How To Draw Cartoon Elephant

Drawing a cartoon elephant might seem a little difficult because elephant itself is a unique animal. Has a unique body and does not resemble to anything in animal’s kingdom of its size.

On the other hand, to roughly outline elephant’s body is not very difficult if you know the simple recipe. Even drawing a real elephant is not complicated at all if you understand few simple techniques.

Other cartoon characters like cartoon hamster or cartoon rabbit just to name a few, have many common features. Cute cartoon characters have many common features, resemblances. You can virtually copy and apply the same or similar pattern on many. But elephant is different, and that may cause some difficulties when you attempt to draw one.

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Here I show you how to draw a walking circus elephant. Its pose is not as common as you may expect but I hope you will like it. It is only a cartoon :)

Let's Draw Cartoon Elephant

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Draw two circles as you see on this picture. Notice how the upper circle is slightly on the side. Upper circle is the head and the lower circle is the body - or shall we say the belly of your elephant.

I would like you to draw these circles in similar size and position in order to accurately capture the elephant’s size. Notice the pencil lines, how rough they are.

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Join the head and the belly by drawing two slightly curved lines. Outline approximately the silhouettes of the trunk as you see on the picture.

Notice how this walking elephant is keeping the trunk happily lifted up.

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Add two hands and two legs…haha…I know it sounds funny because elephants don’t have hands :) But since this one a special walking cartoon elephant - let’s just call it hands and legs.

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Now, we have to make slight corrections on the trunk. Observe how the trunk is ended on elephant’s face. Draw it as you see on the picture and at the same time you can draw the mouth too. Add the tail.

Add ears and the eye line. This elephant is happily smiling so the eye line is only a symbolic. Although elephant ears are supposed to be much larger, but this is a cartoon, so we can literally adjust anything as necessary.

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You can begin gradually erase the initial guidelines as necessary. Draw the outlines of elephant’s dress. Observe this picture and try to do it as on this picture, or better. Add the hat. Use pencil-type-eraser if necessary for erasing narrow spaces or fine lines.

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As you erase pencil guidelines and unnecessary cluster and you’ll soon notice how your elephant starts to emerge. Its shape becomes more obvious and clear. Gradually replace the initial guidelines by clear and distinct contours.

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When you have erased all initial pencil guidelines, you can now outline clear contours of the entire body. Your cartoon elephant is now a ready coloring page.

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Here you have two options: to color the elephant only by graphite pencil or by color pencils. Both are OK, do what fits best for you. I used colored pencils