How to Draw a Snake

Have you ever wanted to draw a snake for your clipart or sublimation projects? They are fantastic creatures with soft, long bodies covered in intricate scales. With more than three thousand species of snakes on the planet, they can be found almost everywhere. In just a few easy steps, we are going to show you how to draw a snake.

You can sketch this design as a cartoon snake, make stickers, illustration for books, for educational purposes or create a very cool t-shirt.

Before we slither into this tutorial, gather your drawing supplies together. This can be any medium you have on hand, such as pencils, crayons, Procreate, or Affinity. During the tutorial we will be sketching with Procreate and these ink Procreate brushes.

Step 1 - Create the Base Shape of the Snake

In the first step, we are going to create rough sketches with basic shapes for our snake. You will want to use a medium that is easy to remove, hide or light in color. A pencil is a good example.

Sketch the Head and Body Guides

Roughly sketch a horizontal oval shape for the head and angle the shape slightly upwards on the right side. On the left side, narrow the end a little bit for the nose. Then, on the bottom right side of the head, draw a curved line for the body. Create an inward curve towards the end of the line.

You can follow our example below, or change the position of the body. We will use the oval and line as our guides when adding definitions.

Define the Snake's Head and Body

With our guides in place, let's give the body and head more definition. As you can see from the example below, we added subtle edges around the area for the nose and mouth. A curve was also added for the eye structure at the top of the oval.

Next, define the body shape. Sketch a line for the top part of the body, following the curve of the head and the body guideline. We highlighted this in red to make it easier to follow.

Then, complete the body shape by sketching another line below your guide. Make sure your snake's body is wider by the head and narrower by the tail.

Sketch the Face of the Snake

Lastly, we are going to sketch the features. Using our sketch below as a reference, sketch the mouth close to the bottom of the head. For the nostrils sketch two ovals to the front of the head just above the mouth.

Above the mouth, close to the back of the head, sketch a horizontal teardrop shape pointing forward for the eye.

Step 2 - Outline your Rough Snake Sketch

We have completed our rough sketches for our snake, and we can now outline the design. Change over to a dark or defining medium like a pen or marker to draw the outlines of your snake.

Define the Outer Sketch Lines

We are going to first outline the outermost sketch lines. This way we can see what areas are overlapping and know what areas we want to keep.

Complete the Outline of Your Snake

Next, draw the inner lines of your snake’s body with your permanent medium. Pay close attention to overlapping sketches, as some of these lines should not be included. See our example image below.

Then, outline the face details on the head, adding an extra curve at the bottom of the head for the jaw.

Once you are done with the outline, you no longer need the rough sketches and can remove them.

Step 3 - Create the Pattern of the Snake

With the main shape of our snake outlined, we are going to use the sketching medium from Step 1 to create the pattern on the body.

Looking at our example below, sketch a dividing line to define the top and bottom areas of the body. Start with the left eye structure and create a curve. Then carry on to draw lines for the entire body, connecting to areas of the shape as seen in the image below.

With your permanent medium, outline the divider that you just sketched. In the next step, we will be adding texture to the scales including our chosen colors.

Step 4 - Add Color to your Snake

Snakes come in many colors and patterns, so feel free to get creative here. We used dark purple for the belly and bright purple for the top. Then, for our scale pattern texture, we used this Procreate texture brush from the Plus Hub to make our snake look scaly all over.

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We are almost done drawing our snake! To create dimension, you can add further shading to the belly. Highlights were added with a white liner brush.

We added the white lines to the eye, nostrils, head, and top areas of the body. Remember to follow the curve of the body when adding these highlights.

You did a sssplended job of drawing your very own snake! Create stickers for educational tools, shirts for animal lovers and tons of other crafty ideas. We hope this tutorial has inspired you to draw more and create all kinds of creatures.