How to Draw a Starfish

In today’s fun and easy drawing exercise, you will learn how to draw a starfish from sketches to adding color. Turn your starfish illustration into beach-themed stickers, make ocean art sublimation designs, or create printable activity sheets for children.

When you are ready to begin this starfish drawing exercise, get all of your supplies ready. You can use pencils, crayons, or even digital programs on your computer and tablet. No matter what medium you have on hand, our easy-to-follow drawing tutorials cater to everyone.

During the tutorial, we will be using Procreate as our app of choice. We have a great selection of FREE Procreate brushes that are perfect for learning how to draw.

Step 1 - Make Sketches of your Starfish

In the first step of our starfish drawing, we are going to create rough sketches with a pencil medium. If you do not have a pencil available, use a light-colored medium instead.

Make a Guide

Start drawing by making a simple guide for your shape. A starfish is shaped like a star and has five arms. To make your guide, draw five lines in a circular direction to make a star shape.

Create the Shape

Sketch around your first arm guide and begin adding shape to your design. Do this by roughly sketching an arched shape that is narrower at the end and wider at the bottom. See our arm drawing below.

Continue adding shape to each of the arms, until you have completed the star shape. Your starfish arms do not have to be perfectly straight, so you can make them curve to the sides if you want.

Add the Bumps

Going over your initial guidelines, draw a bunch of circles. Start in the center of your star sketch with a big circle. As you move down each arm, make each circle smaller than the previous one.

Step 2 - Outline your Starfish Rough Sketch

With a lining medium that is dark and defining, trace over your starfish art sketches. Keep in mind not to trace over your center guide sketch. Only outline the arms and circles. We used these ink Procreate brushes to get thick and thin lines to give it a nice lining effect.

Step 3 - Add Color to your Starfish

In this step, we are adding color and highlights with textured shading to our starfish clipart. For your drawing, you can use any color you have available, such as shades of purple, pink or blue.

Add your colors to your starfish outline, and then add a bit of shading with Procreate texture brushes around the sides of the arms.

With white or another light color, create highlights inside your circles with wavy lines next to them. This will give your starfish clipart a fun vibrant pattern without being too overly complicated.

In just a few steps you learned to sketch, outline, and color your starfish illustration. You can create different shapes by making the arms shorter, narrower and changing the color.

Create other ocean creatures to combine with your starfish. You could learn how to draw an octopus or draw a dolphin with our free guides.