Name: How to Draw a Sphere
Uploaded: 2026-03-14T08:59:32.000Z
Duration: 8 min 31 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Present continuous

Hi there, Matt here with the virtualinstructor.com and in this lesson, we're going to be drawing a sphere.

The comparative

Aren't there more interesting things out there to draw other than a sphere?

Of course there are, but we draw a sphere as a practical drawing exercise.

And this exercise is important for a couple of reasons.

One, spheres typically have a full range of value associated with them.

This means they have the darkest darks and the lightest lights and all the middle values in between.

So we can practice seeing those in our reference and putting those in our drawing.

Now, the second practical reason why we draw a sphere is that those locations of value are easily recognized.

And these locations are very important in creating the illusion of light in a drawing and the illusion of form.

So we can practice locating those locations of value.

And we can also practice creating that full range of value by drawing a sphere.

And when we nail that down and we do a good job with this, then we can move on to all of those exciting things out there to draw in the world besides a sphere.

So grab that pencil and let's get ready to draw a sphere.

I bet you'll find that this exercise is a little bit more interesting and more challenging than you might expect.

We've got the darkest darks and we've got the lightest lights.

It may be hard to see here in the video, but

there is an area of highlight that is pretty much white.

In fact, we're going to try to make it white in our drawing.

It's not completely white, but it's white enough to leave white.

And then we have that full gradation of value progressively getting darker as we go over to this area.

Now, another reason why spheres are so good to explain value and the importance of value is because there are very defined areas on the sphere where light is hitting it, which is leading to the illusion of form.

Where we have an area up here which is the highlight.

Then we have this middle area right here, which is called the midtone.

And then we have this darker area that exists on the object, which is called core shadow.

And then we have this area behind it, which is called cast shadow.

And light actually comes down in this case and bounces off of the surface of the table and bounces back up here.

And you can see how this area right here is lighter in value, and

So we've Got all of these things going on on a sphere.

And it's very easy to explain what things are when we're working with a curved object like this.

So we're going to start by drawing a circle.

I'm going to start by kind of locking my wrist and holding the pencil a couple of inches away from the paper.

And then I'm going to rotate my shoulder.

It may look like I'm rotating my wrist, but I'm not.

If I pull it up like this, my wrist is nice and tight and my palm is just rolling over the surface of the paper.

And I'm going to start making several circles.

Then I'm gonna slowly bring my pencil down to the surface.

It's not a perfect science and you're not gonna get a perfect circle every time.

And I drew several lines here and you know, the reason why I like to draw several lines is you have a better chance of getting the correct line when you draw several of them.

And then you can kind of erase and remove extra lines.

Now I'm going to go ahead and give an indication of the cast shadow.

So I'm going to go ahead and draw an ellipse and I'll draw several lines for that as well.

Obviously, our light source is originating from the upper left hand corner up here.

Alright, so we want to be sure that we're creating the illusion of light and value is what's going to create that illusion.

It's not only going to create the illusion of light, but

it's also going to create the illusion that it's a round spherical ball sitting on the surface.

So since we're working on white paper, we're going to be adding the darker value.

So it only makes sense to start in the areas that are the darkest.

Now we're starting with values that are a little bit lighter than what they actually are.

In our reference here, we're going to progressively get darker with these applications.

Of course, it's always better to start light and go dark rather than to go too dark too quickly.

I'm kind of changing directions here with my strokes here and there just to try to make it as smooth and even of an application as possible.

We've got to learn to recognize those very subtle changes in value where it gets very, very light in areas, but

Alright, now let's start pushing some of these values darker.

Now that we've got some of our initial applications on here, we can get a little Bit darker.

Now to make these darker values, we'll switch over to the 2B pencil, which is a little bit softer.

And, and for that reason it's going to be a little bit darker than the HB pencil.

You just lift some of the value off without really affecting the texture.

I'm going to switch over to the 4B pencil now and we're going to go ahead and make the area of core shadow pretty dark.

Now in the area of cast shadow, a lot of times that's the darkest area and sometimes it's, sometimes it is the second darkest.

Sometimes the area, of course, shadow is actually the darkest, but

in this case we know that this area is the darkest.

So just to save time, I'm going to go ahead and continue with the 4B pencil.

Now you might notice here that we're not using any blending tools at all.

We're just relying on the pressure that we place on the pencil to create the gradations of value.

Alright, now using the kneaded eraser, I'm just going to kind of clean up that edge a little bit.

Alright, now I'm going to put a little bit of value behind here just so we can see the contrast.

You can see that the object is sitting on a table here.

So I'm just going to go ahead and give an indication of that as well.

And then we can put a little bit of indication of the value behind it so that these highlighted areas stand out a little bit more.

The way we perceive value, after all, is all determined by the relationships of the value around it.

So by adding this darker value in the background, we better understand the highlights and midtones.

So now we have our locations of value in place.

We have the area of cast shadow underneath the sphere.

We have the area of coarse shadow where it's the darkest value on the object.

And then we have the reflected highlight where light is bouncing off of the surface of the table back onto the underside of the sphere.

And then we have the area of midtone or middle value around the center portion of the sphere.

And then of course we have the area where the light is hitting the strongest, which of course is the highlight.

And now our drawing of a sphere is complete.

Thank you so much for watching this video.

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And if you want to check out all the resources associated with this lesson, like the photo reference that I worked from, just click on the link right up here and it will take you to that page.

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