Spheres

I explained how many drawings are cube-like. This mostly refers to (human-made) objects. Anything in nature, any living being, is more organic and will be more like a sphere.

Drawing a sphere, however, might be one of the hardest things to do for beginning artists. It’s a combination of two hard things:

• Drawing a perfect circle
• Foreshortening it correctly to get contour lines and form

Fortunately, I’ve already explained how circles and ellipses work. You should have some practice by now! Which should make things a lot easier.

What’s a Sphere?

A sphere is just a ball. Earth is a sphere, just as a wheel, orange or tennis ball.

Technically, a sphere is what happens when you add together three different circles—one in each main direction. (The x, y, and z axes, remember?)

Even though spheres look exactly the same from any angle, it’s important to understand how they are constructed. Otherwise you can only draw balls and nothing else using this shape.

Special Spheres?

Yes, special spheres. The sphere is a three-dimensional circle, which means it is equally large in all dimensions.

But, what if we want to stretch or shrink the sphere in certain directions? (Think of a kiwi or an egg.) Then we’d get a spheroid!

These may seem difficult at first, as they do change their shape when you look from different angles. That’s why I keep talking about construction: it helps you in difficult drawing times.

Draw the three ellipses that make up this spheroid. Then connect the ends with a nice curve.

Try to smoothly draw through the corners. You don’t want “pointy” ends to the ellipse. I made this mistake for a long time, wondering why all my ellipses looked weird and ugly. It was because I drew them more like eyes :p

Contour Lines

Because spheres (usually) don’t have hard edges, using the contour lines of a sphere is often the only way to show its three dimensional form. (The other alternative is using shading as a soft edge, but more on that later.)

Additionally, contour lines can be used to establish the direction in which the circle is rotated. This is useful, for instance, when drawing a head looking in a certain direction.

To draw the contour lines, draw multiple ellipses of decreasing degree along the x and y axis. These divide the shape, just like with rectangles, but this time we’re using curves instead of diagonals.

For a standard sphere, these ellipses would be pointed in the vertical and horizontal direction. If your sphere is rotated, these “constructive ellipses” turn with it.

Exercises

Just like the cube, try to do these as often as you can.

Simple Spheres

Draw a sphere. Add contour lines to it.

Special Spheres

Draw a spheroid. Having trouble? Start with perfect side view, as it’s much easier to do. Slowly rotate and foreshorten, in small steps. Try to get each step right before taking a bigger one.

Orienting Spheres

Draw a sphere. Use the contour lines to make it face the direction you want. If you want, add simple eyes (and nose) to make it into a face. (This also helps to check if you were correct.)