How to Draw a Starfish – Easy Starfish Drawing

As usual, our starfish drawing starts with a few simple lines.

Start with three lines to draw an upside-down “Y”. Note that our “Y” leans slightly to the left, and the lines are not straight but slightly bent.

Then, add the two side lines – the arms to make a funny sticky figure. Again, these are slightly bent and up.

Here, we are sketching the outline of our starfish. You are basically doubling up the star center lines with curved outer edges.

The pointy ends of the starfish arms are not sharp but rounded off. And each arm is slightly widening as it reaches the center. In a way, each starfish arm looks suspiciously similar to a half of banana drawing.

Now, with the simple starfish body shape drawing done, we can add some interesting patterns of suction cups to our starfish.

Start with the five pointy arm ends and draw a little rounded-off triangle on each arm tip.

Then add two small touching almost circles on each inner arms corner.

Next, follow the outline shape of the starfish body and draw small oval suction cups, one next to each other, with a small gap in between all around the body outline.

Depending on its length, you can squeeze five to eight suction cups at each side of the starfish arm.

Next up, more of the suction cups!

This time, follow the center lines on the starfish’s body and cover each arm with small ovals.

Make these noticeably smaller than the outer edge suction cups – it will make the pattern more interesting.

This is a simple step to close the starfish body outline, playing “connect the dots” here. Just fill in the gaps between the outer suction cups, following the sketched outline.

Next, we are adding a few more suction cups to the center of the starfish. These are yet again smaller than the ones on the center line.

A pattern of three small circles in a “V” shape for the larger gaps and just one or two in the narrower corners is all it takes.

Our starfish drawing is almost complete. The last small detail is to add two thin outlines along each edge of the center-line suction cups.

This again adds some more interest to the pattern of suction cups on the starfish – and will help us as a guideline when coloring the starfish drawing.

The final details, for those with patience and a keen eye, are small double-up lines in each of the suction cup ovals. These add some volume to the ovals and make them look puffed-up. (You might want to check out the full-size image to see them properly.)

Here is the polished result of our “how to draw a starfish” tutorial after we erased the sketch lines.

Now, this was one of the many possible patterns for the starfish drawing – a one that is nice and easy to draw.

There are around 1,900 different species of starfish. If you check the Google image search for starfish, you can find inspiration to draw many other interesting patterns.

That said, this simple and easy starfish drawing should give you a good base to start from.

And finally, here is the starfish drawing colored in. Again, starfish come in many colors, so feel free to go wild.

Here, we like the simple orange-red. For some contrast, we have colored the arm centerlines and the center of the starfish with a darker shade of red, leaving all the suction cups simply white.

The dark blue “sea water” background adds some nice contrast to our completed starfish drawing.