How to Draw a Ghost in a Graveyard

Add weather effects to make your scene even spookier.

What could be more spooky than a graveyard at night? A graveyard with a ghost in it! It's a lot of fun to let the darker side of your imagination run wild to create something truly frightening. Even better, neither ghosts nor graveyards require you to be a master artist in order to draw them. As always with a drawing project, the key is to start off simple with some basic construction lines and add the detail over the top.

Things You'll Need

• Pencil
• Sketch pad

Instructions

1. Lay out your page landscape. Draw a pair of wavy lines, one above the other for the near and far horizon. Draw some rough grave shapes at crooked angles in the foreground. These can be crosses or upside-down U shapes for headstones. Draw crooked lines for the outlines of trees.

2. Draw a stick figure with its arms raised and with no legs. This is the ghost. Have it appearing around the edge of a grave.

3. Draw a wavy line around the ghost. Add two slits for the eyes. Add detail to the graves; any writing or images that are carved in them or ivy that is growing over them. Ivy grows as a mat of many three-pointed leaves.

4. Add short, spiky lines for patches of grass. Draw a crooked outline around the trees. Draw inverted "V" shapes on the horizon for mountains. Draw a large circle in the sky for a moon and then draw cloud shapes mostly blocking it out.

5. Add long shadows for everything. Make sure they are all pointed in the same direction. Rub out any construction lines you have used.

6. Shade in the shadowed sides of all the objects with a soft pencil. Shade in the trees completely black. Shade the sky in a dark, near-black gray and the clouds fully black. Objects not in shadow should still receive a fairly dark shading.

References

• Drago Art: How to Draw a Graveyard
• How to Draw Cartoons: Simple Cartoon Ghost