How to Draw a Monkey [Narrated Step-by-Step]

Hey there everybody .

It's Mark Riley .

I'm back with another how to draw video .

You know , it's only been two weeks since my last video , but , oh my goodness , the whole world changed during those last two weeks .

And uh we're all pretty freaked out by this whole Coronavirus thing .

I'm not gonna talk too much about that .

I have a feeling a lot of people out there have heard more than they really want to about the Coronavirus by this stage .

I'm just gonna do what I do best and that is to keep making these , how to draw videos today .

I'm gonna be doing the latest in my series of uh how to draw animals videos and I'm gonna be drawing a monkey .

Uh I'm gonna put a link to the complete list of all my different uh how to draw animals uh videos .

Um But let's go ahead and get started the way we usually do and that is to show you what size I'm working at , I've put a square here and uh it is uh 2.5 inches on all sides that works out to just around uh six and a half centimeters maybe a little smaller than that .

But uh you don't have to make it exactly this size , make it any size as long as it's a perfect square .

And then you make lines right across the middle and you'll be able to follow along as we begin to uh add the lines for this monkey's face .

And so that's what I'm gonna do right now .

Actually , why don't I zoom in so that you can see each line uh more clearly .

OK .

So , as I prepared for this video , I was looking at photos of uh what I believe is called the reus monkey .

Um uh And I don't know if I'm gonna do a completely accurate representation , but uh we're gonna try to get as close as we can .

I'm gonna begin by drawing the sort of basic shape of the um eye region , the area where the eyes are going to be placed .

And uh one interesting thing about a monkey's face is that you have like the eye region and the mouth region very clearly delineated sort of separated into these two areas .

Um And if you've got these lines in place to begin with , it's will help you with the placement of this first set of lines uh as it comes pretty much all the way over here to this um far edge , this is gonna be delineating where the hair begins to grow uh just above and on the sides of the eyes .

And uh why don't I just go ahead and continue this shape um crossing down here and I'm drawing this monkey in a kind of a three quarter point of view .

And what's gonna happen is we're gonna get to the uh mouth area right here and the mouth itself is going to follow right along with the lower line of this uh box .

So that should be really easy placing that particular line and then over here because we're in a three quarter point of view , we're gonna get to see a little more of this shape as I was talking about how the there's this sort of upper area for the eyes and then this separate region down here where the mouth goes .

And if you've left enough space underneath this , you can kind of continue all the way down like so and draw the , I guess it would be the jaw , the rounded jaw of the monkey .

All right .

So once you've got that in place , we can maybe move on to drawing the eyes .

Now , the eyes uh on a monkey's face are quite high up in , in , in relation to the nose , I think compared to um a human face , I guess different monkeys are gonna have different sizes of eyes .

As I studied these photos of the rhesus monkeys , I was struck by how small uh the eyes really are and you can see um the relation between this line and this line , you know , the line that's crossing along the middle .

Um This one unfortunately is sort of floating a little in space , might be a little hard to place .

But if you want to throw in a couple of quick guidelines , like , so , you know , this can help you to get these two eyes to be , um , the right size .

And this one actually comes much closer to the central line in terms of placement .

The second I , so I'm gonna go ahead and draw that shape .

Um They are sort of almond shaped , these eyes coming in at the uh tear duct , the region as I call it , I who know almost nothing about animal anatomy , but I still make these videos anyway .

Um But I was struck by how , like I said , sort of almond shaped or seed shaped .

Uh these eyes are , although I still quite round .

And then in terms of the iris , the iris occupies quite a large um proportion of the eye so that you see very little of the whites of the eyes .

And I guess depending on the breed of monkeys , sometimes the , the so-called whites of the eyes aren't even white .

They seem almost kind of blackish in some breeds .

But I uh I was struck by how much the rhesus monkeys eyes really do look quite a lot like human eyes in a lot of ways and the the pupil I suppose , depending on how dilated it is .

But in most of the photos that I looked at the people quite small in relation to the rest of the eye .

And then you want to get a line up here for the , uh , fold of the eyelid .

And to me this just really completes that feeling of almost humanness .

You know , that's , it's surprising how much monkeys eyes look like human eyes .

And I guess humans starting many centuries ago suspected there was some sort of connection between humans and monkeys because they look so awfully similar in a lot of ways .

Uh But as for a dissimilarity , the bridge of the nose on the monkey , as you might imagine is quite , um subtle and not nearly as pronounced as it is in most human noses .

And so I'm keeping this line here for the nose , uh the bridge of the nose quite light , but it's down here as we begin to head towards the mouth .

In fact , what I'll do is I'm gonna draw just a little hint of the , uh , of the cleft upper lip there to help me place the uh nose .

And one thing you want to pay attention to is the , um , the shape of the nostril .

And I was struck , the shape of the nostril did remind me of , um , what you see sometimes in dogs and different uh four legged animals , this sort of opening of the nostril and then curving up , sort of pointing up at the side as if , as if it was sliced to draw in air from the left and the right , uh you know , to increase the amount of scent that can come into the nose .

And this bit up here is a little tricky I saw in a lot of photographs of various uh types of rhesus monkey that it seems very slightly divided into two areas , the snout of the region , as I have always called it , monkeys don't have snouts or do they ?

Somebody tell me somebody answer all the questions .

I'm gonna add a couple of lines here that sort of suggest the uh sort of the skin underneath , sort of bag bags under the eyes .

Maybe the monkey hasn't had enough sleep .

Heaven knows , we all have lost a lot of sleep lately , worrying about viruses and economic crashes and so forth .

I hope you're all doing well .

I'm happy to report that me , that my family and I , everyone that I know seemingly uh is uh healthy and doing well .

Um But oh my goodness , scary times folks and , um , you know , in a way , I feel glad that I can continue to do these videos and that people can at least count on that as a steady continuity with all the different things being canceled these days .

Um My videos are not being canceled .

I am gonna continue doing them as long as I am able .

Um So what I'm gonna do now is maybe refocus the camera so that we can get some of the other basic lines uh for the rest of the head .

OK .

So if you've left enough space above and below and especially over to this side uh of the square , we can go ahead and start um indicating the fur and kind of the top of the head here .

And uh I , you know , instead of putting a bunch of guidelines in place here , I think you really can get away with just sort of winging it if you imagine maybe this square extending one more square above , um , the top of the head is nearly gonna fill that imaginary square .

Um But really the trick is to figure out where the ears go .

And I was surprised to actually at how high up on the head , I suppose I shouldn't be surprised because even when you look at cartoons of um , monkeys , they tend to put the ears pretty high up on the head .

And if you extend this line , let's say , uh like so right across that might give you , um , more or less the center of where the ear is going to be placed on the head , leave a nice little gap here or a big gap , I suppose I should say .

And then this is where the ear is going to be placed on the head .

Now , I always imagined monkeys ears as very round .

Um But at least with the rhesus monkey , there's almost kind of a point , almost elephant little point up there .

At the top .

And um apart from the one ridge , the uh the in interior structure of the ear seems to be considerably more simple than in the human ear , which um if you've ever tried to draw , it can be quite confusing all the different lines and structures um within this section of the ear on the human , uh quite complicated .

I noticed at least with one photo that there was almost like a little um cut out section down here and I , I'm sure it just varies from almost from one monkey to the next , certainly from one breed to the next .

Um the the actual shape of the ear and at least in the photos that I looked at from this point of view , you couldn't even see the other e uh it was , it's back there somewhere .

Um Now , in terms of adding some structure down here is a section where the hair , uh the fur , is it the hair or the fur , the fur hair .

Um It's kind of sweeping up and then coming back down and we're gonna get into the um the fur in just a second .

Uh As you can imagine , that's quite a time consuming part of the drawing process .

But for now , I'm just gonna get the basic guidelines in place of um at least with the rhesus monkey , the fur is quite long in this area down across the cheeks and heading over to the back of the head and then over here , you can see also in this , you know , from this three quarter point of view , you're gonna see a little bit of the hair that's , uh , flowing out on that side of the head as well .

And the neck is more or less concealed by hair .

But , uh , you would imagine the neck is coming out down here somewhere and I'm gonna just put a line over here that suggests the , uh other shoulder .

I'm gonna have the drawing kind of trail off , to be honest , as we , as we come over here because there's gonna be a lot of details that we have to uh handle over here .

Now , what I'm gonna do right now is to erase these .

I'm dropping my pencil , erase these guidelines .

I'll do that all in time lamps and then I'm gonna come back and start to talk about the direction of the fur all across the head uh in all these various areas .

All right .

So with a lot of these videos in , in drawing animals , especially furry animals , it's impossible to show the drawing process completely in real time .

I think the key is though to figure out the direction of the the general flow of the fur .

Now coming from the top of the forehead , the hair is sort of curving upwards vertically away from the uh eyes .

And I'm just making very loose lines here .

These are by no means the final lines and it's not gonna look very good frankly , in terms of drawing .

But this is the my whole theory of drawing is that just put something down to begin with .

You know , these are not your final lines , this is just giving you some kind of notes almost in terms of the direction of , of the fur and you're gonna build on top of this until you probably don't even see any of these lines anymore .

These are just the initial preparatory lines and this whole area in here , I'll probably refine this later on , but it's not nearly as clean , you know , cleanly defined as it appears .

At first , you know , the , the fur almost like a man with a beard or whatever , it sort of gradually be , you know , starts and , uh , thickens up as it heads away uh from the eyes .

Now , the , what I wanted to point out is that when you come across here , the , the fur is flowing out and sort of up and above the ears a little bit .

But at this point is where right over here by the eyes is where the fur begins to change a direction and the lines begin to fan out .

And there is a very clear split right in this area as the fur begins to head downward , you know , sort of gravity , almost pulling it downward uh across the sides of the , what would that be the temple , the upper cheek .

And then as I said , I'm sure different monkeys have different lengths of , uh , fur here .

But , uh , for the rhesus monkey , the different , uh , photos that I looked at the hair gets quite long in this area and you can get a little more random as it , you know , the longer it gets , there's , there's no necessarily rhyme or reason to what direction these lines are pointing in the farther you go down here .

But actually up here , my sense is that the each individual hair is considerably shorter , uh , than it is down here .

And so you're seeing this whole , you know , almost looks like , um , grass on a lawn or something , you can see these individual lines , uh going all across the , the top .

And as I said , this area over here near the eyes where the hair , you know , goes from pointing upward to sort of fanning down and pointing downwards .

That same thing is happening over here .

Now , you can't see it because it's in a three quarter point of view .

But I mean , you can't see it as much , but you can see enough of it that you want to indicate that change there .

And then you can see me doing this with the , the hair gradually .

There's , it reaches some sort of horizontal point and then it begins to actually curve and point down .

In fact that there's almost more clarity in this area right here just because it is , you're forced to see it in a way .

And uh like I said down here , it's interesting to me that there's like a , a reverse flow here of the , the fur and it , it's almost as if the fur grows up here by the mouth .

So as to flop back down on top of itself .

And , um , before I get into too much in terms of the actual details of the fur on the face , I think I should um zoom in .

So let's plan on doing that .

And , you know , a lot of the rest of this , I'm gonna have to sort of just blow through in time lapse just to keep this video to a reasonable length .

I don't like them to go too much longer than 20 minutes or so .

Heaven knows , I've done some real marathon animal videos that go on and on and on .

So let's go ahead and refocus and talk about uh some details of the face .

Ok .

So , uh your job right now in a way is to get this whole area along the edge of the face a little more subtle .

Um Certainly when people are doing cartoon drawings of uh monkeys , they will , uh really do a hard line right along that whole edge .

But the truth is the fur is actually beginning rather gradually , like I said , sort of like in the area of a man's beard .

Um I think with the hum the human hair line across the forehead , it tends to be pretty sharp from the area of just skin to where the hair begins .

But with a monkey , it's not quite so uh sharp the division and you'll see more , uh , you know , sort of individual little lines .

In fact , I noticed an interesting area of what might be the sort of , um , forefather of eyebrows , but just tiny little hairs in the this area just above the eye .

Um , it all sort of blurs together to be honest and because the the the hair is um doesn't stay put in a way , you know , but you uh if you want to get into details , you might find some little lines of hair right there , but it's all along here .

I think where you , the challenge is to sort of get this , get rid of that super harsh line and try to get things a little more gradual .

And then um once we get down here , I was struck by the fact that , you know , we , we think of , of course , we think of monkeys as hairier than human beings , but seemingly they don't get uh beards and mustaches , uh the way uh human men do most uh men do to some degree or another .

Um And that they have just a little sort of peach fuzz kind of thing going on .

Uh But as if you want to get into the details , the direction of this peach fuzz like hair is gonna change right below the nose and begin to curve um a little bit off to the right , I guess the monkeys left but our right as we're working on the drawing and , you know , we're already starting to get into real detail work here .

And uh I'm not gonna be able to do all of this real time .

But uh for those of you who like to do a detailed drawing of a uh of animals , this , this directional stuff is important and down here is maybe where the the peach fuzz like uh hair of the upper lip starts to grow and get longer and change directions quite radically uh as it pushes up into this area .

Again , with this particular breed of monkey , I'm not sure at all .

Uh monkeys have this thing going on and down here again , it from the photos I studied remains kind of like peach fuzz , not quite as the the each line is pretty short here .

You're not looking at a real beard , but sort of a lightly furry area .

And that might be it in terms of what I can do in real time , folks , those of you who know my videos , you know that I like to use what , what I call the two pencil method where I uh well , hang on a second .

I'll go grab my other pencil .

So yeah , I use what I call the two pencil method .

I use this ordinary um writing pencil in my case , it's a Dixon Tyco Ro .

But honestly , I think any writing pencil will be good uh for the job .

And then I use a black Prisma color colored pencil .

Now , uh if you have a box , a set of colored pencils of any brand , uh just pull out the black um pencil from that set , a colored pencil .

And this will allow you to push um some of these colors to absolute jet black .

I'll just show you real quickly .

Um The difference that it can make um in the edge of this one eye and monkeys , at least again , in the photos that I studied um have quite a black line here , not necessarily like a eyeliner kind of thing , but like almost within the skin , there's like AAA pigment that's tinting uh and uh making their eyes quite visible , you know , this , this shape .

And then of course , the edge of the iris can be uh darkened in maybe not quite as dark as all that uh but the pupil is gonna be nice and uh jet black .

So that shows you what I'm gonna be doing towards the end in terms of darkening things up or like , let's say the um nostril , that's one where I can just absolutely really go to town in terms of pushing it to absolute black .

And you will find um if you've got some sort of black colored pencil , just just allows you to heighten the contrast and um make a more , you know , three dimensional and finished looking drawing .

But sadly , for Now I'm gonna have to kick it into time lapse .

Bring in old man time lapse .

How are you doing , old man ?

Time lapse .

Well , you know , not so happy about this whole Coronavirus thing , but I can still do my time lapsing .

Thank you .

I'm so glad you can still help us with time lapsing .

Old man .

Time lapse .

Let's go ahead and kick it in and , uh , speed through this polishing phase where I add more and more lines throughout the drawing , use the black uh prisma color to sort of beef up the contrast .

And then maybe at the end , I'll be able to come back with my uh beloved white wash and add some white highlights .

But let's go ahead and finish off uh the pencil part of the drawing .

OK .

So you can see what a difference it makes to add this black colored pencil .

Now bear in mind it takes quite a long time to build up this level of detail in the fur though .

I , you know , fast forwarded through all that .

It actually took me about an hour or more , you know , maybe an hour and a half , probably to build up all of this detail in the fur .

You gotta be patient if you wanna have this kind of uh an effect uh in your drawing .

But you might , you know , you might want to do more of a sketchy kind of a drawing that doesn't have this level of detail .

There's nothing wrong with that .

But one thing I wanna show you is my final touch with the beloved white gosh , a kind of opaque , uh , water based white paint that uh allows me to add , um , some highlights and I think particularly in the area of the eyes , um , having diluted this paint just a little bit with water .

So as to allow it to , uh , go down onto the page in a smoother way , I'm gonna add just a little bit of um highlights here like the sun or some sort , some sort of light source glinting off of the eye .

Um These little white dots can make a surprisingly big difference .

And I'm also gonna try to uh suggest some light falling onto the nose to reveal that structure .

Um maybe just a little bit of light along the edge of the cheek .

It's interesting how there really are not cheek bones the way you know , like for human cheek bones .

Uh you really don't see any indication of a cheekbone on uh this type of monkey anyway .

And it's almost like the inverse , you know , it's sort of like curving up and around .

But yeah , these , if you can get a hold of some uh white gosh , you will find not just for this drawing but all sorts of illustrations , adding little highlights can really make a quite a big difference in terms of the um sort of three dimensionality .

Uh the believability of the final illustration .

Well , I think that kind of brings us to the end of things .

Hang on .

I'm gonna go ahead and grab my books so that I can say thank you to anyone who has supported me by getting them like the two pencil method , the book that is entirely devoted to the technique you saw displayed in this video and has an entire chapter on drawing animals .

If you like that kind of thing , the drawing lesson , a graphic novel that teaches you how to draw and the real challenge .

My book , um hyper realistic illustrations , I really cannot say thank you enough to those of you who choose to support me by getting any of those books .

And I just wanna sign off by uh giving some words of encouragement to , to those of you out there like me that are sort of stuck indoors a lot more than usual .

Um I have faith that we're gonna get through this and that humanity is going to come out stronger and better .

Uh At the end of it , it might not look that way sometimes right now .

But uh II , I gotta believe uh we're gonna learn from this and we're gonna come out stronger .

So I'm gonna go ahead and lay down my pencil right now .

I wanna thank you all for watching this video .

I really hope you enjoyed it and I'll be back with another one real soon .