How To Draw Cosy Autumn Essentials (Patreon)

Autumn is a season for drawing lovely, cosy things, so let’s take a look at how to draw some autumn essentials to make your drawings feel nice and seasonal 🍂✨

You can incorporate these motifs into full scenes that you’re drawing, you could just enjoy sketching them out on their own, or you can combine them to make a pattern! Watch my tutorial for making repeating patterns in Procreate and Photoshop here if you haven’t already.

We’ll draw a few different leaf shapes, a couple of tea time essentials, and some cosy scarves to add to your characters.

Drawing Autumn Leaves

Autumn leaves come in super handy when you need nice elements for a border, or you just want to add some detail to a scene.

For the first leaf shape, draw an upside-down teardrop with a curved vertical line through the middle - this will just be a guideline to use in the next step. Roughly following that shape, start at the top and draw an outline down each side in three really large, wavy lumps that get smaller as they get closer to the bottom. From there you can remove the guideline and add in some line details.

For the second shape, the guideline is a rectangle with a triangle on top (sort of like a house shape) with a vertical line through the middle. Using that guide, draw the leaf outline to have five points like a star - one in each corner. Then you can just add some line details from the bottom middle going out to each point.

And for the final leaf shape draw a teardrop with a curved vertical line through the middle. Use that as a guide to draw your proper outline, starting with a point at the top and then following the shape down on each side with a few bumps. Add a few line details and it’s done!

You can enjoy trying lots of different colours for autumn leaves, all the way from green through to orange and bright reds and even purples. I coloured these in with the colour palette attached, and added texture on top with my Soft Crayon brush to give a bit of variation to the colour.

Drawing Tea Time Essentials

If you’re drawing autumn scenes at some point you’ll probably want to draw a warm drink, so this is one way you can draw a tea cup and tea pot.

The simplest teacups can just be a large ‘U’ shape closed along the top, and then you add a handle (just two ‘C’ shapes) and a pointed oval shape for the opening of the tea cup. I like to add a few steam lines to make it extra cosy!

Teapots come in lots of fun shapes but a simple one is a circle shape with a flat bottom, and from there you can just add a lid, a handle and the spout. 

Whenever I draw a tea set I like to decorate them with pretty patterns and designs! Drawing Cosy Scarves + Beanies

If you want to give your characters some warm accessories, it’s as easy as drawing them like normal and popping a beanie on their head or a scarf around their neck.

The first scarf is how I might draw one when it isn’t being worn. You can simply draw two parallel ‘S’ curves, closed at the ends, and then add a pattern to it (if you like) and some tassels.

When a character is wearing a scarf around their neck, you can start with two overlapping rectangles - one horizontal and one vertical - as the guide shape. I like to make the vertical one curved so that the scarf doesn’t feel so rigid. Using that as a guide, trace around the shape of the vertical rectangle, and then the horizontal one (except where they overlap).

And beanies are super simple! You start with a closed semi-circle, and to that you add a rounded rectangle at the bottom (filled with vertical lines for details if you like), and a bobble on top.

Beanies and scarves are the perfect opportunity for some patterns, so you can experiment with different colours and lines or use this pattern mini guide for some inspiration.

And here is the simple colour palette that I used to colour in these shapes! Download it below if you want to import it into your drawing software to eyedropper the colours from. 

Happy drawing! 💖