How to Draw a Sleigh

In today's beginner drawing guide, we are going to show you how to draw a sleigh. With your illustration, create lovely Christmas clipart or easily add other elements to make a festive scene for your crafts. Who wouldn’t want a custom-drawn door sign or some sublimated throw pillows to decorate your home?

Use our other free drawing tutorials to decorate your sleigh such as how to draw a Christmas tree or draw a reindeer.

For your illustration, you can use any art supply or digital drawing app. With our drawing tutorials, you can create your drawings using the mediums that you have on hand. So feel free to use crayons, oil pastels, or Procreate and DesignScape.

Step 1 - Create Rough Sketches of your Sleigh

Let us begin our drawing by using a sketching medium. You can use an erasable or light-colored medium to make your rough sketches. Make sure that if you are using a light-colored medium, you can cover it up when adding an outline or color.

Create the Main Shape

On the bottom half of your drawing space, rough sketch a long horizontal rectangle. Then, on the top right side, draw a triangle. This will be the main shape of our Santa sleigh drawing.

Add the Top Detail

Draw small circular shapes on the top left side of your rectangle and on the top right of your triangle. We will use these circles to create the top wooden curved detail of our sleigh.

Connect the circle by drawing a downward curving line from the bottom of your right circle to your left one. As you get close to your left circle, curve your line upward. See our sketched example below. Then, follow the bottom curve, and draw a line connecting to the top of your circles.

Add the Sleigh Ski

At the bottom of your main shape add the ski. To create our ski we made a long rectangle that curved up in the front. Then attach the ski to the sleigh by drawing curvy or straight lines in between as we did.

Step 2 - Outline your Sleigh Rough Sketch

Using a lining medium, trace the rough sketches to create a defined line drawing. Starting with the top, outline the outer sketch lines and add a swirl in the center of the circle sketches.

Then, trace the outer lines of your main sleigh outline shape. Start at one end and as you get to the bottom, round out the corners.

Continue with tracing the ski and once you are done, you can remove your rough sketches.

Step 3 - Add Color to your Sleigh

The sleigh clipart has been sketched and outlined, so now we will add some color. We used red, brown, and yellow for our color palette. But you can use any color you want for the three areas of your Christmas sleigh drawing.

After adding our base color we used Procreate texture brushes to add shading for depth and texture.

Great job on completing your festive sleigh drawing exercise! With your drawing done, you can add other elements or create a 3D text effect in DesignScape to add to your drawing.

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We hope you enjoyed following along with this tutorial. Now that you know how to draw a sleigh using basic shapes, just imagine what else you can draw!