How to Draw a Basketball: The Curved Seams Are What Make It Round

The circle isn’t the hard part

Ask someone to draw a basketball and they’ll get the circle more or less right, then draw a straight vertical line down the middle, a straight horizontal line across it, and stop. The result looks like a beach ball that’s been run over. It’s flat.

The reason is geometry, and it’s the only genuinely difficult idea in this whole exercise. A basketball’s seams are painted onto a curved surface. When you look at the ball, you’re seeing those lines wrap away from you. A line running down the exact centre of a sphere does look straight from head on — but every other line on that surface bends.

What you need

Two pencils and an eraser. An HB for the construction lines because it stays light and lifts cleanly, and something softer — a 2B or 4B — for the shadow side. A kneaded eraser is genuinely worth having here, because the way you make a highlight on a matte ball is by lifting graphite back off rather than leaving white paper.

Use paper with a little texture if you have it. Smooth paper is fine for the shape but works against you when you get to the pebbling, because the grain of the paper is doing half that job for you.

Step 1: the circle

Draw it faintly. You’re going to be working on top of this line and you don’t want it showing through in the finished drawing.

If you’re going freehand, move from your shoulder rather than your wrist — wrist movement produces short arcs that don’t join smoothly. The other trick is to rotate the paper as you draw and keep your hand still, which sounds like cheating and is how a lot of people get clean circles.

Step 2: the seams, which is the whole drawing

A basketball has four seam lines. Two long ones that wrap right around the ball, and two shorter ones that curve off to the sides. Getting the count right matters less than getting the curvature right.

The long vertical seam

Start at the top of the circle and run down to the bottom. If you place it exactly down the middle it’s a straight line — that’s the one position where it is. Almost always you want it slightly off-centre instead, because a perfectly centred ball is a duller drawing. Once it’s off-centre, it has to bow: the line curves toward whichever edge it’s nearest.

The horizontal seam

Now cross it. Same rule — if it sits dead across the middle it’s straight, and anywhere above or below it curves. Above the midpoint it bows upward at the edges; below, it bows downward. Think about the line of the horizon on a globe and you’ve got it.

The two side hooks

These are what people forget, and they’re the detail that makes the drawing recognisable. On either side of the vertical seam, add a short curved line that starts near the top of the ball, bows outward toward the edge, and comes back in near the bottom. They’re roughly parallel to the centre seam but flattened, like two brackets holding the ball.

Step 3: shading, and why the highlight is the giveaway

Pick a light source and commit to it. Top-left is conventional and easy. The side facing the light stays pale, the opposite side goes dark, and there’s a gradient between them that should be gradual rather than a hard edge.

Here’s the bit that separates a convincing basketball from a plastic-looking one: a basketball is matte. It’s rubber or composite leather with a pebbled surface, and it scatters light. It does not produce the tight white glare you’d put on a snooker ball or a car. Give it a broad, soft, slightly-lighter region instead, with no crisp border. If you’ve already shaded over the area, lift it back out with the kneaded eraser rather than trying to leave a gap.

One more thing that costs nothing: add a little reflected light along the very bottom edge of the shadow side. A thin band that’s slightly lighter than the shadow above it. That’s light bouncing off whatever surface the ball is sitting on, and it stops the dark side looking like a hole.

Step 4: the pebbling

The texture goes on last, over the top of finished shading. If you put it down first you’ll smear it while you shade, and you’ll also end up with even, mechanical dots across the entire surface, which looks like fabric rather than rubber.

Use small irregular marks — dots, tiny commas, short flicks. Vary the pressure. The density should follow the shading: heaviest through the mid-tones where the surface is most visible, sparse in the lit area, and barely there in the deepest shadow where you wouldn’t be able to make it out anyway.

You don’t have to texture the whole ball. Suggesting it across two-thirds and letting the rest fade is more convincing than covering every millimetre, and it’s a great deal quicker.

Adding colour

Plain orange is the trap. A real basketball sits somewhere between orange and a burnt, slightly brown tone, and it gets duller and darker the more it’s been used. If you colour it straight out of the orange pencil it comes out looking like a novelty balloon.

The approach that works with coloured pencils is to lay orange over the whole ball first, keeping it light, then go over the shadow side with a light brown or a burnt sienna. A touch of blue or grey in the deepest part of the shadow will stop it turning muddy — shadows on an orange object aren’t just darker orange, they pick up colour from everything around them.

Leave the seams until the colour is finished. They’re black, but not solid black along their whole length: where the seam runs into the lit side it lightens, and where it disappears round the edge it thickens slightly. Painting them in flat, uniform black is the colour equivalent of ruling them straight.

Drawing it small, or as part of a scene

Most of the time a basketball isn’t the subject of the drawing. It’s in someone’s hands, mid-air over a hoop, or sitting on a court in the background, and at that size all of the above changes.

Below about a centimetre across, drop the pebbling entirely. It turns into grey mush and reads worse than clean shading. Keep the seams — even two of them — because those are what identify the object. A small ball with two curved lines and a simple gradient is instantly a basketball; a small ball with beautiful texture and no seams is just a circle.

Match the light to the rest of the scene, not to habit. If your figure is lit from the right, a ball lit from the top-left will look pasted in no matter how well it’s drawn on its own. And put a shadow underneath it — contact shadow if it’s resting on the floor, a softer offset one if it’s in the air.

How to actually get better at this

Draw the same ball ten times in a row on one sheet, small, at different angles. Not carefully — a couple of minutes each. What you’re training is the seam curvature, and doing it ten times teaches your hand more than one careful attempt does.

Then do a set from a reference photograph rather than from your head. Photographs will show you things you’d never invent, like how much the seam width varies along its length, or how the pebbling is only really visible across a narrow band of the surface. Your imagination smooths all of that out.

What goes wrong

Once it looks right, turn it

A ball drawn straight on is a good exercise and a slightly boring picture. The same four seams tilted a few degrees look considerably better, and it’s no harder — you just rotate the whole seam structure together rather than shifting lines individually.

If you want it in motion, squash it very slightly along the direction of travel and add a soft shadow underneath, offset from the ball. Even a small ellipse of shadow sells the idea that the thing is above a surface rather than pasted onto one.

And if you’re drawing the ball as part of a wider scene, remember that it’s usually not the subject. A ball in someone’s hands should be shaded to match the light on the figure — worth a look at our ice hockey player drawing guide for how to keep a figure and equipment consistent.

Frequently asked questions