How to draw a Racoon

If you live in North America you’ve probably seen a racoon before, whether you wanted to or not. These intelligent creatures may be common, but that doesn’t mean they’re uninteresting in the slightest. If you’re not from North America, you might be surprised that they can grow to the size of a medium-sized dog. Without further ado, here’s how to draw a Racoon!

Step 1:

First draw a circle. It will be the head. Make sure you know the diameter of this circle as we will use it to determine proportions later. We will call this length 1 unit.

Step 2:

Then draw a large half circle off to the side of the head. It should be a little more than two units long, and a little less than two units tall.

Step 3:

Draw four circles under the body, Alternating being about 1/4 unit away from the body and about 1/2 unit away from the body. Draw a 2&1/2 unit long oval for the tail.

Step 4:

Connect the tail and body. Draw the legs up from the circles, extend no more than 1/2 unit above the line at the back of the front leg, and no more than 1/4 unit for everything else. Connect the front of the close front leg to the head, and the back of the close back leg to the tail. Draw a little curve in the belly.

Step 5:

Draw two gumdrop shapes for the ears. On each foot, draw a thumb. The thumbs on the front legs should face each other, and so should the thumbs on the back legs. Then draw three fingers per foot.

Step 6:

Draw an odd number of curves up the raccoon’s tail (in this case 5).
To complete the cheeks draw a little zigzag up to the ears, then make a curve parallel to the ear all around it. The cuter you want your racoon to look the wider you make the cheeks.

Step 7:

Draw a rounded triangle at the bottom of the head for the nose. Draw an upside down V under the nose for a mouth. Draw two circles for the eyes, then around them draw the mask. To be more anatomically accurate, Raccoons have a point upwards between their eyes.

Step 8:

Erase extra lines and clean up existing ones.

Step 9:

Add color. Grey and dark grey for most of the fur. The feet should be pink. Make sure you color the eyes yellow because their eyes reflect yellow at night. This is actually one way you can identify a racoon from a fox, large cat, dog, or possum if it’s too dark to see the rest of the animal. Possums and coyotes are the only animals of that size that have yellow eyes, and coyote eyes tend to have a white gleam while raccoons do not.

Step 10:

Add shading. Remember that raccoons have a furry texture.

So that’s how you draw a Racoon!

This page was a fun one, playing with multiple light sources, and figuring out a creative way to integrate the poem into the page. I decided to put the poem on a park bench for this one because these are animals that seem to prefer urban areas. I was particularly proud of the shadows I did on this page. It was also one of the trickier ones to get right when printing, and had to go through several revisions before I got a version where the letter showed up AND the colors looked right AND nothing important got cut off the edge. But after some trouble shooting this page turned out as good as I had imagined it!