How to Draw a Military Knife in 6 Steps

Posted on by animeoutline

This tutorial explains how to draw a military knife in eight steps. The drawing is done in a simple style that can fit well into an anime, a manga or a comic book.

Although military knives or combat knives are not the most common weapon in anime and manga they can definitely be shown as being used by army or special forces type characters. In addition to being used for combat these can also be survival knives. This tutorial explains how to draw such a tool/weapon with a breakdown of it’s common parts.

The example can either be used to draw a ballistic knife with a detachable blade or regular one. You may also notice that the knife is shown in two positions, an angled one and a horizontal one. This is just to give you more reference material in case you prefer one over the other.

Unless drawing digitally you should start the tutorial in pencil as you will need to erase parts of the drawing in some of the steps.

Above is a line by line video of drawing the knife. It’s recommended that you watch it if you would like to see a more detailed breakdown of the drawing process. However, you should also read the instructions below.

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Step 1 – Draw the Blade

Start the drawing by outlining the main parts of the knife without any of the smaller detail. Begin with the blade. First, add it’s bottom curve running up to the tip. Next, add a second curve going up from the tip to the spine. This is to create the swedge that is so characteristic of military knives.

Define the rest of the blade with a pair of parallel lines going from the end of each curve towards the handle area.

Step 2 – Draw the Guard

Military knives often have a guard similar to that of a sword to prevent the hand from slipping onto the blade. Add one at the end of the blade as shown in the example.

For drawing a sword see:

How to Draw a Katana (Sword) Step by Step

Step 3 – Draw the Handle

Make the handle slightly narrower than the blade and draw it of even width through most of it’s length. At the end of the handle add a wider section (the butt).

Step 4 – Draw the Edge

Outline the edge running along the the bottom part of the blade. As this is a military/survival knife the edge can be quite wide as compared to something like a kitchen knife.

After you outlined the edge add the “teeth” along the spine near the handle (as is common for knives of this type). You can erase the upper part of the blade’s outline when adding these.

Step 5 – Draw the Grip

For the last set of the knife’s details add the grooves along the it’s handle. You can erase parts of the handles outline as needed when drawing them.

For drawing hands holding different kinds of objects see:

6 Ways to Draw Anime Hands Holding Something

Step 6 – Add Color/Shading

First, outline the highlights, the the brightest spots where the light is reflected from the knife’s surface.

Next, fill in the blade with grey and the handle with dark grey leaving the previously outlined highlights white. Afterwards, fill each highlight with a slightly lighter variant of the grey of that part of the knife.

Finally, add the shadows. In this case they are distributed as though the light is coming from the upper right of the knife in the angled example and directly from above it in the horizontal one.

Because the drawing is done in a somewhat simplified style you can use hard transitions between the light and dark areas with no gradients.

Place the shadows as follows:

Lightly darken the blade of the knife
Darken the grooves of the handle grip
Darken the lower half of the handle

Conclusion

Anime or manga style military knife drawing

This tutorial shows how to draw a cool military, survival or combat knife in an anime, manga or comic book style. As mentioned at the start of the tutorial, these types of tools/weapons may not be all that common in anime manga but you do tend to see them being used by certain characters.

For drawing other types of weapons/tools in the anime style see the following guides:

For other similar tutorials try:

How to Draw a Sports Car Step by Step