How to Draw a Heart Step-by-Step

You can effectively draw a heart step-by-step by breaking the shape down into simple geometric shapes. This is a technique many artists use to draw hearts instead of drawing them freehand. Learn how to draw a heart this way and you can create hearts with ease and speed after some practice. Once you have mastered this, you can move on to drawing more difficult hearts with intricate designs.

To help you decide how wide you want the heart to be, lay a ruler horizontally across your paper. Make two marks lightly with a pencil to represent the width you would like the heart to be. Then make another mark at the midpoint between the first two marks. These marks represent the outer edges of the circles you will draw in the next step.

Using the pencil marks as guides to the outer edges, draw two circles side by side on the paper, overlapping them slightly in the center. You can use a compass or trace around a circular object, such as a lid or bowl.

Use the ruler to measure from the top of the two circles down to mark the desired height of the heart. Mark this measurement lightly with a pencil.

Lay the ruler on the paper vertically, lining it up with the point where the circles intersect. Using a pencil, lightly draw a straight line down the page from this point to the marking you made to represent the heart's height in Step 3.

Decide if you want to make a heart with straight sides or a heart with rounded sides. If you want a straight-sided heart, draw a horizontal line across the exact center of the two circles. Then, lay a ruler diagonally on the paper, drawing a line from the bottom point of the vertical line you drew in Step 4 to the horizontal line you just drew in this step. Repeat on the other side of the heart.

To make a round-sided heart, repeat these steps and then lightly hand-sketch rounded lines on each side.

Use an eraser to remove the sketched lines from all the previous steps, leaving only the lines that form the heart shape.