Snake Drawing Easy: 6 Simple Pencil Steps

The one line that makes a snake drawing easy

A snake is easier to draw than almost any other animal because the entire body is a single tube following a single curve. Get that curve right and the drawing is already three quarters solved. Get it wrong and no amount of scale detail will rescue it.

The centreline is the path the snake's spine takes through the pose, drawn as one continuous line from behind the head to the tip of the tail before any outline exists. That is the whole trick, and it is the thing the silent tutorial videos never explain while their hand moves across the page.

Drawing the centreline first, loosely, in one sweep, removes the two failures that sink most beginner snakes. The first is a body that swells and shrinks at random, because without a spine to measure from there is nothing to keep the thickness honest. The second is a head glued on at an angle the neck could never produce, because the head was drawn as a separate shape instead of as the end of a line that was already travelling somewhere.

Everything below is built on that one line.

What you need before you start

You need an HB pencil, a 2B pencil, smooth paper and a kneadable eraser. That is the entire kit for an easy snake drawing, and adding to it at this stage makes the job harder rather than easier.

The two pencils do different work. The HB holds a fine point and lays down a light grey you can still erase cleanly, which is exactly what you want for the centreline and the first contours. The 2B gives you the dark core shadow later without having to press hard, and pressing hard is what burnishes paper into a shiny surface that refuses to take any more graphite.

Paper matters more than most beginners expect. A cheap sketchpad with a toothy surface will fight a long smooth curve, breaking your line into a dotted trail and catching the pencil at exactly the moment you need it to glide. A smooth cartridge paper or a bristol-type sheet lets the centreline come out in one movement, which is the point.

Set aside about forty minutes. Twenty minutes gets you a clean line drawing, and the second twenty is where the shading turns a flat outline into something with volume. If you want to see how the same materials behave over a much longer, more finished study, the full Snake Drawing: Step by Step Scales in Graphite walkthrough takes the same subject into detailed rendering.

One more thing to have ready: a reference photo. Not to copy line for line, but to check where the head widens and how the coils overlap. Snakes do unintuitive things with their own bodies and memory is a poor witness.

How to draw a snake easy: 6 steps

Six steps take you from blank paper to a finished easy snake pencil drawing. Each one has a single action and a single thing to check before you move on.

Step 1. Draw the centreline in one stroke. Start where the head will be, and pull a loose S-curve out across the page in one continuous movement, keeping your wrist relaxed and your pressure light enough that the line is barely grey. Do not lift the pencil. You should see one unbroken curve with no corners in it and no place where the line hesitates; if there is a kink, erase and sweep again rather than patching it.

Step 2. Mark the body thickness at three points. Put a small tick either side of the centreline near the neck, a wider pair about a third of the way back where the body is at its thickest, and a narrow pair two thirds along where the tail begins to taper. You should now have three sets of gate markers of visibly different widths. If all three pairs are the same width, you are about to draw a hosepipe.

Step 3. Draw the two outer contours. Run one line down each side of the centreline, passing through your tick marks and staying parallel to the curve the whole way, so that both contours bend when the centreline bends. Where the body coils over itself, let the contour of the nearer section cut straight across the farther one and keep going. When it works, the coil reads as one body passing in front of another, not as two separate snakes touching.

Step 4. Build the head as a soft wedge. From the neck, draw a rounded triangle that widens slightly behind the eyes and comes to a blunt, slightly flattened snout. The wedge should feel like a continuation of the neck rather than a ball sitting on top of it. If you can trace an unbroken line from the top of the skull down the back without a step or a dent, the join is right.

Step 5. Place the eye, nostril and mouth line. The eye goes high on the head and well forward, roughly in the front third of the wedge, with the nostril further forward still and close to the top of the snout. The mouth line runs from just under the front of the snout straight back past and below the eye, ending near the widest point of the head. You should be able to see that the eye sits above the mouth line, never on it.

Step 6. Commit to the overlaps and clean up. Go back over the contours of the sections that pass in front, pressing slightly harder there and lifting pressure on the contours behind them, then lift out the centreline with the kneadable eraser. The finished line drawing should have a clear front-to-back order in the coils and no visible guide line left. If the coils suddenly look flatter once the centreline is gone, your overlaps were not committed to, and Step 3 needs another pass.

Snake head drawing easy: the wedge, not the circle

Beginners draw a round head because circles are easy, and a circle is what turns a realistic snake into a cartoon by accident. No snake has a spherical skull. The head is a flattened, rounded triangle, widest behind the eyes where the jaw muscles sit, narrowing to a snout that is blunt or slightly upturned depending on the species.

The eye position does more work than the head shape itself. Set high on the skull and forward toward the snout, it produces the low, level, watchful look that reads as a snake. Drop the eye into the middle of the head, as you would on a mammal, and the whole animal turns friendly.

The jaw line should run almost straight back from the snout rather than curving downward. That straight run is what gives the head its characteristic wedge in profile, and it is also where you place the faint corner of the mouth that suggests the animal could open very wide if it chose to.

Selling the pose with head angle

Head angle carries the mood of the drawing more cheaply than anything else you can do. Turn the head slightly toward the viewer, so you see a sliver of the far side of the snout, and the snake reads as alert and aware of you. Keep the head in line with the body, looking along its own direction of travel, and it reads as calm and unbothered.

A tongue flick is the cheapest movement you can add. A thin forked line leaving the front of the snout, drawn with a light touch so it does not compete with the head, gives the animal something to be doing.

Easy cute snake drawing versus a realistic one

Cute and realistic snakes start from exactly the same centreline. They part company at the point where you decide what line weight, eye shape and tone are going to do, which is why the method above serves either.

| Choice | Easy cute snake | Realistic graphite snake | |---|---|---| | Line weight | Even throughout, one pressure | Varied, heavy on near contours, light on far ones | | Eye | Large, round, high highlight | Slit or round pupil set in a scaled socket | | Scales | Left out entirely | Banded rows, selectively rendered | | Shading | Flat tone or none | Three values plus reflected light | | Head proportion | Larger relative to body, shorter snout | True to species, longer wedge |

Neither is a lesser drawing. A cute snake with confident, even line weight is a piece of design and stands or falls on the quality of its curves, which is why the centreline still matters. A realistic snake asks you to keep going for another hour.

If you want an appealing snake to draw, species choice does most of the charm for you. Hognose snakes have an upturned, shovel-like snout that reads as inquisitive. Rosy boas have blunt heads and comparatively large eyes. Green tree pythons coil into neat stacked loops with a squarish head that looks almost designed. In each case the appeal comes from snout shape and eye size, not from anything you have to invent.

Scales without drawing every scale

The shortcut that makes an easy snake pencil drawing look finished is to treat scales as rows crossing the body, not as individual diamonds to be counted. Draw three or four rows fully where the light falls hardest, then let the rest dissolve into tone.

Think of the rows as ribs travelling around the tube. Each row curves across the body, tightening and compressing where the body turns away from you and opening out where it faces you. Get that curvature right in a small patch and the eye accepts the whole snake as scaled, because the brain fills in the pattern it has been shown the logic of.

Rendering every scale at full strength does the opposite of what beginners expect. Uniform detail across the whole body gives every area equal importance, and a drawing where everything is equally important reads as flat wallpaper. Detail has to fall away into the shadow side for the form to turn.

That principle carries across reptiles generally. The heavily textured skin in the Komodo Dragon Drawing: Step by Step in Graphite study is built the same way, with a small region of fully described scale structure surrounded by suggestion, and you can see a range of finished reptile work in David's reptiles and other studies gallery.

Three values and the body becomes round

The shading step almost every easy snake tutorial skips is the one that does the most work. Three tonal values placed in bands along the body turn a flat outline into a tube, and they take about ten minutes.

Work from the top down. Leave a light band along the upper surface where the light strikes, roll a mid tone down the side below it, then lay a dark core shadow as a narrow band just above the lower contour using the 2B. Finally, leave or lift a thin strip of lighter tone at the very bottom edge for reflected light bouncing up off the ground.

That dark core shadow, not the outline, is what creates the tube. An outline tells the eye where the body stops; a core shadow tells the eye that the body curves away and comes back. If your snake still looks like a ribbon after shading, the core shadow is either too wide or sitting right on the bottom edge with no reflected light below it.

Anchor the animal with a cast shadow. A soft dark pool directly under each coil, darkest where the body touches the ground and fading outward, stops the snake from floating. The contact points are the darkest values in the entire drawing, darker than the core shadow, and that contrast is what puts the animal on a surface.

Five common mistakes and the fix for each

Almost every easy snake drawing fails in one of five places. Each of these can be corrected on the drawing already in front of you.

• The sausage with equal width throughout. Go back to your three thickness markers and widen the middle third, then re-draw the contour there. A snake is thickest around a third of the way back, not at the neck.

• The coil that reads as a flat ribbon. You did not commit to the overlaps. Darken the contour of the section passing in front and lighten the one behind it, then add a soft shadow on the farther body where the nearer one crosses it.

• The head too small for the neck. Widen the wedge behind the eyes rather than lengthening the snout. The head should be at least as wide as the neck it joins, and usually a little wider.

• Scale rows running lengthways. Erase them and redraw the rows crossing the body, curving with the form. Lengthways lines read as stripes or, worse, as wood grain.

• Every contour outlined at the same pressure. Lift the far contours with the kneadable eraser until they are noticeably fainter than the near ones. Uniform outline is the single strongest signal that a drawing is a diagram.

Where to take the exercise next

If the snake came easily, the next step is to apply the same centreline logic to subjects where the curve is still doing most of the structural work. Lizards, eels, otters in motion and any coiled or arched pose all submit to a spine drawn first and contours hung off it afterwards.

Then move to mammals, where the single curve is replaced by bone structure and the method has to change. Instead of one continuous line you are placing a rib cage, a pelvis and a shoulder blade, and the contour follows those landmarks rather than a smooth sweep. The Big Cat Drawing: 9 Graphite Study Templates set is a useful bridge, because big cats still move in long curves but have a skeleton underneath asserting itself.

From there, coat and pattern become the challenge rather than form. The Amur Leopard Drawing: Step by Step in Graphite study deals with rosettes travelling over a curved body, which is the same problem as scale rows on a coil in a different costume. For dense fur and heavy mass instead of pattern, the black bear: facts, fur and form piece works through bulk and texture together, and Where Do Bears Hibernate? Dens, Species, Regions is worth reading alongside it for the behaviour that shapes the animal's body through the year.

From practice sketch to collected drawing

The gap between a good practice sketch and an original graphite drawing is not talent, it is hours and intent. An easy snake drawing is a forty minute exercise in structure. An original is weeks of work on a single sheet, where the core shadow you laid down in one pass is built in twenty layers and the scale rows you suggested in a patch are described across the whole body without ever becoming uniform.

David Dancey-Wood draws entirely in graphite, by his own hand, and his work has been praised by David Shepherd O.B.E. Wildlife Sketches has been trusted by collectors for over 10 years, and a tree is planted with every purchase.

If you would rather live with a finished drawing than make one, the signed limited edition prints are the usual starting point, with a framing service for originals and prints and a gift card if you are buying for someone whose taste you would rather not guess at.

Browse the full collection of original graphite wildlife drawings and signed limited edition prints at Wildlife Sketches.

FAQ

Which snake is cute to draw?

Hognose snakes, rosy boas and green tree pythons are the three most commonly described as appealing, and the reason is structural rather than a matter of taste. Hognose snakes have an upturned, shovel-shaped snout, rosy boas have blunt heads with comparatively large eyes, and green tree pythons coil into tidy stacked loops beneath a squarish head. Upturned or blunt snouts and large eyes do the charm for you, so you can draw them accurately and still get a friendly result.

How do you draw out a snake step by step?

Draw the centreline as a single loose S-curve, mark body thickness at three points along it, draw the two outer contours parallel to that curve, build the head as a soft wedge, place the eye high and forward with the nostril ahead of it and the mouth line running straight back, then commit to the overlaps and erase the guide line. Those six steps produce a complete line drawing. Shading is a separate stage and should not begin until the line work has a clear front-to-back order in the coils.

How do you make a picture of a snake look realistic?

Realism in a snake drawing comes from three values and varied line weight, not from drawing more scales. Lay a light band along the top of the body, a mid tone rolling down the side, and a dark core shadow just above the lower contour, then leave a thin strip of reflected light at the very bottom edge. Add a cast shadow under the coils that is darker than anything on the body itself, and make the contours of near sections heavier than those of far ones.

What are the basic shapes for snake drawings?

There are only two: a long curve and a wedge. The curve is the centreline, which stands in for the spine and dictates the entire pose, and the wedge is the head, a flattened rounded triangle widest behind the eyes. Beginners often reach for a chain of circles along the body, but circles encourage even thickness and lumpy contours, whereas a single curve with three thickness markers gives a smoother, more convincing taper.

How long does an easy snake drawing take?

About forty minutes for a complete drawing with shading, split roughly evenly between line work and tone. The six line steps take around twenty minutes once you are not fighting the centreline, and the three-value shading plus cast shadow takes another twenty. A simple cute version with flat tone and no scales can be finished in fifteen.

Can beginners draw snake scales in pencil?

Yes, provided you draw scale rows rather than individual scales. Render three or four rows fully in the area where the light falls, keeping each row curving across the body rather than running along it, then let the rest fade into the mid tone and disappear entirely in the core shadow. Attempting every scale at equal strength is the most common way beginners flatten an otherwise good drawing, and the selective approach used in the step by step snake scales in graphite study is both easier and more convincing.