How To Draw A 3D Hole Optical Illusion

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Lesson Details

Hi, this is Ethan Nguyen for My Drawing Tutorials.com and in this video, I’m going to show you how to draw a 3D hole optical illusion. Here’s what the illusion will look like.

Now let me show you how I did it.

Step 1 – Drawing the Ellipses

The first step is to draw a big ellipse. The rest of the drawing will be done in ink, but I will draw this first ellipse in pencil because we will be erasing it later.

Next, draw a smaller ellipse inside the first one using ink. You’ll want to make this one slightly shorter and more rounded. And instead of placing it right in the center, move it down slightly.

By the way, I made a light pencil sketching of the entire drawing before hand and is now simply going over it with ink. That way, the drawing process will be a lot smoother and you won’t have to see me erasing and re-drawing a bunch of times.

But when you’re drawing this yourself, don’t be afraid to change things around a bunch of times to get the curves just right.

Then draw another smaller ellipse inside this one. Again, you’ll want to make it more rounded and place it closer towards the bottom.

Repeat this process three more times.

You can see the pattern very clearly here. Each ellipse is a little more like a circle and they group together at a single point.

Step 2 – Drawing the Tiles

Next, we’re going to draw some straight lines from the center outward.

The gaps between these lines will be widest at the bottom and gradually narrow as they move upwards.

To help planing out the spacing and make them more consistent, I like to start at both ends at the same time. That way I’ll have a good idea of how wide the stripes at the top will be and plan accordingly.

One important detail is to make sure you end up with an even number of stripes. You’ll see why this is important in a minute.

Once we have all the stripes drawing in, let’s erase the outer most circle.

Step 3 – Inking and Shading

Now, we’ll use a sharpie marker to fill in the outer circle using an alternating pattern. This is why it’s important to have a even number of stripes. If the stripes were odd, it would throw the pattern out of sync.

The large sharpie marker won’t be able to color in the squares all the way to the edge, so we’ll just go as close to the edge as we can for now.

Continue doing this for all the circles.

Now, let’s take a smaller pen and fill in the small gaps that we couldn’t get with the larger marker.

The last step is to create a dark gradation at the center hole. I’ll use a 9xxb graphite pencil to put in a base tone. You also can use a 4B or 6B pencil for this.

And I’ll use a blending stump to smooth out the tone.

And now I’ll use a charcoal pencil to put in a really dark layer for the hole.

And that’s it! Now all we have to do is look at this drawing at an angle to see the 3D optical illusion.