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 in a kawaii style and then selling clipart or merchandise on Etsy, check out this course!

My old bud Ilaria (we’ve been friends on Instagram back when I had Instagram) created this course! I’ve watched her grow from 0 followers, and I’m so, so proud of her!

And believe it or not, there is not 1 single good online course about learning how to draw kawaii art and then making physical stickers on the internet. I’ve been looking for a course like this for a long, long time.

And it’s finally here!!!

You can create your own stickers and print them and sell them on Etsy or any space! She goes into detail about how to draw the characters.

This is by far one of the best courses I’ve taken that is so cute and so educational.

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

What do you need?

A sketchbook, Photoshop, 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.

Even if you don’t want to make stickers and just draw kawaii characters, this course is perfect!

Check it out here!

And if you are really keen on improving your drawings or you want to create cute kawaii animals and kawaii people, check out this second course by Sara.

Sara teaches you how to draw anything in a nice kawaii style. I really love these kinds of courses because they’re so easy to learn and it’s very easy to get clients because this is a really relatable drawing style.

It is in Italian but it comes with subtitles and it’s really easy to follow.