How To Draw A Clownfish (Full Step By Step Drawing Tutorial)

You might have recently looked up how to draw a clownfish after watching Finding Nemo or maybe you’re just interested in drawing some kind of fish species, either way, you’ve made an excellent decision to choose to draw this fish.

Not only are they attractive with their bright orange and white color, but a clownfish is also one of the best pets you can choose to have.

If you’re interested in a few fun facts about clownfish before we get started on the drawing, here’s what you should know:

They’re quite hardworking where they take care of the nest and eggs. Although they aren’t fantastic swimmers, they do try their best when they need to venture out. However, what’s even more shocking is that not all clownfish are orange in color and there are at least 28 – 30 clownfish species.

Pretty crazy if you ask me.

Anyway, now that you know a few interesting factors about clownfish, you must be even more excited to draw them.

Let’s start, shall we?

Reference Image

For this clownfish drawing, we’ll be basing our drawing off the following reference.

As you can see, our clownfish over here has a small body with 6 fins and 3 stripes.

The first white stripe is more curved towards the head whereas the white stripe near the fin is faced towards the other direction.

The main stripe in the middle is wavier in shape. These points are important to note before we begin our drawing as this will give us a good idea of how to go about drawing a clownfish.

Steps For Drawing A Clownfish

Step 1

To begin the drawing, draw a curved line as shown above making the left end of the drawing more slanted down since this will lead into the tail.

Step 2

You’ll then want to join the line you had just drawn on the right-hand side and draw a similar shape from before curving the end of that line more in.

Try to roughly measure the space between those two lines to give you a good idea if it is sufficient.

Step 3

Now it’s time to draw the tail and you can do this by drawing a curved line out from those previous two lines and joining them together by drawing another curved line in as shown in this demonstration above.

Step 4

Our clownfish drawing is finally taking shape and now it’s time to draw the fins. You can go ahead and copy the drawing as I have done here.

Step 5

Once you have completed drawing the fins on the body, be sure to draw the other fin near the front of the head.

Start by drawing two slanted lines and draw a curved line to close it off.

Then you’ll want to move on to drawing the stripes on the clownfish. As you can see, the first stripe is facing towards the head and curves in while the stripe in the middle of the body is quite wavy and joined halfway with the fin.

The last stripe has two lines facing inwards towards each other. Don’t forget to draw in the eye as well.

Step 6

If you’ve observed the reference image correctly, you may have noticed that there is a black border around each of the fins. Draw them in with a marker or pen of your choice in black. You can fill in the eye shape as well.

Step 7

And lastly, to complete this clownfish drawing, you can draw in the lines of the fins. Try to vary the shape of the lines to make it more interesting.

And that’s it, you’ve successfully drawn your very first clownfish.

Final Drawing

It’s absolutely okay to leave this clownfish drawing as a lineart doodle but if you would like, you can shade or color it in as well.

I’ve roughly done so here to give you an idea of how it will look if you color it in. It’s not the best of coloring jobs but the main idea is to see the different colors used.

When you are shading, you can have a bit of yellow/light orange at the bottom of the fish and the rest of the body will be shaded with orange.

There’s also a bit of a darker red/orange used at the very top and on the main fin to give it more dimension like depicted in the reference image.

Conclusion

Learning how to draw a clownfish is actually much simpler than it looks but in the end, you have an adorable drawing that is definitely worth the effort you put into it.

When you add color to the drawing, it makes it stand out more and actually resemble a clownfish.

Because this clownfish looks so good, you can use it just about anywhere.

It doesn’t matter if you want to create an entire ocean theme drawing or you just want to add it to fill in a blank space, this drawing is fantastic and insanely fun.

Did you find this clownfish drawing tutorial helpful? Don’t forget to share your thoughts in the comments below.