How to draw a beautiful rabbit with pencils

Hi, today I'm going to show you how to draw a beautiful rabbit with pencils and I'll also share some tips along the way for drawing fur in general. I'm Sabrina, I'm an artist from Austria and I love sharing my knowledge about drawing with you. So without further ado let's get into the tutorial. For materials you will need pencils ranging from H to 6B, a black coloring pencil, a tissue, an eraser or eraser pencil and some sketching paper. Before you start print out a black and white photo of the rabbit. In the first step we must map out the lines for the drawing. Draw a long ellipse in the middle of your paper for the rabbit's face. Another ellipse, this time drawn horizontally, marks out its cheeks. Next draw two more ellipses as ears which start in the upper third of the first ellipse. Use your printed photo as a guide to get the angle of the ears right. In my sketch you can also see that the head is divided by a cross in the middle. The horizontal line shows you exactly where the eyes will be and the vertical line is a guide for the center of the face. This will help you later when drawing eyes, nose and mouth. By breaking down the motive in the first step completing the sketch is now much easier. Now draw the eyes, nose and mouth. Use the cross in the middle of the face as a guide. Next lightly soften the contours of the rabbit to make them flow. Imagine the ellipses melting into one another. Adjust the shape of the ears accordingly. If you look closely you will notice that the ears are not perfect ellipses. Once you're satisfied with the sketch erase all construction lines. We can now start shading. Take a close look at your printed photo and try to narrow down the dark and medium dark areas of the photo. After all the photo is made up of many different shades of grey. Now concentrate only on these medium and darkest shades of grey. Fill in these areas on your drawing with a pencil. It's best to use an HB or 2B pencil. Be careful not to make these areas too dark because you can add more later. Leave the lighter areas in the photo blank. In the next step take a softer pencil for example 4B and go over these very very dark areas again. Which areas look almost black in the photo? These are the areas you should be focusing on with your pencil. These are for example the eyes, the nose, the mouth and the insides of the ears. A soft pencil contains more graphite than a hard pencil and is therefore darker but it's also more difficult to erase. So be careful when to use a dark pencil. Next use a scrunched up tissue or a cotton swab to smooth out the edges. Gently wipe over your pencil strokes to make them softer and more even. This way even the smallest gaps between the strokes are filled in with a little graphite and the drawing looks much less rough. For step number six you need an eraser pencil or a pointed eraser. I can highly recommend purchasing an eraser pencil which you can use to erase single strokes very precisely. Now take another look at your reference photo and identify the brightest areas. You might have blended into these areas with your tissue or cotton bud in the previous step. Therefore you should now touch up the edges with your eraser of choice. We can now draw in realistic fur. You have already laid the foundation for this in the previous steps. Use an extra dark pencil upwards of 4B and start to draw lots of individual hairs. The rabbit's fur on its head and ears is much shorter than on its body. This means that your strokes on the head must be short and the strokes on the body a little longer and more curved. In fact the fur on the nose is so short that you should almost draw dots instead of lines. Pay attention to the direction the fur grows in. Not all hairs flow in the same way. You should also make this visible in your drawing. Look at this picture for reference. Give your drawing more depth by making the black areas even darker with a black coloring pencil. This increases the contrast between light and dark areas, making your drawing much more realistic and three-dimensional. Use an opaque black coloring pencil to draw black areas. The darkest parts of your drawing will attract the viewer's attention first. Therefore you should give the eyes, nose and mouth a lot of black. The eyes will become much deeper and more realistic. In the last step you can add a few more details to the rabbit. For example we cannot forget to include the long whiskers that are characteristic for a rabbit. Because these long hairs are very thin and rather light you should use a hard pencil. A hard pencil does not get dull as quickly. This will help you to maintain a constant stroke width. Move the pencil across the paper in dynamic fast motions. Press firmly at the beginning of the stroke and then release towards the end of the stroke. This way your strokes will be evenly curved and thinner towards the end. I hope you enjoyed drawing this rabbit as much as I did and I hope to see you next time.