How to Draw a Plague Doctor

In this tutorial, we will show you how to draw a plague doctor – a very interesting character who was formally considered a doctor but had little in common with modern doctors.
Plague doctors appeared in the Middle Ages, during the plague – in an era when most formidable weapons were arrows, the only source of knowledge was a book and the only light source was torches and candles.

 

Step 1

We will draw Plague Doctor in the style of medieval engravings. First, draw an oval for the head. Sketch the torso in the form of a rectangle. Outline the hands and legs. We want to notice, that in the first steps you should not press down on a pencil too hard.

Step 2

Draw the lines of the facial symmetry. The vertical line will help you to find the center of the face and help to draw the beak. The horizontal line will help you to draw the eyes. Draw the outlines of the hat, which was typical for all doctors of that era. Draw the outlines of the cane, cloak, and the stick in the hands of the Plague Doctor.

Step 3

Ok, now proceed to the third step of the tutorial on how to draw a Plague Doctor.  Add volume to the arms. At first, draw the long and wide sleeves of the cloak, that tucked into the gloves. Then draw the gloves and sketch the fingers.

Step 4

Now you need to add details to the head of the Plague Doctor. First, draw the openings for the eyes. Draw the lines of the fabric around the face. Visually this fabric passes from under the hat, that is, from the temple across the cheekbones and chin to another temple.

Step 5

Draw the lines of the fabric around the neck. Add details to the hands. Draw some folds on the sleeves. Draw the palms and fingers in detail. Give the volume to the stick in the hands of the Plague Doctor. And if you already know how to draw straight lines, then visit our tutorial on how to draw Wolverine claws. Add some folds to the gloves to make the drawing more realistic.

Step 6

Now erase all guidelines from the Plague Doctor drawing and start adding the final details. Then draw a line that divides the beak into two parts. To add more realism draw the seam above this line. After that, add some folds to the bottom of the cloak. Darken all the lines of the figure and erase all remaining unnecessary lines. By the way, if this tutorial seems too difficult for you, we recommend you tutorials on how to draw an apple or how to draw an iPad.

Step 7

In the final stage of the tutorial on how to draw a Plague Doctor, you should add some shadows. Light falls on our figure from the upper right corner. Given this and the rules of light and shadow, try to draw shadows as in our example. In contrast to the comic book style, in this drawing, we will not draw too contrasting shadows. Draw the shadows using soft and smooth pencil strokes. Try to make the transitions between light and shadow as soft as possible.

So, it was a pretty difficult lesson, is not it? We hope that we had taught you how to draw a Plague Doctor. If you like difficult tutorials like this one, we recommend you to visit our tutorials on how to draw Wolverine’s head or how to draw Sub-Zero. But if you like easy drawing lessons we recommend you our tutorial on how to draw an iPad or how to draw a donut. Share this tutorial with your friends and subscribe to us on social networks.