If you decide to draw a dolphin, for this it is not at all necessary to graduate from art school or study with a professional teacher. It is enough to learn the basic rules of composition and construction. This is necessary to create any solid image, and it will help to understand how to draw a dolphin.
Regardless of the style and technique in which you will work, first of all you need to lay out a sheet to imagine what you will depict and how. It is possible to draw a dolphin without a background, of course, but its position on the sheet should still be determined in advance. Otherwise, you run the risk of discovering that your animal does not fit on paper, or "leaves" to the side. Then you have to redo everything. Therefore, it is better to initially spend a couple of minutes on the preliminary layout of the sheet.
After you have made the markup, you can proceed directly to sketching the dolphin itself. To begin with, we outline the elementary form. In the case of a dolphin, this will be a drop, the wide part of which will become his head, and the narrow part - his tail.
Next, add the fins. The dolphin has a dorsal, caudal and two pectoral fins. In the image, you can modify them to fit the overall style of the picture.
After that, we finish our beak, eyes and breathing hole for our dolphin. You can give his face cartoony or realistic features. On this drawing can be completed, but it can be supplemented.
If you are thinking about how to draw a dolphin in pencil, you can offer several different options. You can use a linear pattern where there will be nothing but the contour of the animal. You can give it volume with the help of hatching, more dense in places of shade and more rare in the light. You can also cover it with some kind of ornament or even turn it into a decorative work. In any of these cases, one must go from the general to the particular and take on the details only upon completion of the form.
You can also create a background for your dolphin. And not even possible, but necessary! This will give the picture organicity and fullness. Here the fantasy should work as it should - whether it will be the depth of the sea, the sky at sunset, the water park with its visitors, the circus arena ... You can think of some kind of your own world, if imagination allows. It doesn’t matter how reliable your drawing is, the main thing is whether it is pleasant for you to see it (or for those for whom you create it). What matters is what you invest in it.
If you work in paints, then in no case should you limit yourself to banal gray-blue tones! This stereotypical image destroys the liveliness of the picture and makes it boring. Do not be afraid to add colors! It won’t hurt a dolphin, believe me. But it will revive the picture for perception.
We hope you now have an idea of how to draw a dolphin in stages. Practice! And do not be afraid of failures (and they will be!). Not a single artist has already managed without them. The main thing in the drawing is courage and practice. Therefore, the more you work on yourself, the better your creations become. And this applies not only to drawing dolphins, but also to all creativity in general. It remains only to wish you good luck!