How to Draw a Cute Kawaii Dango - Easy for Kids and Beginners

If you’ve been reading my website for a while, you’ll discover I love food and drawing food even more.

I have recently developed an addiction to drawing food in a kawaii style. And I realized that these Japanese dumplings are sometimes made into cute kawaii shapes so that it’s more colorful and presents better.

This is such a great kid’s project! And these make adorable stickers.

So, I thought I’d teach you how to draw cute dangos today.

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This is what you’ll learn by the end of this post:

Add highlights and shadows and you'll have finished learning how to draw dangos

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Table of Contents

How to draw cute and kawaii dango step by step – Easy tutorial for beginners

Please note that I’m using Procreate and drawing this digitally.

You can even use Clip Art Studio as it is beautiful software that most digital artists use, including Manga and Anime artists.

I talk more about how I got started with digital art here.

You can use any tool you want to make this drawing because the process basically is the same. You can use color pencils, pens or crayons – it’s completely your choice!

Let’s begin.

Step 1: Draw the outline of the Dango

Let’s start by drawing the dangos (rice dumplings first)

I love teddy bears so my dangos will be in teddy bear shapes.

First, we are going to draw the skewer that holds all the dangos, so just draw a small stick like shape like this at the bottom of your canvas/page.

Next, we’re going to draw a small circle like this over the skewer. This will be our first dango.

You can make your dango look like any animal – a cat, bunny, dog, etc. I’m choosing a bear because it’s really easy to draw.

I’m just going to draw 2 small ears on the dango like this:

Next, I’ll draw another dango the same way above this one.

Draw another ball over the previous dango

Finally, I’ll draw another dango over this one. This is how they’re usually sold and portrayed on the media.

Next, I’ll draw 2 eyes and a small nose on the first dango.

Start adding eyes and noses on your dangos

And I’ll do the same with the others.

Easy, right?

Now, we’ve finished drawing the dangos.

It’s time to color it!

You can color your dangos absolutely any color you wish.

Step 2: Color the cute dangos

The best part about drawing dangos is you can use your creativity to color it any color you want!

Color the skewer biscuit brown.

Next, I’m going to color the dangos pastel colors like light pink, cream and light green.

Now, obviously, this is a dango drawing, so I am going to take my creative freedom and add more details to the dangos.

I’ll add little circles over the nose and mouth to give it a bear like appearance.

Next, I’ll add 2 small ears in darker colors to all the dangos.

And finally, I’ll add pink blush spots to all 3 dangos.

Since I’m drawing this digitally, I am going to add highlights and shadows to my drawing. You can see this post to see how I color my digital art.

And we’re done drawing the dangos.

Drawing Resources

I hope this tutorial was helpful to you and you enjoyed drawing this cute dango. You can even use this post as a cute dango drawing reference.

If you want to see more tutorials on drawing kawaii animals and kawaii things, please leave a comment below on what you’d like to see next!

I will add more kawaii drawing tutorials (animals, food, and lots of things) to this blog, so keep a lookout!

If you are interested in drawing anything in a kawaii style and then selling stickers online, check out this amazing course!

CHECK OUT THE COURSE HERE

It’s honestly one of the cutest and most inexpensive courses that you can get – especially if you want to sell stickers in your online store – like Etsy or Creative Market.

The course is in English, and it’s amazing!

See this course here.

What do you need?

A sketchbook, Photoshop or Procreate, and a graphic tablet so that you can draw the kawaii characters. If you want to make stickers, you’ll need a printer and sticker sheets. I explain how to make stickers on Procreate here.

This course is perfect even if you don’t want to make stickers and just draw kawaii animals!

Check it out here!

Use code STRAYCURLS-10 to get a 10% discount!

If you are just getting started with ProCreate, I highly recommend this course: Procreate for Beginners: Digital Illustration 101