How to draw a gingerbread man: base sketch
Step 1: Draw the gingerbread man's base body shapes
Let’s start our gingerbread man drawing with the usual simple base shapes for the body.
Draw the head as a simple circle. Then draw two “U” shaped arms sticking out, one on each side, just under the head. (No, gingerbread men do not have necks.)
Then draw two lines down like a nice skirt. Those will mark the outer edges of the body and legs – we will finish those off next.
Step 2: Draw the gingerbread man's legs and feet
Draw another upside-down “V” to mark the width for the inner legs. Try to make the legs the same width as the arms (adjust the outer lines you drew in the previous step if needed).
Then draw nice rounded feet to close the legs – these are again simple “U” shapes, just tilted a bit more out, that transition smoothly to the leg.
Step 3: Draw the gingerbread man's eyes and buttons
Next, let’s start decorating the gingerbread man.
For the real gingerbread cookie, you would use something like round M&Ms for the eyes and the buttons. Draw those in as simple circles – two for the eyes on the face and two more for the buttons on the gingerbread man’s belly.
Step 4: Draw the decorations on the gingerbread man
The rest of the line decorations for the real gingerbread man cookie would be done using white icing. Let’s draw the “white icing” lines now.
Start by drawing the mouth – just a nice smiley open “C”. Now, since the icing is thick, we want to double up on the mouth line and close the shape with nice rounded ends.
Then draw the decorations on the arms and legs, just about where the wrist and ankles would be. Here we are doing simple wavy lines, again doubled-up to show the thick icing line.
How to draw a gingerbread man: outline drawing
Step 1: Draw the gingerbread man cookie outline
By now you pretty much know how to draw a gingerbread man. All that is left is to outline the completed shape of the gingerbread man cookie – draw out the head, arms, body and legs with a single thick line.
Step 2: Draw the gingerbread man decorations
Another easy step – just outline all the decorations straight from the sketch – the eyes, buttons and the wiggly icing lines on the arms and legs.
How to draw a gingerbread man: finished drawing
How to draw a gingerbread man: finished outline drawing
Finally, erase the sketch lines.
And here is the finished gingerbread man drawing in one colour – indeed a cute and friendly gingerbread man with a nice smile and traditional decorations.
How to draw a gingerbread man: finished drawing coloured-in
And here is the final coloured-in picture to complete our “How to draw a gingerbread man” tutorial.
The gingerbread man cookie is of course a nice gingerbread brown colour. We are leaving the “icing” decoration lines a simple white. Finally, the M&Ms for the eyes are dark brown, with some bright contrasting colours for the body buttons – here we have red and blue.
Notice also the shading trick that gives the cookie some thickness: There are the narrow white highlights on the top-left edges – either leave those out when you are colouring the body, or add them back in with an eraser pencil. And the dark brown shading on the opposite bottom right edges – just simple dark brown shading.
