How to Draw a Dolphin - Easy Cartoon Dolphin for Kids

Difficulty: Easy
About 20 minutes
10 steps

Save keeps your ticked steps. We email you a link, no password.

A cartoon dolphin is one of the friendliest animals you can draw, and it only takes a handful of curves. Rob from Art for Kids Hub draws this one with his daughter Hadley, side by side, so you get two versions to follow. They draw in black marker and color with a single aqua pencil. The finished dolphin is leaping out of the water with a big shiny eye and a little smile.

How to draw a dolphin: the short version

Draw a big round eye with two white highlights.
Arch the forehead over the eye and down the back.
Add a sideways U for the nose.
Draw the chin and two flippers.
Run the belly line down toward the tail.
Add the tail flukes, the dorsal fin, a blow hole and a smile.
Color it in.

Start with the eye, not the body

Most dolphin drawings start with the body outline and end up with a tiny eye squeezed in at the end. Starting with the eye flips that. You place the eye first, kind of big, and the whole head grows around it. That big eye is what makes it cartoon cute. Leave the two highlight circles white when you fill it in. They make the eye look wet and shiny.

The curve that makes it a dolphin

Dolphins have a rounded forehead called a melon, and that bump is what separates a dolphin from a shark or a fish. Hadley hears it as "four heads", which gets a good laugh in the video. Draw the forehead high and round, then let the line keep going down the back in one long sweep. Put the nose in front of it as a short sideways U, lower than the forehead.

Make it look like it is jumping

The body bends in a gentle arc, head up and tail tucked under, like a dolphin leaping out of a wave. The belly line is the trick. It starts under the nose, disappears behind the flippers and comes back out lower down. Imagine it passing behind the flippers so the two ends line up. That one overlap makes the drawing look 3D.

Coloring ideas

Rob and Hadley use one light aqua Prismacolor pencil and leave the belly white. Hadley adds a little shading along her dolphin's belly for depth. Crayons, markers or oil pastels work too. Real bottlenose dolphins are blue-gray, but Hadley's vote was pink and purple, and nobody is going to argue with her. Add some wavy water lines and a few splashes under the tail to finish the scene.

Drawing it together

This is a good one to draw next to a child. Each person gets a sheet, you draw one step at a time, and you compare as you go. Pause the video whenever someone falls behind. Hadley added eyelashes and turned hers into a girl dolphin halfway through, and that is the point. As Rob says at the end, it does not have to look like theirs. Have fun with it.

Common problems

It looks like a bird. The nose is too pointy. Round it into a U.
The body is too short. Stretch the back line further down before the tail.
The tail looks flat. Make each fluke an S-curve that dips down and comes back up.

More ocean animals to draw

Stay in the water with a shark, a sea turtle or a fish. For the background, learn how to draw waves.

Quick answer

Learn how to draw a dolphin in 10 easy steps. An easy project: about 20 minutes. You need 3 things, including plain white paper, black permanent marker and colored pencils. The 10 steps start with draw the Dolphin's Big Cartoon Eye, draw the Dolphin's Rounded Forehead and Back, add the Dolphin's Nose With a Sideways U, draw the Dolphin's Chin and First Flipper, add a Second Flipper to the Dolphin, draw the Dolphin's Belly Line and draw the Dolphin's Tail Flukes.

What's next