I Did See a Mammoth Drawing Activity with Alex Willmore
Who doesn’t love a festive draw-a-long? Check out the blog post from author-illustrator, Alex Willmore on how to draw a fun and festive character from his book, I did see a Mammoth.
I love being an author and illustrator. Creating stories and worlds is always so enjoyable but my absolute favourite things about it is drawing fun characters… and what’s more fun than a penguin?! In my book I Did See a Mammoth, I got to draw absolutely loads of penguins. Big ones, small ones, happy ones, grumpy ones, all sorts. It was just the most fun, giving each penguin their own personality. If you’d like to find out how I draw my penguins, read on and I’ll talk you through how to draw your very own.
1 – Penguins are fun, squishy looking animals so I like to start by drawing an oval but with a flat bottom. Imagine dropping a bean bag onto the table.. that shape.
Okay… flat bottomed oval drawn?
2 – Next, penguins need.. wings? Draw a U shape on the inside of the left side of the oval and then the same on the right side leaving space between the 2 ‘U’s for the penguin’s belly. Now your penguin has two nice flappy wings.
3 – I like to give my penguins flippy floppy feet too. I draw these like 3 little scribbles for each foot. You don’t have to do this though as I think Penguins look super cute when their feet are tucked into their body. I’d keep my feet tucked away too if I lived in the snow!
4 – The fun part. Penguin’s face! Let’s start with eyes. 2 circles inside the top of our first oval. These eyes can be as big or as small as you like. Try different things.. you’ll find the size and shape of your penguin’s eyes give them very different personalities.
Then 2 little (or large) black dots in the middle of your circles. Position these wherever you like within the circles.. you’ll get some fun results. My favourite penguin in the book has pupils right in the middle of their eyes.
5 – Then finally… the beak! Just a simple triangle between or below the eyes.
6 – You could also try adding some hair or fun accessories.. perhaps a winter hat or scarf?
And there we go. You should now have a lovely penguin. You can colour it in if you like. When colouring penguins, I like to add a cute white tummy. Why not try drawing more than one and having a whole huddle of penguins.
I Did See a Mammoth is published by Farshore and is available now.
Views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the Federation.