How To Draw A Pirate Step By Step With Illustrations

 Drawing a pirate takes some imagination and some good old fashioned reference of some pirates....not the modern day kind though, they are quite boring. Let us take a look back at Pirates of old and what you will find here is a drawing tutorial that shows you how to draw a basic Pirate.

Pirates are classic characters and they lend themselves to looking quite dodgy very well. The first sketching process is the simplist and that is to find the body shape of the pirate and how it will look, I either do one sketch like below or sometimes it does take a few atempts at getting the pirate figure right.

The shapes are generally drawn lie circles and all the main muscles are sketched this way, this is a really simple way of laying out the muscles of a figure and that's what I've done below....

 Continuing our pirate drawing tutorial, we can see in the image to our right that the figure is starting to look more figure like and less like a lego man, and that's how we approach the drawing process, we sketch and build, sketch and build all the time, until our job is done.

More often than not, I do this drafting process on my lightbox as it is far quicker to draw a character in stages than it is to create one out of nothing. Sometimes you'll hit lucky with a fast drawing, but nine times out of ten, the secrets in the sketch structure sculptures that you sketch out along the way.

 The Pirate drawing is coming together nicely now and the figure has been worked out fairly well, considering this is just a drawing tutorial. I've added more details to the muscles and the pirates bandana is clearly defined.

You can add more to the pirate if you wish, as this is a bare bones pirate really and they don't have to look like mine when you draw your very own Pirate and of course that's when good reference photos come in handy, although I've drawn this from one of my sons pirate action figures as they are a breath of inspiration to draw.

Moving on....

 The pirate when finishing off with a 5B pencil, I have added a few more details like hairy arms and a skull and crossbones emblem on the bandana and a few extra muscle lines and creases on the shirt.

Of course the sword I added in the last step, but it looks more defined now. Try and build your drawings like they are a puzzle to solve as drawing is quite like that really, problems can be solved by sketching and refining previous sketches, so always look for ways of drawing and better ways of sketching.

Draw yourself a pirate today!