How To Draw Fantasy Creatures

Drawing fantasy creatures is an imaginative concept and a fun drawing process to get into as the limits to anyone's imagination are limitless as there are infinite design possibilities for drawing your own fantasy creatures as most fantasy creatures can be created from combinations of animals and have successfully been inspired and created this way in the past through well known fantasy creatures such as dragons.

Exaggeration of the human form and indeed combining with animal forms create some interesting creature designs and the more you practice at sketching out these concept creature creations then you'll learn to draw some fantastically original creatures of fantasy more often.

Existing creatures from Greek mythology are inspiring for your own creature drawings like Medusa, a half woman and half serpent with snakes for hair.

Ways to get inspired

Try and write a small paragraph that describes what your creature could look like, an example could be:-

"A fat, hairy creature with huge arms and small legs with spiky armour and holding a huge club to batter someone with, also wearing huge boots and the creature has huge horns that twist behind it's fat head."

I find that written descriptions work very well as you can imagine exactly what you write.

Watch the video to see how I start to draw a fantasy creature, I haven't used my written example though as I've started from scratch.

In the second video I simply wanted to get the right pencil lines drawn, so that they look like a progression has been made and the drawing looks more structured, it is useful to draw more with the form of the creature in mind now as I've done below.

Watch the video and see how the fantasy creature is coming along...

Adding the shading is the final part of the pencilling process and I suppose it is the best part of drawing creatures and monsters for me as the shading helps to define the form of the creature much more than mere pencil lines do.

Fantasy creatures can take any form you wish and your imagination should know no limits, just sketch and see where it takes you.

Drawing a Demonic Dog creature here. This is a more recent drawing video and it reflects my drawing style which has improved over the years. The drawing video is over 33 minutes long and shows you the full drawing process from the beginning pencil sketch to the finished inked illustration.