Finding Nemo built its cast around small creatures navigating a very big ocean, and Nemo sits at the center of that world as the little clownfish everyone recognizes. This step-by-step tutorial covers how to draw Nemo in clean line art, and it fits right into the Finding Nemo / Finding Dory collection of guides on the site.
What Goes Into Drawing a Clownfish in 11 Steps
The tutorial runs through 11 steps and ends on clean black and white line art with no color fill, so all the focus stays on shape accuracy and line control. Nemo swims at a slight angle, which means the body curves are not perfectly symmetrical and take a bit of attention to get right. The proportions lean toward the film’s rounded, exaggerated style rather than a realistic fish.
Nemo’s Key Visual Features
- Round oversized head with large expressive eyes
- Wide cheerful smile across the face
- Clownfish body with two white stripe bands
- Large rounded tail fin on the left side
- Small pectoral fins near the body center
If you enjoy drawing characters from the same franchise, Dory is a natural next pick with her flat, wide body shape being a good contrast to Nemo’s rounder build. For more Pixar-style cartoon characters with expressive faces, the guides for Joy from Inside Out 2 and Oliver from Oliver & Company cover similar cartoony proportions worth practicing.
Understanding the Color Coding in the Step Images
Each step image uses a three-color system to show what is new and what came before:
- Red Color: lines added in the current step.
- Black Color: lines completed earlier.
- Gray Color: base sketch for structure.
How to Draw Nemo: Step-by-Step Tutorial
Finished Your Nemo Sketch? Share It Below
Once the drawing is done, drop it in the comments. Seeing how different people handle those stripe bands and the tail angle is always worth a look. All new tutorials go live on Facebook and Telegram the moment they are published, a new YouTube video based on existing guides goes up every single day, and Pinterest gets updated regularly too, so following any of those keeps you in the loop. If you want to keep exploring cartoon fish or animated characters in general, the sketch of Raph in Hamato Ninpo state and the guide for Flora from Winx Club offer two very different styles to try next. Supporting the project on Patreon also gives you access to unique hand-drawn coloring pages that are not available anywhere else.