How To Draw Insects - Bee

Hi, I'm Simbie Yau. I'm an illustrator, graduated from the University of Lincoln. Today I'm just going to be showing you how to draw objects.

This is how you draw a bee. How I'm going to start is by using a pencil and drawing a simple circle in the centre first. This is a rough guideline to where I'm going to start and then just a semi-circle attaching the circle and then I'm going to be drawing just a simple kind of leaf point at the end.

And this is just the bottom, the third abdomen of the bee. So that would be the head, the body and the tail. And then the eyes and now I'll just be drawing the antennae, just keeping it quite symmetrical.

And then I'll just quickly rough out the wings. Generally, you just keep it at an angle so you just pretend that you are drawing a point from the centre and downwards like this. Like an A shape, that'll be where your wings would be, so I'll draw a third in of the circle and meet the wings round so, that kind of shape.

And then you do the same on the other side. Just curving the wings, that's it. Then I'm just going to mark out where the legs are going to be.

And the first set of legs will be somewhere near the head and then the second would be somewhere near the body. This is going behind the wings, so you won't be able to see very much of it but just marking them out. And then the third set will just essentially be from there, but you won't be seeing it from the wings so you just imagine that there is a leg coming from there and it will stick out here.

So they're coming out here, like this. And then draw the leg straight from the head like this. Keep it quite even and then angle the feet outward like this.

Now I'll do the same for the second set of legs, angle the feet. And that will be the rough guideline of your bee. So I'm going to draw the wings first.

Let me use a slightly thicker pen and just use those pencil lines using a thinner pen, I'll mark out the eyes. I'm just going to cross hatch the eyes. I'll just draw out the antennae.

Essentially if you want to draw a fly, this would be the rough guideline of a fly and you can make these antennae a little bit smaller but this would be essentially a fly. The characteristics of a bee would be to make it a little bit more fairy so I'd just add a little bit more detail and then this would be darker so I'll just add a more shading. Just flicking the pen or using the side of the pen.

Then I'll just continue the legs, just creating little curves at the end of the feet to show off the little feet marks. I'm going to go back to using a pencil and we are just going to map out how to draw the veins within the wings. Sometimes it's quite easy to look at the reference of a bee's wing.

I would simply just start a line until about half way of the wing and draw a line in-between the edge of the wing and then adding the veins. It's still a little bit creative about it. I would just, exactly like a tree, just let the veins just branch out.

Then I'd do the same for the other side. And using a thin pen, I'd draw this out. And that's how you draw a bee. .