Skip to main content
Photography of Alvaro Montoro being a doofus
Alvaro Montoro

Lucas's Sidekick

Drawing a Giraffe with CSS

css html codepen css-art

Yesterday I did a quick cartoon of a giraffe using HTML and CSS:

The process went like this:

  1. Drew the snout by doing an ellipse and adding some rotation
  2. The head is a rotated oval
  3. A pseudo-element of the snout made a circle for the nose, and added some shadows to duplicate it
  4. For the mouth, we used another pseudo-element of the snout, we made it into an ellipse and use the bottom border for the line.
  5. The eyes are a rounded pseudo-element of the head and its shadow
  6. Then for the hair, another pseudo-element of the head shaped like an ellipse and with an inset box-shadow.
  7. Both ears are a single element and its ::after by making them squares with opposite rounded corners.
  8. The horns were placed behind the head but in a position that makes them look like one is on top and the other one behind.
  9. A really tall rectangle made the neck
  10. A similar rectangle made the mane, with a small rotation and cropping small triangles to make it irregular.
  11. Finally, for the dots in the neck, we use a neck pseudo-element and a bunch of box-shadows :)

Here there is a timelapse video of the process:

Article originally published on