8 Easy Thanksgiving Drawing Tutorials for Kids (Step by Step)
Thanksgiving is five weeks away (November 26 this year, if you’re the planning type), and we have a prediction: at some point on the big day, you’ll need the kids to sit quietly for twenty minutes while you do something urgent. Rescue the gravy, find the good serving dish, or simply breathe.
This is where drawing comes in. A stack of paper, a box of crayons, and a Thanksgiving drawing tutorial is basically free childcare — the educational kind that grandparents photograph approvingly. So we pulled together every Thanksgiving tutorial on the site into one list. Eight drawings, each done in about five minutes, one red line at a time, the DrawCub way.
Our advice: start now, not the night before. Draw one a week and by Thanksgiving the kids will have a whole gallery ready — and the turkey-day drawings will be noticeably better than today’s. (Growth you can hang on the fridge. That’s our favorite kind.)
The Big One (Start Here)
There’s no dodging this one. The turkey is the Thanksgiving drawing the way the birthday cake is the birthday party — non-negotiable. Ours is a cheerful six-step version: big oval body, fluffy tail lobes, triangle beak, and a wobbly wattle that makes the whole bird look like it’s telling jokes. This is the drawing most kids will beg to color first, because those tail feathers are basically a coloring-book page built into the bird.
The Dessert Section
Every Thanksgiving table has one, and every kid has an opinion about it. Our pumpkin pie tutorial skips the arguments about crust-to-filling ratios and goes straight to the good part: a golden triangle with a swirl of whipped cream on top. Honestly, drawing the pie takes about the same time as eating a slice — roughly five minutes, though the drawing is significantly less messy.
The Classics
The horn of plenty. It sounds fancy, and on the finished page it looks fancy — all those apples and grapes tumbling out of a woven horn. But here’s the secret: it’s just a curved cone with fruit piled on top. Kids feel like they’ve drawn something from a museum when they’re done. Between us, the fruits are the fun part — each one is about three lines, and there’s no wrong way to draw an apple when it’s falling out of a cornucopia.
One tall black shape, a band, a buckle. That’s the whole tutorial, and we mean that as a compliment. The pilgrim hat is the confidence-builder of this list — the one to hand to the kid who just announced “I’m bad at drawing” (they’re not, they’ve just never had the right first step). Five minutes later they’ll have a proper historical hat on paper, and they’ll be ready for something trickier.
Okay, this one earns its spot for the face alone. Our scarecrow has a stitched-up smile and a patched coat, and kids genuinely love drawing that grin — there’s something about drawing a happy face that puts one on the artist, too. The hat comes first (good practice after the pilgrim hat above), then the face, then the patches. It looks complicated. It isn’t. That’s the best kind of tutorial.
Quick Wins (Tiny and Satisfying)
The smallest drawing on this list and, per kid focus-group research conducted in our own living rooms, one of the most popular. An acorn is just an oval in a cap — two shapes, maybe three minutes. It’s the perfect warm-up: draw three acorns in the corner of your page and suddenly you have a fall scene. We’d start every Thanksgiving drawing session with this one, the way runners stretch before a race.
7. How to Draw Corn on the Cob
If the acorn is the warm-up, corn on the cob is the victory lap for straight-ish lines. The husk gives you those big confident curves, and the kernel rows are just rows of little arcs — repetitive in the relaxing way, not the boring way. Kids who love patterns (and most of them do) will draw corn all day. Yellow crayons will be involved. There is no avoiding the yellow crayons.
The Grand Finale
8. How to Draw a Thanksgiving Feast
We saved this for last because it pulls the whole theme together: a table loaded with a turkey, sides, and all the trimmings. It’s the most ambitious drawing on the list — but it’s still the same one-red-line-at-a-time method, so it never feels hard. Draw this one the weekend before Thanksgiving and you’ve got instant wall art for the holiday. Prop it next to the real table on the day and take a photo. Trust us, the relatives will lose their minds over it.
What to Actually Do With All These Drawings
- Homemade place cards. Fold an index card in half, glue on a mini drawing of an acorn or corn, write each guest’s name. Ten minutes of drawing time, guests keep them forever. (Our families genuinely fight over these.)
- The gravy-rescue activity. When dinner prep hits crisis mode, hand the kids the feast tutorial and disappear. You get quiet time; they get a masterpiece. Everyone wins, especially the gravy.
- A gratitude banner. Draw the tutorials, cut them out, and string them across a banner with one thing each person is thankful for written underneath. This is the one the teachers in our circle swear by for classrooms.
- The fridge gallery. Turkey front and center, pie to the left, cornucopia to the right. It stays up until Christmas decorations go in. These are the rules.
Tips That Actually Help
- Start with the acorn, not the feast. Two easy wins before anything ambitious. Confidence compounds — this is true for kids and grown-ups alike.
- Color after the drawing is done, not during. Finish the pencil lines first, then break out the crayons. Half-colored outlines are how regrets are made.
- Let the turkey feathers be weird colors. Real turkeys are brown. Drawn turkeys can be purple, and purple is correct. Creativity outranks accuracy at Thanksgiving.
- Draw together. Sit down and do the tutorial alongside your kid. Your turkey will look worse than theirs. This is normal, and they will remind you of it. That’s the point.
- Combine them into scenes. An acorn at the foot of a cornucopia, a scarecrow guarding the pumpkin pie — these tutorials stack into a full Thanksgiving scene faster than you’d think.
Your Turn
Pick one — we say the turkey, since there’s no Thanksgiving without it — grab a pencil, and give yourself five minutes. Then grab our free Starter Pack at drawcub.com for printable practice pages to keep the streak going. And since the holidays only accelerate from here, our 25 easy Christmas drawing ideas for kids is waiting for when the last slice of pie is gone.
