How to Draw Jack Skellington

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Hello everyone.
Let's learn how to draw Jack Skellington, the Pumpkin King from Tim Burton's great movie Nightmare Before Christmas.

The first part of this lesson focuses on Jack's body and clothes, while the face is left very simple, as you can see in the left picture.

The second part of this lesson covers different emotional expressions of Jack and how you can draw his head in different angles.
If you want to jump to the second part right away, click here.

How to Draw Jack Skellington - Part 1: Body and Suit

Step 1:
We start drawing Jack Skellington by drawing Jack's skeleton.
This "skeleton" is just a stick figure that helps us to draw the full body later.

Begin with a circle for Jack's head.
Then compare the length of all other body parts to it.
Upper and lower arms have the length of 2 and a half heads.
The torso is the area from shoulders to pelvis and is 2 heads long.
Thighs and lower legs have the length of 3 heads.
Draw small circles where the body is bendable.

As long as you stick with these proportions you can draw the body in different poses and it will still look alright.
In my picture Jack has placed one foot on an object, holds something in one of his hands and waves with the other.

How to Draw Jack Skellington - Step 2: Jack's Body

Here is the step by step process how you can draw Jack's body over this stick skeleton.



To keep the face simple, just draw in two circles for the eyes, two small ovals for the nose, and a smiling, zipper-shaped mouth.


It is not well to see in the movie, but I think the brooch that is holding Jack's collar has the shape of a cat's head. So be sure to give it two pointy ears at the top.
Draw the collar with three long spikes to each side.


Now draw an outline for Jack's arms around the lines.
Resist the urge to make them any thicker.
They should be very, very thin.


Make Jack's torso rather broad at the top and narrow towards the bottom. As a general rule, the head should be able to fit into his chest.


The legs are just as thin as the arms. Since Jack is wearing pants, you can make the trouser legs a bit broader above the ankles.


In contrast to legs and arms, the feet are very short.
Make the shoes pointy at the front, and separate the heel on the one shoe that you see from the side.

The only body parts still missing are Jack Skellington's hands, and we'll draw them in the next steps.


Start with a small part of bone that sticks out of the sleeves.
Then add a larger bone piece on top of it for the middle of the hand.

Attach tiny blocks to the hand where you want to place the fingers.
These blocks are the joints, where the fingers can be bend.
Since one hand is seen from the side, you have to place only one block there. Afterwards you can add the first finger segment to the joints.

Draw in the missing finger segments, and remember to place little joint-boxes in between them. Be sure to make the thumb shorter than the other fingers.

Jack's body is complete now, and all that's left to do is to add a few more details to his clothes.

How to Draw Jack Skellington - Step 3: The Tailcoat



The suit can be drawn in three steps.

First you draw the two sides of the coat that are folded above each other.

Then you add a collar along the top of the coat and a button where the two sides are held together.
I also added eyes to the cat-brooch in this step.

Finally, draw in two long tails hanging down between the legs.
Split them up again towards the end.

And with that the Pumpkin King is complete.

How to Draw Jack Skellington - Step 4: Items & Background



Now it's time to draw in a background and additional items.
I placed Jack into a cemetery and gave him a pumpkin.
It may look complicated, but to draw such a cemetery is rather simple.

Each mound can be drawn with a single curved line, and the round gravestones on top of them, too. To make things a bit more interesting I placed crosses on some of the graves. Don't draw them all straight, but let some of them lean sidewards a bit.
A nice trick is to make the mounds and gravestones smaller and smaller in the background. In that way you create depth in your picture.

When coloring your picture in the end, remember that Jack's suit isn't entirely black, but has a lot of Grey, thin stripes on it.

So that was the first part of this lesson.
Now we go on to the second part: drawing the head in different angles and with different emotional expressions.

How to Draw Jack Skellington - Part 2: Emotional Expressions

Here is a picture with different shapes Jack's eyes and his mouth can have. Think about the ways how you can combine different eyes with different mouths and what sort of expression you'd get as a result.
Of course there are far more possible shapes than shown here.
This is just to get your imagination started.

You can make Jack's head look in different directions by drawing curved lines into a circle.
First, take look at the images below, where this is shown step by step.
If you still have problems with this technique, then check out
this tutorial where I explain in details how to rotate a head.
Just read the relevant section, and then click on your browser's back button to return here.

How to Draw Jack Skellington - Expression 1: Worried, Sad, or Tired

In the movie Jack has to struggle with intense negative emotions for a while.
Here is a way how you can express that in your drawing.


                            

                                 

When you draw a head seen from a side angle, you have to "squeeze" one half of the face and make everything a little bit narrower there.
That's why one of the eyes looks smaller than the other one.


How to Draw Jack Skellington - Expression 2: Happy Profile




                 
When Jack is happy the corners of his mouth reach up to the level of the eyes.
From this angle you can see that his head is not a perfect sphere, but flat above and below the nose.

How to Draw Jack Skellington - Expression 3: Enjoying the Spook

This is probably Jack's favorite expression when he is scaring everyone to death, while having a lot of fun doing so!


                        

Here you have to draw the eye on the distant side of the face smaller than the eye on the other side, again.

                       
Note how the cheeks and the eyebrows are reaching beyond the circle in this step.
Like the eye, the cheek on the distant side of the face has to be narrower.

How to Draw Jack Skellington - Expression 4: Angry and Terrifying

When things don't go the way he wants them to go, Jack can get really angry. To demand obedience and respect from the other citizens of Halloween he puts on this terrifying grimace.

                        


                         

Frightening indeed!
Jack is a nice guy, but you shouldn't annoy him too much.

I hope these examples put you on the right track so that you can draw Jack in any emotional expression you choose.
Experiment a little bit, and I'm sure you'll get a handle on this quickly.