How to Draw a Simple Lizard

The key part of drawing a lizard is getting the body right and saving room for the head. Draw a simple lizard and add scales with tips from an illustrator in this free video on drawing, illustrations and cartoons.

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Video transcription

Joel Hickerson from Grin Dog.com. We're going to draw a very simple lizard. All right. So, our lizard is longer than it is tall, so we're going to turn our sketch book to the side, horizontally. And then we're going to start with the main element of our lizard, which is the body. Now if we draw our body too far to one side or the other, we won't have room for the head, which is also going to be an ellipse, or the the tail, which is going to be more of a half arcing circle. Lizards have four legs, two at the back, and two at the front. It has two eyes, usually they're big. Better to see you with. And this is a happy lizard, so we'll give it a big smile. Two nostrils. Ellipse for feet. We can thicken our legs up a little bit. All right. And maybe even some eyebrows to go over the eyes. All right? Now these are construction lines. What we've just done with the pencil is add our...just to do construction lines. So now, we're going to come back with our marker, and pick just the lines that we want, and draw it....draw our finished piece of art. Okay. There's the eyes. Eyebrow. We draw the eyes under the eyebrow. This one's turning out to look a little more like a gecko. Maybe even want to give it a little bit of a....what's called a wattle underneath the chin. A body. Follow the tail around. Now as we go over the legs, we want to put the front leg behind the body, so we cross the body in front of the leg. Front....the second leg'll be in front, so that crosses in front of the body. Leg in front of the body. We follow back. The third will be behind the body, so we'll cross over that. Okay. Now we go back with our eraser, and we erase these construction lines. And if we've done this right, we've drawn very loosely and very lightly, these lines will disappear very quickly. And we can go back and enhance our really basic shape that we've come up with. Maybe do some things to it to make it look a little more like a lizard. Might open it's mouth a little more, give it more lip. Might give it some lizard spots. Even scales on the belly. Okay. Give it a little gravity, or a little thicker line at the bottom to give it a little bit of weight, to weigh it down onto your paper. Make some ground. And that's how you draw a simple lizard.