How to Draw a Parrot

Create a beautiful and colorful parrot that will amaze your friends with our how to draw a parrot tutorial. Parrots are known for their vibrant feathers, unique beaks, and playful personalities, making them a popular subject for drawings. Easily apply your bird illustration to your crafts, such as designing mail stickers or tropical clipart, or print and frame it to give away as a gift.

Take flight with our other fun drawing guides to create a bird clipart collection. You can learn to draw a flamingo or make a cute bat drawing.

Before starting the steps, you need to gather your supplies. For this parrot drawing tutorial, you will need a sketching medium such as a pencil, lining tool, paint, or something similar to apply color.

Step 1 - Sketch the Parrot Base Shape

In this first step, we will create and roughly sketch the base shape of our parrot. So get your sketching medium and drawing area ready.

Head and Body

Sketch two ovals to shape the head and body of your parrot. These ovals should be at an angle and below each other. The top oval shape should be smaller, with the bottom significantly larger.

Wing Shape

Draw an elongated teardrop shape that extends further down over the oval body. This will be the base shape for your parrot's wing.

Add Feet

Add the two feet on the bottom side of the body, as we did in our guide image below. A parrot's foot is curved with long nails on the ends of the toes.

Draw a Beak and Eye

Draw the beak and a small circle on the head for the eye. A parrot's beak is curved downward with a hook-like end, almost like the big claw of our crab drawing, but with a smaller bottom section.

Step 2 - Add the Feather Details

Let's add more details to our parrot sketch, such as the feather details on the wings, around the head, and below the body.

Add Feathers

On the wing, draw overlapping curved lines, ranging from short to long, as you go further down the wing. See our red and blue sketch lines in the example provided below. Then, along the bottom edge of the body, add a couple more feather shapes to the wing edge on the other side.

Fill the Space

Around the beak and eye, draw a line as we did in red and add a little bit of shape to the top of the beak. Lastly, add jagged lines for a fluffy appearance around the head and chest of your parrot.

Step 3 - Darken and Define your Sketch

For our third step, you will darken your sketch lines to create defined line art. Pay close attention to the sketch lines and which of them you want to make permanent. Some of the base sketches you will need to skip.

Start your outlines by lining the wing's feathers and fluff lines. Using a monoline Procreate brush for your lines works perfectly when you need even lines.

Lastly, continue tracing the remaining lines for the head, other feathers, and feet. You can erase the remaining sketches when you are done tracing and adding any extra details to your drawing.

Step 4 - Color your Parrot Outline

With your coloring mediums, it's time to add life to your drawing by applying color. For your colors, you can use any shade under the rainbow or get a pre-made color palette.

We chose two to three shades of red, yellow, blue, gray, and cream. We alternated between our shades on the feathers to create depth and added shows.

Apply unique textures and blending methods to your artwork to make your tropical drawing even more realistic. See our handy tutorial on the four ways to blend color in Procreate.

You have just illustrated your very own parrot! Fantastic work following our drawing exercise, and we hope you enjoyed this FREE drawing tutorial. Why not create different colored parrots or combine them with other tropical clipart?