How To Draw: Bats

After a great time bat watching on Wednesday night, I couldn't resist drawing them for this week's How To Draw. As the only mammal to fly, bats are amazing to watch, but their wings can make them tricky to draw. Unlike bird wings, bat wings are featherless and are instead made of a thin membrane of skin covering a frame which is the bat's arm and modified long fingers. Like birds though, they can twist their wings into a manner of different shapes, giving you a variety of poses to draw. If you want to learn how to draw a bat in these various shapes, my How To Draw: Birds In Flight post has all the information you need, just replace the birds with bats.

Stage One

Lets begin with a bat in flight. Here, I am going to draw a brown long-eared bat on the wing. To draw any bat, the basic structure is an oval for the body, a circle for the head and large round shapes for the wings, tail and ears. Don't worry about exact size of the wings at the moment, just make an estimate guess for now as we are only interested in the genral shape at this stage of the drawing.

Stage Two

Stage Two is where we work out the size of the wings and adjust the shape of the bat. I don't actually start this stage of the drawing with the wings but with the ears. Once I have redrawn the ears (adding structure to the lobes) and adjusting the shape and size of the head and drawing in the eyes and snout, I can now use the ears as a guidance to where the shape of the wing should be. I began drawing the wing close to the ears first, starting half way down the top ear. Then draw in the frame and 'spokes' of the wing with thin lines and connect the 'spokes' with a slightly curved line for the membarane of skin at the bottom of the wing. For the other wing, begin again at the top ear and from the line where the body meets, leave a gap of roughly a couple of inches and draw the frame and 'spokes' of the wing and connecting them with a curved line just as before. The tail is done in a similar way to the wings, with thin lines for the legs and the tail between the legs. They are then connected with a 'V'-shaped edge of a membrane of skin.

Stage Three

Redraw the outlines in pen and shade in the wings and tail, but be careful not go over the wing's framework or the legs. Lightly shade in the body, creating a texture of fur by making a layer of tiny lines. The head is a slightly darker shade and the ears have lightly dark centres with light lines representing blood vessels.

Stage Four

I have a few techniques on show for this colouring stage. First, the frames of the wings and the legs are coloured pink. But I used a rubber to slightly bleach out the bold colour. The wings have a light layer of yellow along the edges as a highlight. The ears orange which were layered over in bright yellow to make them stand out. Then I used black and brown to darken parts of the ears to look concaved inwards and I used my pen to go over the blood vessel lines again. Finally, the body. I was actually having trouble making it look pale using a light yellow and white pencil crayon as it blended in with the pen ink that I used to create fur texture. So, I ended up using a white soft pastel to get the body to the level of paleness that I wanted. To apply pastel or chalk, you can either layer it on or, as I have done, create a line and brush it to where you want it with your finger. If you make a mistake when applying the pastel, don't worry, you can use your fingernail to scratch it off or a rubber to rub it off. I then scratched away at the chalk with my pen to create the fur texture once again. The head is brown and the snout is pink.

Stage One

A bat, of course, only fly at night. During the day, they famously hang upside down. For my final drawing for today, I will draw a lesser horseshoe bat at rest. The basic shape of a resting bat includes an oval for the body and a circle for the head. Then draw two pointed 'ear'-shapes for the bat's legs and on either side of the bat's body, draw some shapes representing the wings which are folded and wrapped around the sleeping bat.

Stage Two

Now draw more detail to each part of the bat. The legs are simple thin lines with small blobs for feet with the thighs looking like mini chicken thighs. The wings are thin at the top and thicker towards the head with the frame work of lines added along the edge of one side of the wing and a small claw sticking out at the bottom. The facial features includes tear-shapes for ears and a 'U'-shape under the snout (a key feature for a horseshoe bat).

Stage Three

Redraw in pen and shade in your bat. Dark shades for the wings and body with light shaded patches around the head and legs.

Stage Four

Finally, colour in your bat. Brown for the fur and pink for the wing frames, ears and snout.

And that is how to draw a bat. I hope this has helped inspire you to pick up a bat detector or join a bat walk and to enjoy these amazing nocturnal creatures for yourself. Remember, bats are protected by law and is illegal to disturb them from their roost sites. So instead of taking photographs which disturbs them when using the flash on the camera, get your sketchbook and pencil out and draw them as an alternative.