How to Draw a Seal

From basic sketch shapes to adding color and shading, you will learn how to draw a seal today. Seals are cute and cheeky marine mammals with flippers and blubbery bodies. If you love sea life, this animal clipart drawing exercise is a great way to add more to your sketching skills. Use across various projects like illustrations, parties, promotions, t-shirts, stickers and more.

Before you begin, it's a good idea to first gather together the drawing supplies you need. You can use any traditional or digital medium you have on hand to create your drawing. For this tutorial, we are using Procreate. If you are following along with the same app, we are also using these Procreate ink brushes to outline and add color.

To blend your colors, you can choose between an awesome selection of Procreate blending brushes.

Don't forget, Design Bundles also offers FREE Procreate Brushes that you can download today for your other project ideas.

Step 1 - Create the Rough Sketch of the Seal

We are going to sketch the base shape first. You can use any medium for your rough sketches, like a pencil, that can be removed when you are done outlining.

Sketch the Head and Body

To begin our seal base shape, we need to draw two oval shapes for the head and body. Roughly sketch a large vertical oval (shown as red) that is leaning towards the right for the body. Then, at the top right of the body, leave a gap and sketch a smaller horizontal oval for the head (shown in blue).

Fill Out the Body Shape

Next, we need to fill out the seal's body shape to add some definition. Begin by connecting the two oval shapes to make the neck of your seal. At the bottom right of the body, sketch a triangular shape for the tail end. See our sketch below.

Step 2 - Add Definition to Your Seal Base Shape

With the base shape set up, we can continue by drawing in the flippers, the mouth, and defining the body a little more.

Sketch the Flippers and Mouth

We are going to first sketch the mouth part. You can use our sketch below to follow along.

On the right side of the head, sketch a bump that is flatter at the top and more rounded at the bottom for the mouth. Then, on the body, sketch the two front flippers shaped like boomerangs. At the end of your triangle, draw the hind flipper. Each area sketched-in was added as a red line below.

Define the Body Shape

For our final sketches, we are going to define the shape of the body. Mimicking our image below, follow the body sketch lines, joining the back and chest as a single shape. For the front flippers, extend the lines higher up onto the body.

Add any final details that you feel your drawing needs, such as crease lines by the leg, body, or tail.

Step 3 - Outline the Seal Rough Sketch

With the rough sketches of our drawing done, the next step is to outline. You can use any defining or permanent medium, like a pen, or marker to outline your sketch.

Outline the Whole Seal Body

Begin outlining the whole body of your seal. Only outline the sketches you want to keep, leaving out shapes like the oval and some overlapping lines that are not needed. Once you have outlined the rough sketches of your seal, you can remove them.

Outline the Face of the Seal

Now that the seal outline is ready, let's add the facial features. In our sketch below, you can see that we added a nose to the bump above the seal's mouth. Just below that, we drew in the mouth lines.

Then, at the top center of the head, draw the eye with a line close to the top edge as the brow bone. You can also draw an ear flap or hole on the left side of the head.

Complete the outline by adding creases or fold lines. These can be between the two front flippers, around the eye, mouth, or tail.

Add the whiskers extending out from the mouth of the seal.

Step 4 - Add Color to Your Seal

We are almost done with our seal drawing. It's time to add some color and use a blending brush to create highlights and shadows on our design.

A seal comes in a variety of brown and gray shades, so you can color your seal any way you want to. For our design, we used three shades of brown and two shades of gray.

Layer your colors by using shades of brown on the chest, head, and parts of the flippers. We then used our grays for shadowing on the bottom, back, rest of the flippers and tail.

Soften the highlights and shadows by blending your colors. One way to blend is to use the Smudge tool in Procreate. Add two white dots on the eye and a white stripe on the nose of our seal. There we go, we are all done with our seal illustration.

You did an ex-seal-lent job drawing your very own seal! Why not draw more sea life clipart with our tutorial on how to draw a dolphin? We hope you had fun learning how to draw a seal and can use these techniques in your future projects.