How To Draw A 3D Sphere

Lesson Details

In this lesson, I’m going to show you how to draw a 3D sphere optical illusion.

The first step is to draw a circle. I’ll use a template to make things easier.

Next, we’ll draw horizontal lines around the circle. You’ll want these lines to be uniform so it’s a good idea to measure it out.

And you’ll also want to draw them in ink. That way they’ll stand out even after we shade the drawing.

Now we’ll draw curved lines across the circle to connect these horizontal lines.  I’ll draw the lines in pencil first in case I need to make adjustments.

We will draw this sphere as if we are looking up at it from below, so the space between each curves will start out small at the top and gradually get larger towards the bottom.

And now we’ll ink it in.

Now for the shading.

For this drawing, the light source will be coming from above and slightly to the left so there will be a shadow on the bottom right.

I want the shadow to be darkest near the sphere and gradually lightens as it moves away.

OK, time to shade the sphere it self. Since the light source is coming from above, there will be a highlight area here…

…and the tone will gradually darkens as it moves away. So I’ll go ahead and put in a base tone to reflect this pattern.

Next, I’ll go back and darken the core shadow area and blend it out.

Now, it’s just a matter of darkening the shadows to add more contrast. The more contrast we can create, the more three dimensional the drawing will look.

And that’s it, we’re all done.