Drawing Skulls: How To Draw A Skull

Skulls are great to draw, as I have often drawn many skulls and they are fun to draw as well as useful in many fantasy settings. They can be used as a focus in tattoos and many other design elements in creature and character drawings and so drawing skulls is something that I have experience with and it is a favourite thing of mine to draw.

The Skull

The human skull is made up of bones that form the shape of the skull and the most prominent bones are the cheek bones, which you can increase the largeness of them to exxaggerate the features somewhat if you want to create a creature skull, but today we shall concentrate on the Human Skull.

Here is a drawing of a skull I did awhile ago, and it is one that looks almost realistic or as realistic as it can get with my comic book style.

Also see how to draw a pirate skull, which is fun to learn to draw if you like pirates. A pirate skull has to include a few design elements like a pirates bandana and a pirate dagger and even that classic eye patch.

When drawing an effective skull there aresome points that I think help to make your skull drawing good.

First, a realistic approach can often times produce a great looking skull, so a photo or reference could be useful, but not always the case of a realistic looking skull is always needed, as an artist you can practice drawing a skull from a photo and then interpret your skulls as your own and fit them into your own style.

Here I have simply drawn a shape that will be our skull, it is a side profile of a skull head and will be the skulls design that I have chosen. You can draw your skulls however you want.

When you are trying to develop your skull drawing it is a good idea to still be open to new ways of drawing and sketching even at this stage, things and ideas could change within your own mind, depending on what lines you decide to draw.

Here I have drawn the eyes and the mouth as well as working out the cheekbones, I will define these more later..

 By adding the recognizable features of a skull now, you are making your drawing resemble a skull which is obviously the right way to go.

The cheekbones are defined as are the teeth and the skull nose, drawing skulls is easy when you see it done!

 Here I add extra details like bones lines and a bit of shadow  to the mouth area and under the eyes, this all helps to put your skull design down as a near permanent more skull like drawing.

All the lines that have been sketched in all contribute to the overall drawing to make it look like a skull.

I always seem to ink my drawings, maybe to make them more finished.

Anyway this step is optional, you can ink them with any black fine liner or black ink and it just gives it a real permanence to your skull drawing or any drawing for that matter.

Try drawing skulls today, anyway you can....

Also check out - Drawing Skull And Crossbones for a pirate inspired skull image to draw.

See what I came up with below from the little skull exercise we went through today!

Drawing a Skull wearing a gas mask was an idea I have had for quite some time and I needed to have a little more insight and research done on drawing gas mask, but I thought I'd have a go anyway and this pencil drawing of the skull wearing the gas mask turned out quite well actually. Check out the drawing video below!