How To Draw Clifford The Big Red Dog

Getting Clifford Right Without Losing Your Mind

Drawing Clifford isn't difficult in the traditional sense, but it's more annoying than you might expect. The character was designed by Norman Bridwell with extremely simple geometry — basically a large red oval with appendages — which makes it easy to start and harder to finish convincingly. Anyone can slap a red circle on paper and call it a day. Getting it to actually look like the character instead of a generic red blob is where people stall out. The fundamental structure breaks down into a few basic shapes that nest inside each other. You start with a large horizontal oval for the main body, then layer a slightly smaller oval on top for the head. The legs are simple vertical rectangles with rounded bottoms, the tail is a thick curved stroke that tapers to a point, and the ears are two floppy teardrop shapes hanging off the sides of the head. The face sits in the upper third of the head oval — two black dots for eyes, a larger black oval for the nose, and a simple curved line for the mouth underneath. His collar is a thin black band around the base of the head with a small yellow tag.

How To Draw Clifford The Big Red Dog Step By Step

I've walked people through this dozens of times at community art nights and online forums, and the process always goes the same way. Here's the sequence that actually works without overcomplicating it. Start with a light pencil sketch using basic shapes only. Draw your large body oval first, keeping it noticeably wider than it is tall. Then sketch the head oval overlapping the top of the body oval by roughly twenty percent. Don't worry about details yet. Next, add the four legs as simple rounded rectangles coming off the bottom of the body, and the tail as a sweeping curve behind him. The ears go on as two soft teardrops on either side of the head. Once the construction feels solid, go in with your ink or final pencil lines and refine the shapes. Smooth out the ovals, round the leg bottoms properly, and make sure the tail has a nice taper. Finally, add the facial features — eyes as solid black circles, the nose as a larger black oval, the mouth as an upward curving line, and the collar with its tag. Color everything red except the nose, eyes, collar, and tag, which stay black and yellow respectively. One thing that trips people up constantly is the scale relationship between the head and body. Bridwell drew Clifford with a body that's roughly twice the width of the head, but when beginners get it wrong, the character starts looking like a regular dog instead of Clifford. If your head looks too small relative to the body, step back and compare them. If they look equal, you've made the body too large. I had a student once who kept producing drawings where Clifford looked like he had a normal dog's proportions, and the issue turned out to be that she was drawing the body oval perfectly circular instead of clearly elongated horizontally. She needed to see a reference image before continuing. A single glance at the actual cartoon frame resolved the problem instantly.

The coloring stage is straightforward but there's a practical consideration worth noting. If you're working with markers or liquid watercolors on standard paper, the broad red areas tend to bleed and create uneven patches that make the character look cheap. Use a heavier paper stock — anything at least 120 pound text weight — if you plan to apply wet media. For dry media like colored pencils or crayons, regular printer paper works fine. I recommend a layered approach with colored pencils: lay down a light base coat first, then build up saturation gradually. This gives you more control over the red tone and prevents the paper from buckling or pilling under heavy pressure. There's a common misconception that because Clifford is a simple character, you don't need to worry about anatomy or pose. That's wrong. The simplicity of the design means every proportion mistake is immediately obvious. A slightly too-wide nose, eyes placed too far apart, or a tail that curves the wrong direction will make the drawing look off even if someone can't articulate why. The original illustrations benefit from a subtle understanding of canine structure underneath the simplified shapes. The legs aren't just stick rectangles — they have a slight bend at the "knee" area and set slightly inward toward the center line. The body oval isn't a perfect geometric shape either; it has a gentle compression at the underside where the belly meets the legs, giving the figure some weight. If you want to draw Clifford in different poses rather than just the standard front-facing version, the construction method stays the same but you'll need to think about how the basic ovals rotate and overlap. A side view simplifies things — the body oval becomes more of a rounded rectangle, the legs align in a single plane, and you can drop the second ear entirely since it's hidden. A three-quarter view is where it gets fiddly. The head oval shifts so one eye is slightly smaller and higher, the visible ear droops more naturally, and the body oval gains a subtle elliptical contour to suggest depth. I find it helpful to sketch a light guideline through the center of the body oval to keep the left and right sides balanced during these more complex angles.

For a quick download reference or printable guide, you can find free Clifford coloring pages on the Scholastic website or search for "Clifford the Big Red Dog printable templates." These are useful as tracing references if you're still working on nailing the proportions. Just don't rely on tracing as a crutch — use it until you can reproduce the basic shape from memory, then put it away.