How To Draw A Koala

Hi, I'm Laura from Creative Drawing Studio in London. We offer drawing art classes for children and adults. In our ten years of teaching we have seen that drawing is a skill that anyone can learn.

Let's draw a koala, and let's draw the koala in a tree. We're going to start with the nose, which is a curvy line coming about this big on your paper, and right below it we're going to draw two "squashy" circles for the nostril. Next to it we'll start the eye, so this eye over here, we'll draw a dot colored in, leave a highlight, with a circle around it, it's touching this part of the nose.

This one's just over a little bit because of our angle, and you can draw a circle around this dot. Now we'll draw the side of the face coming from this little mouth section, right up to about here, and we'll draw the other side of the face which comes out a bit more, like that. We'll place the ear in, which they have nice big fluffy ears, so lets go up and lets make sure we have enough room for the head by measuring the bottom and at least doubling the size.

Should be about half way down, and put in a light shape for the koala ear, like that. Then we'll draw a section for the other ear, which you'll see later is very furry, like that, lightly pencil in those ears. Now I can draw in the inside of the ear here, and some of the inside of the ear here, and now I can darken the lines once I feel more confident.

If you use little dashes it looks like furry ears. Next we'll draw this ring under the face, which is a white section of the fur of the neck, it's like a little bib almost, drag it around, about this shape, and placing in one arm under that, right under this bib section, we'll do that by adding a curvy line which almost touches it and raises up for a thumb, and then we'll come down straight for now because we'll add a tree for that section in a minute. Now we'll come back to this bib, this white section, come back and down with the curvy line for the other part of the arm, like that.

We'll put in a simplified version of the paw, like this, and just give it three sections. Now is time for me to put in some of the tree. So from this thumb where I had the straight line we could start to add a bit of our tree, and we can jump over to the other side and add some more tree here.

Before we finish the tree, we can come back and draw the back of the body by going to the elbow and adding another section of the body and this leg will have a section coming down here, almost to the tree, and then underneath, touching the tree. Now we can place, we need to erase the tree right under it, so we can place this paw right on the tree, right overlapping, with three toes. This is the point now where we can jump over and finish the edge of our tree.

There's a bit of arm behind the other side of the tree, so if we go to the end of our paw here and add some more of our tree in the back we can have this arm coming in from the other side, first by showing some of the long claws, adding another side of the tree and coming over with the knuckles. Add some leaves, put some of the tree behind them, and there you have your koala.