How to Draw a Cow

Oh what a moo-tiful day to learn how to draw a cow. In just a few steps, we will take you from rough sketches to adding color and decorations to your cow drawing. You can use your drawing to make the sweetest sublimated totes, funny greeting cards, decals, scrapbook paper or farm themed projects.

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With so many creative possibilities, we just know you’ll have loads of fun with this drawing exercise. Before you begin, get your drawing supplies ready. Our drawing tutorials are incredibly flexible and can be used with any art media you have available. This can be watercolor paints, markers, and even digital drawing apps like Procreate.

If you're following along with Procreate, be sure to check out the FREE Procreate Brushes available on Design Bundles.

Step 1 - Sketch the Head of your Cow

For our first step, we are going to roughly sketch the head of our cow using a removable medium like a pencil. Feel free to use a light-colored medium to make your rough sketches. You will want something you can cover up when adding color later on.

Create the Head Shape

Let's being by sketching the center of our cow's head for the face. Sketch a vertical oval shape with a squared bottom. See our sketch below.

Draw the ears on either side of the face shape at the top of the head. The ears curve inward close to the face shape and then round out on the ends.

Sketch the Facial Details of your Cow

Add details to the face, like the eyes and nose. Beginning with the eyes, make a small filled-in circle on either side of the face, close to the ears. Then add dimension by making a short curved line from the top of the eye going toward the nose.

At the bottom of the face shape, draw the nose, with two nostrils on either side as we did in our sketch below.

Step 2 - Sketch the Body of Your Cow

With the head and face sketched, we are going to add the front and back of the body. You can copy our sketches or create a different body pose for your cow. You could even skip this step if you only want to draw the head.

Sketch the Front of the Body

We are going to sketch the chest view of our cow. Below the ears on either side, draw an outward curved line the same length as the face shape, going downward.

Continuing with the line, sketch the two front legs with a gap in the center and make a V shape for the center of the chest. At the bottom of the legs, sketch the hooves with a small gap in the center.

Sketch the Back of the Body

On the right side of our cow’s head and front body, we are going to sketch the belly, rear, back legs, and tail. First sketch a big curved line, from the side of the chest, going to the right and upwards for the belly shape. Next to the right ear, make a short downward curved line for the rear end of the body.

Continue drawing the rear end line downward with a hoof gap, and sketch the line back up towards the belly. This will be one of the back legs of our cow.

Right below the cow’s belly make the other back leg as we did in our sketch below.

Lastly, sketch the tail starting from the top right side of the body. Add a tuft of hair at the end.

Add the Cow Spots

For the last part of our sketch, we are going to make random curvy shapes on our cow's body for the spots. We also added a line at the bottom of the legs to separate the hooves from the legs.

Step 3 - Outline the Rough Sketch of Your Cow

In this step, switch to a defining or permanent medium to create clean outlines of your rough sketch. As you are outlining, pay close attention to which sketch lines you want to make permanent. Begin by outlining the cow’s head, and face details first.

Then, continue outlining your cow’s body and spots. Feel free to add any extra details to your cow. Once you are done outlining, you can go ahead and remove the rough sketches of your cow drawing.

Step 4 - Add Color to Your Cow

With our permanent outlines made, we are going to switch to our coloring medium. For the cow drawing, we used black, white (or cream), brown, and pink. These will be our base colors.

The cow spots were filled with black, pink added to the nose, brown to the hooves and the rest of the body colored in with cream shade.

Finish your cow drawing by adding darker shading and textures. You can also add watercolor clipart to make a flower crown.

Fantastic job on completing your cow drawing! If you enjoyed following this drawing guide, be sure to check out our other easy drawing tutorials. Apply your drawing to crafts or combine them to make your own unique illustration or clipart.