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

Near the top centre of the page, draw a loose oval in pencil, pressing lightly. This is only a guide and most of it will disappear under the sheet. Leave plenty of paper below it: the body and the trailing sheet take up two thirds of the drawing.

Draw one shoulder off the side of the head and bring an arm out from it, reaching forward. Make the two shoulders deliberately uneven. A lopsided ghost looks like it is moving toward you; a symmetrical one looks like a costume on a hanger.

From either side of the head, bring two long lines down the body and let them widen toward the bottom as if the fabric is caught in wind. Add a cuff of sheet falling off the wrist of the reaching arm, and a few long fold lines running down the body from the shoulders.

Inside the head, draw two hollow eye sockets and a shallow triangular nose hole, like a skull with no lower jaw. Then draw the hand: three or four long, thin fingers curling out from the cuff, with one pointing, and a thumb tucked behind.

Long fingers are what make it creepy. Human-length fingers make it a person in a sheet.

Switch to a medium gray marker (a CG5 or similar) and colour the whole ghost, working downward from the head. When you reach the bottom edge, take the marker off the paper in ragged points and shreds instead of following a clean curve, and leave a few gaps higher up the body as holes.

Make it messy on purpose. This is the pass that turns a friendly bedsheet ghost into something that has been drifting around for a century.

Go back over most of the ghost with a darker gray (CG9), but leave the top of the head, the back shoulder and the face in the lighter first layer. Those untouched patches are your first highlights, and the second layer is what gives the sheet weight and folds.

Switch to a black coloured pencil and press hard inside the eye sockets, the holes, and the long opening down the centre of the sheet. Run a band of shadow along the underside of the arm and into the deepest folds. Contrast is what makes the ghost read as three-dimensional instead of a gray shape.

Go over the pencil shading with a colourless blender marker to melt it into the gray, which softens the harsh edges and makes the whole thing look painted. Then take a white coloured pencil and pick out highlights: along the top of the head, the tops of both shoulders, the bridge of the nose, and down the ridges of the folds where moonlight would catch.

Finish by sharpening the torn edges at the hem with the black pencil, since the blender rounds them off.