How to draw a Bat for Halloween

An easy step by step to drawing a Halloween bat

Carrying on with the Halloween drawing theme, last time I showed you how to draw a Halloween Pumpkin, in this blog post we’ll take a look at how to draw a bat in a few easy steps.

By the end you’ll be confident enough to draw a variety of cartoon bats!

Why do bats have this association with Halloween and all things spooky? Perhaps its the existence of blood sucking vampire bats or because they can look very creepy or the fact that they are nocturnal so mainly come out at night.

Whatever the reason we’re glad these companions to Count Dracula exist to create a frisson of fear as they float, silhouetted by the moon, behind a witch’s broomstick.

Let’s start with the ears

Connect the bat’s ears

Now draw another slightly curved line connecting the ears, this is the top of the head.

Next draw the outer side of the bat’s face by extending the ears downwards.

Drawing bat wings

Now let’s draw the top of the bat’s wings. This is simply done with two curved lines on each side.

Starting from the bottom point of the face, the first curved line moves outwards and ends above the bat’s head. Begin the second curved line where the first one ends, it moves downwards and further out from the head.

The bottom side of the wings is a series of three arching curves that start at the end of the second curve we drew above and end at a point underneath the head.

Two eyes

Give your bat two eyes, they can be any shape you want, circular, triangular or piercing slits!

One finished bat

And here’s our finished bat. Colour it in if you like, black for the body with contrasting yellow or red eyes would look good and suitably creepy!

Draw a slightly different looking bat

You can experiment with the shapes of the different elements that make up the bat.

Here the bat’s ears look rather leaf like:

Connect the ears as we did previously:

The upper wings are more curved on this bat and don’t extend upwards:

But the bottom of the wings is very similar to what we had before:

Add a pair of interesting eyes:

And here’s another Halloween bat!

A few other bat styles

Here are a few more bat styles, have a go yourself and see what you can come up with.

Colour your bat

Colour in your bat with whatever tools you have to hand – traditional pencils and paints, digital colouring or a mix of the two. Try out different colours and textures, you don’t have to keep to a standard look.