How To Draw A Pirate Skull

 Drawing a pirate skull has always been a fascination of mine, probably because I watched The Goonies a little too much as a kid with good old one eyed Willy the pirate and so I thought it fitting that I do a quick drawing tutorial featuring a pirate skull that brings back memories of me watching The Goonies for the 1000th time on my summer holidays away from school.

A pirate skull can wear anything that a real human pirate wears, because it makes the skull look the part and so in the following drawing I opted for a bandana wearing pirate with a patch over one eye (even though it's a skull and the eyes have rotted away lol!) and in the skulls teeth is an old pirate dagger for fun.

Now on with the pirate drawing tutorial.

The very first sketch is the important one as I always have to get the head shape out of the way first before I can move on to draw the other important features later and so here I've drawn an oval shape which is fairly basic, but it does the job and then I draw a cross mark which the vertical line going down helps to separate the eyes and so I can place the eye sockets directly underneath and the horizontal line helps balance out most of the connecting features like the cheek bones, the skull nose and the teeth and jawline.

The idea is to draw simple and then attack with detail after the second stage.

 Here you can see that I've opted for another basic sketch with me roughly marking in the eyes, the cheek and jaw bones with the teeth. This is the second most important stage, because if the drawing doesn't look right here, it's time to change it.

I want the bandana on the skulls head to be a distinguishing feature as will the dagger in it's mouth and so I've really left the out at this stage as the main part of the creative drawing comes in the next stage, filling in the details.

Alot of other artists may try to blind you with the reasoning that a massive multi part step by step drawing tutorial will help you draw something, but really if I simplified the steps and drew something that could inspire instead of sending you to sleep,then my job has been done.

Side note: try to get some reference photos of pirates and other useful pictures, the Internet is full of them. You may find this useful to draw some pirate skulls.

 The pencil drawing below, I just came in with my 2B pencil and filled the lot in with details, because I knew firmly what I wanted, the eye patch, the dagger and the bandana.

Of course some of these details may be cut back when it comes to the inking stage or some lines may disappear, because I find when it comes to the inking part, that I just tend to get carried away as I either draw too much detail or less and in this case I drew a bit more.

See how your pirate skull will turn out. Try drawing one based on this tutorial and then maybe go through the steps to draw another one and compare them both, practice makes perfect.

Inking a pirate skull drawing is more about improving the original pencil lines than anything else and if you can recognize where there are areas to improve on in your drawing, then add them now.

I use a lot of pens to ink and some are better for different things, the Sharpie markers can add large black areas and any other ink pens can just be good for lots of fine line work.

In the case of the final pirate skull drawing here, less is more, but I do think that to experiment with thicker and thin lines now and again is a good idea as it can turn a flat drawing into a stylized one.

Have fun drawing yourself a pirate skull. And don't forget to check out the art of Wayne Tully and more drawing tutorials at Draw Fantasy Art

 Draw Skull and Crossbones