How to draw a red panda — easy step by step drawing ideas

Red panda drawing ideas are, without question, the most requested thing in my house. Somebody sees a red panda at the zoo or in a cartoon, comes home, and announces that today we are drawing the fluffy orange one with the stripy tail. And the wonderful news is that a red panda is far easier to draw than it looks, because underneath all that spectacular fur it is really just a circle, a soft pear shape and one big curl.

Learning how to draw a red panda is also a sneaky lesson in something artists call silhouette. The reason a red panda reads instantly as a red panda — even as a tiny shape across a room — is the combination of round head, wide low ears and that enormous ringed tail. Get the silhouette right and the drawing works even before you pick up a single crayon. Get it wrong and no amount of careful shading will save it.

In this tutorial we will build a cheerful cartoon red panda in six easy steps, following the practice sheet below. I will share the pro tips I use when I teach this one to a class, the mistakes that turn red pandas into raccoons, and a few ideas for what to draw once the first one is on the fridge. Sharpen a pencil, find something rust-orange, and let us begin.

The 6 steps to easy red panda drawing ideas

Step 1 — Draw the head

Start with a single circle in the upper middle of your paper, and make it slightly wider than it is tall — more of a gentle oval lying on its side than a perfect ball. That little bit of extra width is doing real work: a red panda has a broad, flat, friendly face, and a tall narrow head immediately starts to look like a fox instead.

Leave a good hand's width of empty paper underneath, because the body, the legs and that magnificent tail all have to fit below and beside the head. If you place the head in the centre of the page you will run out of room at exactly the wrong moment, and the tail is not the part you want to shrink.

Step 2 — Add the face

Give your red panda two big round eyes, placed low on the head and about one eye-width apart, each with a white shine dot left blank near the top. Below and between them add a small rounded nose — think of a soft triangle with the corners rubbed off — and a short curved smile underneath it.

Now the detail that matters most: the cheek patches. On either side of the face, draw a large teardrop shape sweeping from beside the eye down to the jaw. In a real red panda these are cream-white fur, and they are the single feature that makes the face unmistakable. Draw them big and generous; timid little patches will vanish once you start colouring.

Step 3 — Add the ears

Red panda ears sit wide apart, almost on the sides of the head rather than the top, and they are rounded rather than pointed. Draw each one as a soft arch about a third as tall as the head, then draw a smaller matching shape inside it for the pale fluffy tuft that fills a red panda's ear.

Set them further apart than feels natural. This is the step where most red pandas accidentally become foxes: pointed ears, close together and high on the head, are fox ears. Wide, round, slightly floppy ears are red panda ears, and moving them outward by even a centimetre transforms the whole face.

Step 4 — Add the sitting body

Under the head, draw a rounded body that is narrow at the shoulders and wider at the bottom — a soft pear, or a fat letter U with shoulders. A sitting red panda is a comfortable, slightly slumped shape, so keep every line curved. There is not a straight edge anywhere on this animal.

Make the body roughly one and a half times the height of the head, and let it tuck up close underneath so there is no neck showing. Cartoon animals are cuter without visible necks, and red pandas genuinely do sit like fluffy bowling pins with the chin resting almost on the chest.

Step 5 — Add the arms, legs and tail

Add two short front arms coming down the front of the chest, ending in rounded paws with three little pads on each. Then two back legs, tucked out to the sides at the bottom with the paw pads facing forward. Keep all four limbs short and stubby — a red panda's legs are almost entirely hidden in fur, and long limbs make the drawing look leggy and awkward.

And now the best part. The tail starts at the lower right of the body and sweeps out and upward in one long, confident curve, about as long as the head and body put together. Draw it as a fat sausage first, wide all the way along and only slightly tapered at the tip, then add five or six gently curved rings across it. Those rings should follow the curve of the tail, not cut straight across it.

Step 6 — Finish and color

Go over every line you want to keep with a firmer pencil stroke or a fine black pen, then erase your guide lines — the bits of the head circle hidden behind the ears, the body line behind the arms, and any stray sketching. This is the moment the drawing stops looking like a plan and starts looking like an animal.

For colour, work from the top down. Rust orange over the head, back and the top of the body; cream or very pale yellow on the cheek patches, the ear tufts and a stripe above each eye; dark brown on the legs, the paws and the tummy. Then the tail: alternate rust and cream bands between the rings you drew, starting and finishing with a dark one.

Finish with a black nose, two pink blush spots on the cheeks, and the white shine dots left blank in the eyes. If you want a little extra realism, add short flicking pencil marks around the outline of the body and tail so the edge looks furry rather than cut out with scissors. Twenty seconds of scribble, enormous difference.

Common mistakes to avoid

The ears are too pointy and too close together

This is the number one red panda problem, and it produces a perfectly nice fox every single time. Fox ears are tall triangles sitting close together on top of the skull. Red panda ears are wide arches, set almost at the outer edges of the head, and they look slightly too big for the face.

If you have already drawn pointed ears, do not start again. Round off the tips, widen the base, and slide each one outward by drawing a new arch and erasing the old. The face will change species in about fifteen seconds.

The tail is too thin

Red panda tails are enormous — roughly as long as the animal's entire body and almost as thick as the body is wide at the base. A thin, tapering tail reads as a cat or a squirrel, and it robs the drawing of the shape people recognise.

Draw the tail thick and confident, and keep it wide most of the way along before it rounds off at the tip. If it already looks skinny, thicken it by drawing a second outline outside the first rather than trying to erase and redo.

The face markings are too small or left out

Those cream teardrops under the eyes, the pale stripes above them and the white ear tufts are not decoration — they are the animal's identity. Skip them, or draw them as little dabs, and you end up with a generic orange cartoon creature.

Draw each cheek patch big enough to reach from beside the eye down to the jawline, and leave those areas completely uncoloured when you go over the face in orange. Leaving paper white is easier and looks cleaner than trying to colour cream over orange.

Troubleshooting

My red panda looks like a raccoon

Almost always a colour problem rather than a drawing problem. Raccoons have a dark mask across the eyes; red pandas have pale patches under them. Keep the area around the eyes light, make sure the darkest fur is on the legs and tummy rather than the face, and warm the whole body up with plenty of orange.

The body and head do not look connected

There is probably a gap or a visible neck between them. Rub out the join and redraw the top of the body so that it overlaps the bottom of the head circle by a good centimetre, then erase the hidden line. Overlap is what makes two shapes read as one animal.

The tail rings look messy

Straight rings across a curved tail always look wrong, because they fight the form. Redraw them as shallow curves bending the same way as the nearest edge of the tail, and use fewer of them — five or six well-spaced rings look far better than ten crowded ones.

Key takeaways

FAQ

Is a red panda hard to draw for kids? Not at all. A red panda is a circle for the head, a soft pear shape for the body and one big curved tail. Most children of six or seven can follow this sheet on their own, and a five-year-old can do it with a little help placing the tail.

How is a red panda different from a raccoon or a fox? Three things: the face is much rounder and flatter than a fox's, the cheek patches are big cream teardrops rather than stripes, and the ears are wide apart and rounded instead of pointed. Get those three right and nobody will mistake your drawing for a raccoon.

What colors do I need for a red panda drawing? Rust orange for the back and head, cream or very pale yellow for the face markings and ear tufts, dark brown for the legs and tummy, and both colours alternating for the ringed tail. Black for the nose and a touch of pink for the cheeks finish it off.

How do I draw the ringed tail without it looking messy? Draw the tail as one long curved sausage first and only then add the rings, as gentle curved lines that follow the curve of the tail rather than straight across it. Aim for five or six rings, spaced evenly, and colour alternate bands.

And there is your red panda! Whether it came out tidy or gloriously fluffy, you just built a whole animal out of a circle, a pear and a curve — and that belongs on the fridge. Try drawing it again curled up asleep with the tail wrapped round its nose, or up in a tree branch munching bamboo, and come back tomorrow for a new tutorial.

More tutorials: All tutorials · How to draw a panda · How to draw a fox · How to draw a raccoon