How to Draw a Ghost - Scary Shaded Ghost in 8 Steps

A ghost is two circles and a wobbly line, which is why most ghost drawings come out cute. Cute is the default. The other kind, the one that looks like it has been at the end of a hallway for a hundred years, barely comes from the drawing at all. It comes from where you put the dark.

The walkthrough here follows Art Hub Plus, filmed straight down over the paper. The sketch takes four minutes and uses shapes a child could copy. The rest is shading, and that is the half worth slowing down for.

What makes a ghost scary instead of cute

Three decisions do it, and gore is not one of them. Blood and fangs read as a costume. Dread reads as real.

• Eye shape. Round eyes are friendly. Tall, narrow sockets that go fully black are not. Leave the mouth out; a mouth gives the face an expression you can read.
• Dark under the sheet. The shadow where the fabric tucks under is what says a body is in there. Skip it and you have drawn laundry.
• Proportion. Fingers twice as long as a real hand. Shoulders that do not match.

The hollow socket here is the same shape that anchors a full skull drawing, so the time you spend on it carries past this picture.

The sheet ghost or the wispy one

Two drawings hide under the word ghost. The sheet ghost has a hem, an edge you can tear and catch in the wind. It is the easier of the two, because every fold hands you somewhere to put a shadow, and a torn hem does more for the mood than an hour of blending.

The wispy ghost has no bottom edge. The body narrows into a trailing tail that fades before it reaches the floor, and you fade it with pressure, not a line. Good effect, hard control, and it needs a dark background or the tail has nothing to dissolve into. Start with the sheet. If the shape appeals more than the shading, it works in fabric as a cheesecloth ghost.

Pencil grades and the blending stump

Two grades carry the drawing. A 2H stays pale enough that marker or softer graphite covers it later, so the whole sketch goes down in 2H and nothing you regret shows through. A 6B gives you black that still looks black inside the sockets.

A blending stump is a tight roll of paper sharpened to a point. Drag it over graphite and the grain disappears, which is what you want where the ghost thins into air. A fingertip smears too, but it leaves skin oil the next layer will not grip. In marker, the colorless blender does the same job. Either one is easier to steer when the construction underneath is sound, which is what the drawing fundamentals are for.

Leave the paper white instead of erasing it back

The brightest thing in the drawing is bare paper, and you get one supply of it. Cutting a highlight out of finished shading leaves a gray smudge with a hard rim, because graphite sinks into the tooth of the paper and never lifts all the way out.

Decide where the light is before the first gray goes down. Pick a side, leave those patches alone through every layer, and shade around them. White pencil over dark gray is the one exception, and only because it sits on top rather than lifting anything off.

Backgrounds that add dread

A ghost alone on white paper floats, and floating reads as a sticker. Put it somewhere.

A window behind it, two dark bars crossing, tells the eye it is night and indoors. A doorway is better: a black rectangle with the ghost half inside it, so part of the body is genuinely lost. Fog is the cheapest, a stump smudged sideways across the lower third, and it hides the hem.

Whichever you pick, the background has to sit darker than the ghost or the ghost stops glowing. For the rest of the Halloween set, a bat is a silhouette you fill in solid and a jack-o-lantern is three triangles and a grin.