How to Draw a Tiger

Nocturnal and the biggest cat in the world, today we are looking at how to draw a tiger. There are many similarities between domestic cats and tigers. But unlike domestic cats, tigers love water and can’t purr. In this tutorial, we will take you step-by-step on how to easily draw a tiger, from rough sketching to adding color.

Before you start drawing, get all of your supplies together. You can use any medium you have on hand, like colored pencils, markers, Procreate, or Photoshop.

We are going to use Procreate. If you are too, you can use these ink Procreate brushes for your sketches, outlines, and coloring your tiger. Looking for other brushes? We have a great selection of Procreate texture brushes for you to choose from.



Step 1 - Sketch Support Shapes for the Tiger

In the first step of how to draw a tiger, you are going to use an easy-to-remove medium like a pencil. A rough sketch of basic shapes will plan out how your tiger will look.

Sketch Head and Body Shapes

Start by sketching a circle for the head. Add a horizontal and vertical guideline through the center of it. Next to the head sketch a bean shape for the body that is double the width of the head.

Then, at the bottom of the body, sketch the front and back legs. You can refer to our image below for a visual reference.

Add Tiger’s Tail and Ears

Sketch the ears on either side of the head and place them above the horizontal guideline. Next, sketch the tiger’s tail on the rear of the body.

Sketch in the Eyes, Snout and Paws

Using our example image below, sketch two ovals for the eyes in the center of the head. Place these above the horizontal guideline. Then, sketch a bigger circle for the snout in the center of the vertical guideline. Draw this at the bottom of the head.

Lastly, sketch four ovals, two big and two small. Draw these on the bottom of rough leg shapes. The two big ovals are for the front legs and the smaller ovals for the back legs. These ovals will be the paws of our tiger.

Step 2 - Define your Rough Tiger Sketch

The sketch with basic shapes is now finished. This will help with adding details and defining the shape of your tiger as well as combining shapes.

Starting on the head, begin defining your tiger's face. The details will include the eye shapes, nose, and mouth. Looking at our example below, we kept our snout (nose/mouth) very minimal. We will add more details in the outlining step.

The eyes were slightly shaped on the corners to look more cat like. A heart shape was added for the nose with a line leading to the mouth. We also add a slight curve halfway on the snout.

Next, start sketching around your basic shapes. Begin by adding fur inside the ears and on the side of the tiger's head. You can draw the fur however you choose or use our image below for reference.

Lastly, combine the legs and paws. We curved the legs a bit and combined these with the paws. For a visual guide, have a look at our image below.

Step 3 - Outline the Tiger Sketch

For this step, switch to a more defined medium like a marker or pen to clean up your sketch. Start outlining the tiger sketch then add more details to the eyes and snout.

When outlining, keep the sketch lines in mind. There are some areas where your sketch will overlap, such as the legs, body, and paws. These are the areas that you don’t want to outline.

Once you are done outlining, go ahead and remove the rough sketches of your tiger.

Step 4 - Add Color to your Tiger Drawing

For the final step in how to draw a tiger, we are going to add color to our drawing.

Start by adding some red to the nose, black for the pupils with green on the edge. Then, fill in parts of the tiger’s head and body with orange. A similar jagged edge was used to match the head design.

The inner ears, snout, chest, part of the eyes, sides of the head and paws were left as white. For the paws, we shaded the area instead of using a solid line.

Lastly, we added a light shading of green around the edge of the pupils. Use a light gray to shade the white areas. Think of these areas as where you would expect some shadow to be such as inner ears, belly etc.

You can add as much or as little shading on your tiger, playing with textures, colors, and depth.

Add the half stripes on the back and belly of your tiger with only one side of the legs getting stripes. Complete with more stripes on the tail with a black tip. We also added some lines on top of the head. Make the lines slightly uneven to create some character.

Feel free to add more elements or create a background scene for your tiger. Just have fun!

That's it, we are all done. Now that you know how to draw a super cute tiger, why not add it to a t-shirt or a card project? There are so many creative ideas that this little guy can be applied to. We hope that you enjoyed this tutorial as much as we did.