. Their low maintenance and unique shapes make these plants fun to illustrate. Your cactus drawing can be used to create boho designs or humoristic SVGs and sublimations.

Combine your plant illustration with other elements like cactus flower clipart, or add a cute handwriting font to personalize with custom text.

Before we begin, gather your drawing supplies. You can use any medium you have on hand to follow along with our drawing guide. Our drawing tutorials can be used with paint, crayons, and digital mediums.

Step 1 - Make Sketches of your Cactus

With a pencil or light-colored medium that you can cover with color, let's begin by making our rough cactus sketch. For this tutorial, we are sketching a bunny ear cactus. See our collection of cactus clipart for other cacti types to draw inspiration from.

Create the Cactus Shape

Starting with your cactus shape, begin your first sketch in the lower area of your drawing space. For our first piece, we drew an arched shape that narrows towards the bottom with a straight line.

Above the first sketch, add smaller arched shapes on top. With each added piece, make your shapes smaller, as we did in our example sketch below.

Add the Details

Next, let's add a couple of details to our cactus sketch. Feel free to interpret your details in any way you want. For our drawing, we added curved lines to all our pieces, with spines along each line in the shape of a small "x".

Lastly, we drew simple flower sketches on top of our second piece. You can draw more flowers in the shape of roses, daisies, and even sunflowers.

Step 2 - Define your Sketched Cactus Lines

For our second step, we will switch to an outline medium. To make our outlines permanent, we can use a dark, black, or defining medium. We used these Procreate ink brushes to color our cactus outlines.

Begin tracing the outer sketch lines of your shape. Then, trace and line over your stripes. We will add our flowers and spines in the next step, but you can outline them now.

Step 3 - Apply Color to your Cactus

If you used black to create your outlines, switch to your coloring mediums. Use different shades of green to apply color to your plant illustration. We already lined our sketches with green, so we filled our cactus with a different shade of green.

We colored our flowers pink and used white to add the spines. You can add other features to finish your drawing, like patterns, or use texture brushes to do shading.

You have reached the end of our drawing exercise! Great job following along and illustrating your cactus. Just think how amazing your drawing will look on a t-shirt, mug, or with other boho clipart to make a whole theme.

Inspired to create more plant clipart? Be sure to check out how to draw a maple leaf or draw a tulip with our easy-to-follow drawing guides.