How to Draw a Reindeer

From basic sketches to outlines and color, today we are taking you through this drawing exercise on how to draw a reindeer. With your reindeer drawing, you can make all types of winter and Christmas clipart crafts. Create unique gifts and décor for you and your family for the festive season.

Before you begin sketching, get your drawing supplies ready. For this exercise, you will need a medium to make sketches, outlines, and add color. Our FREE guides are created for everyone, no matter what level of drawing skills you have.

For our drawing, we will be using Procreate along with these Inking Procreate brushes.

Step 1 - Sketch the Head and Body Base Shape

Using a sketching medium, we are first going to create the base shape of our reindeer. You can use any type of sketching medium that you can erase or cover up when adding color.

Begin your drawing by roughly sketching the head. We drew the head at a downward angle, so we sketched an oval with a narrow bottom, pointing to the right.

Close to the head, sketch a bigger horizontal oval for the body. The body shape is about three times the size of the head.

Step 2 - Sketch the Head Details of your Reindeer

With our base shape sketched, we can begin adding the rest of the details to the head. We are going to add the ears, antlers, eyes, nose, and neck in this step.

Add the Ears and Neck

At the top of your head shape, sketch the ears on the left and right sides. Create the neck of your by drawing straight lines at the bottom of the head towards the body shape.

Add the Antlers and Face Detail

Between the ears, sketch two antlers with a small gap in the middle. You can make your reindeer antlers any shape you want to, or copy our sketch below.

Inside the head shape, close to the ears, add the eyes by drawing circles. As our reindeer’s head is at an angle, the right eye will be less visible. We drew the right eye right up against the right side of the head shape.

At the bottom end of the head shape, create the nose by drawing a circle with nose holes.

Step 3 - Add the Legs and Final Sketches

For our last few sketches, we are going to add the legs, tail, and final details. For your reindeer legs, you can copy what we do or change how your legs are posed.

Add the Back and Front Legs

We are going to sketch the top section of the legs first. Looking at the sketch below, we drew rectangular shapes overlapping each other. The back top legs are angled to the left and the front top legs are to the right.

At the bottom of the top legs, draw narrow long rectangles for the bottom half of the front and back legs. Our bottom back legs are angled to the right. One of our front bottom legs is angled to the left and the other one is straight down.

Add the Tail and Shape

Looking at our blue sketch lines in the image below, we added shape to the hind leg of our reindeer. Add a curve to the one back leg and a small line by the chest.

Once you have added shape to your reindeer, add the tail at the rear of the reindeer. Lastly, at the bottom of the reindeer legs on the left sides, add a small pointed edge for the hoof detail.

Step 4 - Outline the Sketch of your Reindeer

In this step, we are going to use a defining medium to create permanent outlines of our reindeer. We will outline our rough sketches in steps to make sure we line the correct sketch lines. Some of the overlapping sketch lines we don't want to make permanent.

Start outlining the ears, head, body, and legs of your reindeer, making it a solid shape. We then added a jawline at the bottom of the head shape, and jagged edges on the chest for hair. Continue outlining your sketches, like the eyes, nose, and tail.

We added more jagged hairlines to the reindeer's tail and made a furry chest section. At the bottom of the reindeer, legs draw lines to create the hooves.

Then, outline the antlers and create a curved line inside the ears. Finally, add two lines in the center of the reindeer's face as we did in our image below. Then, add some extra jagged lines to the chest and tail.

When you are done outlining and adding the hair details, remove your rough sketches.

Step 5 - Add Color to your Reindeer Drawing

For our final step we are going to add some color to our reindeer drawing. For your reindeer, use different shades of brown. We recommend at least three shades of brown to add some depth to your drawing.

For our reindeer, we added our brown shades to different areas and added contrast to the belly, face, and ears. Feel free to add texture using Procreate texture brushes for shading and blending your colors.

This little reindeer is now ready for the holiday season. Festive stickers, cards to celebrate Christmas, sublimated gift bags, and so much more. Well done on doing a fantastic job and drawing this loveable creature.

We hope that you can take what you have learned today and create even more amazing clipart for your projects.