Drawing a Cartoon Giraffe

Artist Danny Green demonstrates step by step how to draw a giraffe.

Hi, I’m Danny Green, I’m a cartoonist and an illustrator and an instructor here at the Guilded Page at Santa Fe, New Mexico. And we are in their classroom here and today we’re gonna learn to draw a cartoon giraffe. And giraffes are fun animals to draw. I’ll draw a few shapes for the little antlers, little round, almost like mushroom kinda shapes. Then draw the long, long neck going down. And then we’ll draw the chest cavity here and very long legs on him, always big knees, big lumps for the knees here and continuing on to the shin, little hooves there, similar to the horse. Giraffes seem just taper on down at the back, very small, draw little tail, little small tail in him, not quite the lion’s tail that we have. We draw a smaller tail. The little sway back there and little curve back here, and then back down again for the hind legs. Okay, the spots should be a part about as much as a brick and mortar are apart. Just gather between the spots. Looks like there we are, there’s our basic shape for our cartoon giraffe. And I’ll move on next to adding the ink, we again use a brush pen filled with a water proof ink. Little antlers, little antlers on the animal crack me up, little stumps there, just like a little reindeer type of things. Draw the ears, and the folds of the ears. And add a couple of eyes in there. And going down to the hooves there, lumps for the knees, little predominant than the horse. Then we have our tail, this small tail coming down there, then a little tuff of fur, little tuff of fur at the end of the tail, kinda like the lion, long, long lines for the neck. And there’s our outline for our hard ecline for our cartoon giraffe. Now we gonna go to the next thing, we’ll add some color, gonna use again yellow, we’re gonna put yellow in around here and on through the body here. Just add it where we need it, and on up through there. Now we’re gonna add some brown, and a big blobs of brown too, coz the spots of giraffes, so we’ll apply big blobs of brown here. Brown for the hooves, there we go, there’s our color added there. And now, we’ll take our stump, and we’ll start to smear it around to get it to such a way, get a making sort of a tan around there. And there we are, looks like, yeah, there’s our cartoon giraffe. And please stay for the next video, where our next, we’re gonna do a cartoon monkey.