Here is another popular animal drawing just in time to add to your Halloween drawings collection. Today we will learn a simple and easy way how to draw a bat. Since we are using only a few simple shapes, this one ends up as a pretty cartoony looking animal. To enhance that look, we gave our bat big googly eyes and really long ears.
Start the bat drawing with a rounded triangle head. The top corner is rounded off just slightly, while the left cheek is much rounder. Leave the bottom right corner sharp for the time being.
Then draw a bean-shaped body under your head.
Finally, mark two large ears on the top of the head. These are made from two curves meeting at the point. Now different bat species have different sized ears, so feel free to draw your bat's ears as long or short as you like. We are going for an exaggerated, funny, cartoon look here - hence the very long ears.
Next, draw the bat's face. Since we are drawing a cartoon bat, we have used two large ovals for the eyes. Draw one small upside-down arc for the nose and another one, wider and flatter, for the smiling mouth.
Then add two skinny legs, one on each side at the bottom of the body. These are again drawn very simply from two parallel curved lines.
Woohoo, finally a step where our drawing stops looking like Piglet from Winnie the Pooh and becomes a bat.
The bat's wing is made from a leather membrane that hangs between the bat's arms and long fingers. Here we are drawing a simplified skeleton for the wings. Draw two arcs going up from the shoulder, one on each side of the body - these are the very simple arms. Then draw three long fingers - again just simple curves - fanned out and going down from each arm's end.
Now a real bat would have four fingers, but the first two are so close together that in our simplified drawing, we can get away with just three.
Finish the bat's wing by drawing a series of arcs for the lower edge of the wing. Join the fingers one to another, and also draw an arc to join the inner fingers to the bat's legs. Finally, add a small flying tail wing between the legs.
And while you are all pumped up on drawing those smooth arcs, add two more curves to mark the fold in ears as well.
That is enough for sketching, let's outline and improve our bat next.
Let's start outlining the bat from the head. The head shape remains the same as the sketch, except that we have lightly rounded off the last corner as well. The ears, eyes, nose and mouth are directly outlined from the sketch.
Then add two dots into the eyes for the pupils. Add two more small dots to the nose for the nostrils. And finally, bats have these lovely vampire teeth - so draw those as simple triangles, two longer ones for the fangs and two smaller in between.
Next, outline the bat's body and legs. Again, these are a direct copy of the sketch - just notice the small gap left out in the body line on the top of the right leg.
Then outline the outer edges of the wings. Here we are adding a small "hook" at the top wing tip - this is actually a very simplified representation of the bat's thumb.
Here comes another improvement on the simple sketch: double up the lines for the bat's fingers and arms, to give them some thickness.
Next, follow the sketch to finish the bat's wing with those lovely folds.
The final touches are adding the claws on the feet - just a few short lines - and some texture lines onto the bat's ears.
Here is the completed bat drawing, after we have cleaned up the sketch lines with an eraser. Now, this was a fairly simple way how to draw a bat, what do you think? And this one turned out to be quite a cute if a bit confused cartoony fellow. If you would like your bat to look less ditzy, just put those two dots in the eyes a bit further apart.
Our usual final step is to colour in the drawing. Our bat has nice brown fur and dark black wings as he soars through the dark blue night sky, full of stars. Do you remember how to draw a star and the trick we had for drawing many of them fast?
