How to Draw a Skull

Do you love creating spooky drawings? We have an awesome tutorial today where you can learn how to draw a skull. Skull clipart can take the form of intricate sugar skull shapes to minimal Halloween illustrations. Whether you are making scary drawings for your portfolio, or just crafting for fun, this Halloween clipart is sure to be a scream.

For this skull drawing tutorial, get together the drawing supplies you want to use. You can use traditional materials or drawing apps, our drawing tutorials cater for everyone.

You will need sketching, lining, and color mediums to make your drawing. If you are using Procreate, then you can add guides with the Procreate drawing guides. We will be using Procreate along with this Procreate brush tool kit.

Step 1 - Make the Guides for Your Skull

In our first step, we want to sketch the basic shapes and lines that will act as our guides when drawing the skull. For the guides, we recommend using a removable sketch medium like a pencil.

Create the Skull Base Shape

Roughly sketch a circle for the first guide shape. You can draw your circle freehand, use a circular object or draw with Quickshape in Procreate.

Below your circle shape, draw the bottom half of a square. Then, below the square, sketch a downward triangle (shown in blue). Your shape should look like our example sketch below.

Sketch Guidelines on the Base Shape

With our basic shapes sketched, we are going to add guidelines. Make the first guideline down the center of your circle and bottom shapes. Then, add a horizontal line through the center of your circle.

Add another horizontal guideline through the bottom half of the circle shape. Then, make a vertical guideline on either side of the lower shapes. Place these lines closer to the edges. See our sketch below.

Step 2 - Add Definition to the Top Half of the Skull

With our guides ready, we are going to add structure to our skull shape. In this step, we are adding definitions to the top half of our skull.

Create the Facial Bone Shape

Looking at our image below, sketch the bone structure around the eyes and temple (shown in red).

Start just above the center horizontal guide in the circle. Create an inward curved line that extends to the edge of the circle on either side. This is the top area of the eye socket.

Then, carry on with the edge of the red line just below the horizontal guide. This time, make a large rounded curve (shown in blue), following the circular shape. Extend the end of this curve inward towards the vertical line as seen in the sketch below.

We need to add a similar shape to the blue curve that we created above for the cheekbone. Sketch this line on the lower half of the circle but make it wider than the circle shape. Begin sketching just below the middle horizontal guideline and then extend down to the bottom of the circle.

Add the Eye Sockets

Between the center and bottom guidelines on your circle, and sketch the eye sockets. The eye sockets are more rounded at the bottom than the top and have a space. See our sketch below for a visual guide.

Add the Nose and Upper Jaw

Next, we are going to add the nose and make the upper jaw shape. In the center of the circle, on the lower horizontal guideline, sketch two teardrop shapes as we did for the nose. Draw the upper jaw shape next.

Sketch an open rectangular shape below the cheekbone. The upper jaw should be halfway down from the bottom of the circle. This will determine the height of the upper jaw. The width of the upper jaw is determined by the left and right horizontal guidelines in the shape below the circle.

Step 3 - Define the Lower Half of the Skull

We have defined the top half of our skull. Now we will work on shaping the lower jaw as well as adding the teeth.

Sketch the Lower Jaw Bone

Using our sketch below as a guide, draw the bottom jaw line (red), making it rounded at the chin. Then, sketch the top part of the lower jaw (blue), just below the top jaw, curving down to the bottom horizontal guideline.

Add the Top and Bottom Teeth

With the skull sketch shape now ready, we can add our upper and lower teeth. Start sketching the upper teeth. Draw rectangles extending halfway down from the upper jaw (seen in red).

Then, sketch the lower teeth extending up from the lower jaw. The upper teeth, especially the center four, should be bigger than the lower teeth.

Step 4 - Create Permanent Outlines of Your Skull

Our skull sketch is now ready to be outlined with a permanent medium. For your outlines, you can use a medium like a pen or a marker, or even a Procreate brush. When outlining the sketch, avoid overlapping sketch lines that you don't want to keep.

When you have outlined your skull, clean up your drawing by removing your sketches. You can keep the skull drawing as an outline or add color. If you don't want to add color or shading, you can skip the next step.

Step 5 - Add Color and Shading to Your Skull

In the final step of our human skull drawing, we are going to add color and shading. Feel free to experiment with your own style of color and shading.

We added a beige base color to the skull and filled the eye sockets and nose with black. Remember to not add color to the corners where top and lower jaws join.

Next, using black and dark grays, we added shading to our entire skull. We focused the shading on the edges of the temples, eye sockets, nose, and teeth. Want to add a textured shading effect in Procreate? We have a great selection of Procreate texture brushes you can use.

Here is the final result of our scary clipart.

Just looking at this drawing will give anyone the chills. Great job on learning how to draw this super awesome skull! Create some atmosphere with our tutorial on how to draw a candle for seasonal projects like Halloween. This design would look especially great for Medieval fairs or Heavy Metal concerts.