Combining art with math, geometric animal art can be a great art project to do with kids.
How To Draw Geometric Animals
Here are the basic steps to drawing animals using geometric shapes:
#1 Find a photograph of an animal.
Kids can pick their favourite animal or use a picture of their pet.
My daughter’s favourite animal is a fox. To find a picture for her to use, I did a simple search on a website with free photo downloads called Pixabay.
We found a beautiful fox image that didn’t have any body parts hidden by grass or any another object, and also had enough contrasting colors to be easy to work with.
#2 Print photo
Print the photo if it’s digital, or cut out the image if it’s in a magazine.
If you have a photo editing software, you have the option of sizing the photo to whatever dimensions desired. If not just print out as is.
#3 Place card stock or paper over image.
This works the easiest if you have a tracing light box or something else to make tracing easier. A few pieces of scotch tape might be helpful to keep everything from moving.
#4 Trace outline of image using only straight lines.
You’re going to redraw the outside of your image with only straight lines. A small ruler will be very helpful.
Since we are doing geometric art, this won’t be exactly like the image. You can decide to do more lines to more closely resemble the animal, or less lines for a simpler effect.
#5 Trace parts like the eyes and nose of the animal using geometric shapes.
Using your ruler, trace these areas making sure all lines are straight.
#6 To add more detail, you can draw straight lines to emphasize different parts of the body.
For example, in the fox image, I chose to outline the head, and distinguish the hind leg from its tail. Of course this is optional and up to each artists artistic choice.
#7 Draw lines to fill the inside of the animal with geometric shapes.
Common geometric shapes are triangles, rectangles, and other 4 sided polygons.
You can choose to do smaller shapes which will mean there are more shapes, or bigger shapes which means there will be less of them.
I had my daughter do hers in pencil so she could erase things she didn’t like. It was a good idea as she created a lot of lines that were at times too close together to be able to see shapes. So there was some erasing that needed to be done.
Afterwards, she retraced everything in black marker to make the lines nice and crisp.
#8 Color if desired.
If desired, shapes can be colored in.
I told my daughter to choose 3 – 5 colors for her fox. She choose her coloured pencil crayons and then colored each of the geometric shapes of her animal one of those colors.
This is my 9 year old’s geometric fox:
She has some things to work on, but that’s what learning is all about. Overall, I was very impressed with her geometric animal art.
Making Greeting Cards With Geometric Art
I have always enjoyed creating my own handmade cards. I have a box where I keep all the greeting cards I’ve made. When I need a card, I dig through my box to pick just the right one.
I hope to be able to pass on this hobby to my daughter, so she too can make her own greeting card creations.
Getting kids involved with creating greeting cards has many benefits. It combines art with writing, and teaches empathy and thinking of others.
And making geometric art animals is a great start to creating some nice greeting cards.
Simple Ways To Make Greeting Cards
Layering Different Colors of Card Stock
Layering various colors of card stock is one easy way to make a greeting card.
For my geometric fox card, I simply trimmed the white card stock of my geometric fox, and glued it to a larger layer of brown card stock. Inside the card I glued a white sheet of paper.
When I end up using my card, I might add some black lettering to the white area, depending on what I want it to say, like “Thank You” perhaps or “Get Well Soon”.
Using White Card Stock and Folding It
For my daughter’s geometric fox card, she created it on white card stock that was folded over in the shape of a square.
I had some artistic suggestions for my daughter, but she decided to come up with her own idea. This is her finished card:
Layering Cut Out Shapes of Card Stock or Colored Paper
Here’s another geometric animal art card we made.
We used the same methods above except we drew the outline of the giraffe on yellow card stock and then cut it out.
For the spots we cut shapes from brown paper and glued them on.
We focused on the eyes and nose and other identifying features we wished to highlight, using not exact shapes but using a ruler to trace our original photo using the straight line method as explained above. We did those pieces on black paper and glued them on the yellow giraffe silhouette.
When our giraffe was complete, we glued it to another coloured card stock that was cut and folded into a card.
Related: Another beautiful animal greeting card is this DIY owl handmade card.
More Geometric Art Ideas
For more geometric art ideas for kids, check out this book “Math Art and Drawing Games For Kids“
