27 Monkey Pencil Drawing Ideas and References to Draw From

Monkeys are the animal that punishes sloppy drawing. The face reads as almost-human, so a proportion error that you would forgive on a dog looks instantly wrong here, and the fur grows in a dozen competing directions across one head. That is exactly why they are worth practising. Below are 27 pencil references pulled apart one at a time — what each drawing is actually doing, and the specific skill it will force you to fix.

Work through them in any order. The early ones are character-led and forgiving; the forest studies and the front-on portrait near the end are where the real difficulty sits. If you want a wider animal warm-up first, the realistic animal pencil drawing collection covers the same fur-and-anatomy problems across a dozen species, and these realistic deer pencil drawings are the closest cousin to a monkey coat in terms of stroke direction.

27 Monkey Pencil Drawing Ideas to Work Through

1. Mother and Infant Macaque

Two coats meet here and they run in opposite directions: the mother’s chest fur sweeps down and outward, the baby’s crown fur sweeps up. Keep that contrast and the embrace reads instantly. Notice that the infant’s face is the only crisply edged area in the whole picture — everything else is soft. That single hard edge is what pulls your eye where the artist wants it.

2. Chimp Belting Into a Microphone

The head is tipped back, which means the jaw is foreshortened and the muzzle shortens dramatically. Most people draw the open mouth flat and lose the tilt. Build the skull first as an egg on a neck, mark where the brow ridge sits, and only then cut the mouth in. The dark cave of the throat is your deepest value on the page — save it for last.

3. Full-Body Chimp on a Stool

A rare full-body reference in a set dominated by heads. The weight sits on one hip, the spine curls forward, and the long arm counterbalances it. Block the whole silhouette in before any fur exists — if the silhouette reads as a singing chimp with no interior detail, the drawing is already working. Chimp feet grip like hands, so give the toes real length.

4. Pistol Aimed Straight at the Viewer

Extreme foreshortening: the barrel is essentially a circle and the forearm is compressed to almost nothing. Draw the gun as a stack of simple boxes and cylinders in perspective before you add any metal shine. The jacket does the storytelling here — cloth folds are hard-edged and angular, fur is soft and broken, and the contrast between those two textures is the whole point of the piece.

5. Chimp in a Fedora

The hat brim throws a cast shadow across the brow and eyes, which instantly sells the noir mood. Get that shadow shape right and you barely need to render the eyes at all. The brim is an ellipse seen from slightly below, so both its front and back curves must belong to the same tilted plane — that is the mistake most beginners make with hats.

6. Extended Arm and Pistol

This one is really a hand study wearing a monkey costume. The thumb wraps the grip, the index finger sits along the trigger guard, and the knuckle line curves rather than running straight. If hands are your weak point, sketch the grip on its own five or six times before attempting the full drawing — these pencil and ink hand studies are useful for that drill.

7. Seated Chimp With an Open Book

The book gives you a hard geometric object in the middle of an organic subject, and it is unforgiving — the two pages are planes in perspective, so their outer edges converge slightly. Note the feet drawn up into the frame: the artist used them to close the composition into a stable triangle instead of letting the body drift off the bottom of the page.

8. Chimp Reading, Shoulders Hunched

Same subject as the previous drawing, staged differently, which makes the pair a good comparison exercise. Here the book is held upright and the shoulders round forward over it. The page curve catches the light and stays almost white, so the fur has to be pushed several values darker than feels comfortable to keep that white reading as paper rather than as a hole.

9. Half-Finished Portrait With the Artist’s Hand

A work-in-progress shot, and more instructive than a finished piece. The eyes and ear are fully rendered while the lower muzzle is still bare outline — that is a working order worth stealing. Establish your darkest darks in the eye first so every later value has something to be judged against, instead of rendering evenly across the page and discovering at the end that nothing is dark enough.

10. Climbing Study on the Easel

The climb runs on a diagonal from bottom-left to top-right, and the tail curls back against it to stop the composition sliding out of frame. Limbs alternate in a spiral rhythm rather than sitting in matched pairs. Draw a single line of action from the gripping hand through the hips to the tail tip first — get that line wrong and no amount of fur rescues it.

11. Macaque Portrait, Hand Beneath the Chin

The pale, nearly hairless face sits inside a dark ruff, so the whole drawing hangs on that one value jump. Leave the face paper-white for most of the process and build the surrounding fur dark around it. The fine skin wrinkles around the eyes and muzzle go in last with a sharp 2H — heavy lines there instantly age the animal by twenty years.

12. Monkey Seated on a Thick Branch

The branch is rendered more heavily than the background but less than the animal, which creates three clear depth layers on a flat page. Bark takes short broken strokes that follow the branch’s curve around its cylinder. If your foliage keeps competing with your subject, these tree sketching studies show how far you can suggest a canopy with almost nothing.

13. Lying Along a Sloped Branch

The body follows a single long diagonal and the folded arms create a horizontal that stops the eye at the face. Everything behind the animal is drawn with the side of the pencil and left deliberately unresolved. This is a good study for relaxed weight — the chest sags into the branch rather than hovering above it, and drawing that small compression sells the contact.

14. Baby Monkey Clinging to a Vertical Pole

Four points of contact, all bearing real load — the fingers wrap the far side of the pole and the toes dig in below. Beginners draw hands resting on a surface instead of gripping around it, and the whole pose goes weightless. Show a fingertip or two crossing the far edge of the pole and the grip becomes believable in a single stroke.

15. Chimp Lying in Leaf Litter

This is the darkest drawing in the set, and it works because the face is the lightest area inside a dense field of hatching. Squint at it and you see a bright oval floating in near-black. Build the background as one big mass of value first, then lift the face back out with a kneaded eraser — much easier than tiptoeing around it.

16. Face Emerging Beside a Trunk

Partial occlusion is the lesson: the trunk crops the body, so your brain fills in a whole animal that was never drawn. Detail is concentrated in a tight zone around the eyes and falls off fast toward the edges of the frame. That falloff is deliberate focus control, not laziness — rendering everything equally would flatten the picture.

17. Small Figure in a Forest Clearing

The animal occupies maybe a tenth of the page and the drawing is stronger for it. Trees thin out and lighten as they recede, which is atmospheric perspective doing the work no outline can. Try this as a compositional exercise: draw the same monkey small in a large environment and resist the urge to zoom in. The restraint is the lesson.

18. Banana With a Single Colour Pop

Everything is graphite except one yellow banana, and that restraint is the trick. One colour in a monochrome drawing acts like a spotlight — add a second and the effect collapses. Keep the yellow flat and simple; if you render it as carefully as the fur it stops being an accent and starts being a competing subject.

19. Two Bananas and a Stuck-Out Tongue

The same colour-pop idea pushed toward comedy. The tongue is the difficult part: it is wet, so it carries a sharp specular highlight and a soft shadow underneath, unlike the matte fur surrounding it. Leaving a hard white gap for that highlight is what stops the tongue looking like a slab of grey clay.

20. Baby Monkey on a Stone Post

A tall, narrow composition with a lot of empty paper below the subject, and the hanging tail is what keeps that emptiness from feeling accidental. The pitted stone gives you a rough, irregular texture to set against soft fur. Vary your pencil pressure hard on the stone and keep it feather-light on the coat.

21. Symmetrical Front-On Portrait

The hardest angle in the whole set. Dead-on symmetry means every error is doubled and obvious, so measure the eye spacing against the nose width before committing to any rendering. The irises here are noticeably pale against dark pupils and lids, which is what gives the stare its intensity — blend them too dark and the animal goes lifeless.

22. Chimp in a Peaked Cap

Costume drawing done properly. The cap is a stiff, machine-made object with a crisp crown seam and a hard peak, sitting directly against irregular fur — opposite textures touching along one edge. Keep the cap’s lines mechanical and ruled-feeling and let the fur stay broken. If both are drawn with the same stroke, the hat looks knitted.

23. Stylised Chimp With Oversized Eyes

This one enlarges the eyes and shortens the muzzle while keeping realistic fur, which is the classic cartoon-realism hybrid. It works because the exaggeration is applied consistently — half-realistic and half-stylised on the same face looks like a mistake rather than a choice. For more on scaling eyes without breaking a face, see these big-eyed cartoon character studies.

24. Clean Line Art in Leaves

No shading at all — form is carried entirely by line weight and by how densely the strokes are packed. Thicker contour outside, finer marks inside. Drawing something like this is the fastest way to find out whether your shapes actually work, because there is no rendering to hide behind. It also prints straight to a colouring sheet, in the same spirit as these printable animal colouring pages.

25. Baby Chimp With Glossy Eyes

Cuteness here is engineered: eyes set low and wide, cranium enlarged, muzzle shortened, features pushed down the face. The glossy look comes from two highlights per eye — one bright and hard from the key light, one faint and soft opposite it. Put both highlights in the same spot in both eyes or the gaze will drift. The spiked hair should be flicked outward with a fast wrist, not drawn slowly.

26. Top Hat and Ruffled Cravat

The most decorative piece in the set. Around the face the marks are controlled; out toward the hat and collar they dissolve into loose scribble that never resolves into anything specific. That deliberate decay from tight to loose is a professional habit worth copying — it directs attention and saves hours. It directs attention and saves hours.

27. Nine-Panel Cartoon Expression Sheet

Finish where the page started, but now draw your own version. Nine heads, one character, nine emotions, and the head shape must stay recognisably the same in all of them — that consistency is the entire exercise. Note that the changes are tiny: an eyebrow angle, a lifted lip corner, one eyelid lowered. Big distortions are easy; small controlled ones are what animators actually get paid for.

Pencils and Marks That Suit Monkey Fur

Almost every drawing above was built with a small pencil range, not a big one. An HB for the initial construction, a 2B and 4B for the bulk of the coat, a 6B or 8B reserved for the deepest points — nostrils, the inside of the mouth, the gap between fingers. A 2H sharpened to a needle handles the fine facial wrinkles, and a kneaded eraser lifts light back out rather than scrubbing it away.

• Follow the growth, not the outline. Fur radiates outward from the crown, sweeps down the cheeks, and reverses direction along the forearm. Stroke direction is what makes a coat read as fur instead of texture.
• Vary stroke length by zone. Short flicks on the face, longer sweeps on the shoulders and back, tight controlled marks around the eyes.
• Draw clumps, not hairs. Fur separates into wedges and tufts. Render the clumps and let a few stray hairs break the silhouette at the edges.
• Leave the highlight, don’t add it. Plan white paper into the eyes and the top of the muzzle from the start; erasing a highlight back in almost always looks muddy.
• Push your darks further than feels safe. Most weak animal drawings sit in a narrow mid-grey band. If nothing on the page is near-black, nothing looks lit.

Where Monkey Drawings Usually Go Wrong

The muzzle drifts too long. Chimp and macaque faces are flatter than most people remember, and an over-projected muzzle reads as a dog. Measure it against eye width before rendering anything.

The eyes end up too high. Ape brow ridges are heavy and the eyes sit tucked beneath them, lower on the head than a human’s. Getting that ridge shadow right fixes half the likeness on its own.

The fur turns into scribble. This is usually a direction problem, not an effort problem. Slow down and decide which way the coat grows on each part of the body before filling anything in. The same fix applies to any coated animal — these dog sketching references drill it hard.

The hands go vague. Monkey hands carry the character, and blurring them is the fastest way to lose a drawing that was otherwise going well. Give them the same attention as the face.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the easiest monkey to draw for a beginner?

A stylised young chimp with enlarged eyes and a shortened muzzle, like drawings 23 and 25 above. Exaggerated proportions are forgiving — a small error reads as style rather than as a mistake. The front-on realistic portrait at number 21 is the opposite, and is the one to save for later.

How do I stop monkey fur from looking like scribble?

Decide the growth direction for each region before you shade it, and stroke with it every time. Then build in two passes: a light directional base layer, and a second darker pass only in the shadowed clumps. Uniform pressure across an entire coat is what flattens it into scribble.

Which pencil grades do these drawings need?

HB, 2B, 4B and one very soft grade such as 6B will cover everything on this page. Add a 2H for fine facial wrinkles. Grade range matters far less than value range — a full drawing done well with just a 2B beats a scattered one made with a twenty-pencil set.

Can I use these as references for a tattoo or a commission?

Use them the way you would use any reference: to study pose, value structure and texture, then draw your own. Copying a finished piece stroke for stroke is fine as private practice but is not yours to sell. Study it, then close the reference and draw from memory — that is when it sticks.

Pick three drawings from this page that scare you slightly — the front-on portrait, the foreshortened pistol arm, the forest clearing — and work through those instead of the comfortable ones. That is where the fur, the proportion and the value control actually get learned. When you want a broader animal challenge afterwards, the little animal sketch series will keep the practice going.