24 monster drawing ideas for a blank page

· 3 min read

Most monster drawing ideas lists give you nouns — "draw a fire dragon" — which is the part you were never stuck on. The hard part is what makes a creature look like someone rather than a shape with eyes.

So: three rules first, then 24 prompts built around them.

The three rules

Silhouette before detail. Cover your drawing and picture only the outline. Could you pick it out of a crowd? If not, no amount of scales fixes it. Push one proportion further than feels comfortable — very tall, very low, very round, very wide.

One dominant feature. One huge eye, one horn, ears far too big, a shell that's most of the body. Creatures with six competing features read as noise. A quiet body supporting one loud idea reads as a character.

Draw the attitude. Posture carries personality more reliably than a face does. Chest up and proud, hunched and shy, mid-bounce, curled asleep. A creature drawn stiff and symmetrical will look stiff and symmetrical.

24 prompts

Shape-first

  1. A creature that's 80% head.
  2. A creature with no legs that clearly still gets around.
  3. Something long and low, like a draught excluder with opinions.
  4. A perfect sphere with the smallest possible limbs.
  5. A creature taller than it has any right to be, with tiny feet.
  6. Something built entirely from soft curves — no straight line anywhere.

One-feature

  1. A single enormous eye, and everything else quiet.
  2. One horn, far too big, and a body that struggles to balance it.
  3. Ears so large they work as blankets.
  4. A shell it obviously hides in.
  5. A tail heavier than the creature.
  6. A mane that's most of the silhouette.

Personality-first

  1. A creature that's permanently slightly worried.
  2. Something extremely smug.
  3. A creature that has clearly just woken up.
  4. Something shy, drawn mid-hide.
  5. A creature that is far too pleased about something small.
  6. Something ancient and unimpressed.

From somewhere else

  1. A creature made from your favourite food's shape — not its picture, its shape.
  2. Something based on a houseplant you own.
  3. A creature shaped like a piece of furniture in the room you're in.
  4. Something that would live in the weather outside right now.
  5. A creature built from a musical instrument's silhouette.
  6. The last animal you saw, but wrong in one specific, confident way.

Making it good with three more minutes

Fill the page. The most common problem with creature sketches isn't the creature — it's that it's drawn small in a corner with a lot of empty paper.

Close your shapes. Open-ended lines read as ambiguous, and ambiguity is what makes a drawing look unfinished even when it isn't.

Show the face straight on. Face-on or three-quarter. Eyes are what turn a shape into a someone.

Then stop. Detail added after the shape reads well tends to muddy it. If the silhouette works, you're done.

What to do with it afterwards

A page of creature sketches usually becomes a page of creature sketches in a drawer. Two things worth doing instead:

Give it a name and one sentence of who it is. Costs thirty seconds and is the difference between a doodle and a character you remember.

Put it somewhere it does something. In Inkmon, a drawn creature hatches into an animated one you look after daily — it gets hungry, plays, sleeps, and after weeks of care the art regenerates into a grown-up version of your original drawing. There's a whole gallery of what other people drew, which is also, incidentally, the best source of ideas on this page.

Further reading