How to Draw a Beach Scene

Sketching the Background

Draw a horizon line in pencil. Draw a straight, horizontal line across the middle of your piece of paper. This will be the horizon line, the line where the sea meets the sky. You can use a ruler to help you draw a straight line.

Add a wavy line for the edge of the water. Below the horizon line, but not quite at the bottom of your paper, draw a wavy line across your whole page. This will mark the tide-line, where the water reaches the sand. Make the curves of the line different sizes to make the waterline look more realistic.

Draw little squiggles in the water to look like waves. Your scene will have the beach in the bottom part of your page, then the water, and then the sky. Make it clear that the ocean is water by adding little squiggles to look like waves. Don’t worry too much about making it look perfect. You are just at the pencil stage, and can fix it up later with colors.

Draw clouds in the sky. To draw a cloud, sketch short, connected curved lines. You can make the clouds as big or small as you want, and can also add swirls in the middle of the cloud for a more realistic effect. If you want your beach scene to be perfectly sunny, with no clouds, then feel free to skip them! Study clouds and you will notice that they have perspective, which means they are like boxes going back towards the horizon. When painting your clouds, remember that even on sunny days, the shadows in clouds are lighter than the sky. This is important to making them feel like they are floating.

Draw a sun or a moon. If you want your beach scene to take place at sunrise or sunset, then draw the sun as half a circle, sticking out of your horizon line, in the middle of the page. If you want your beach scene to take place in the middle of the day, then draw the sun as a full circle floating in the sky. If your scene is at night, add a moon by either drawing a circle or a crescent. Don’t worry if the circle isn’t perfect! Most of the time people don’t look directly at the sun, so they don’t really see a perfect circle. If you want, you can give your sun a friendly smiley face.

Adding Details and Color

Draw a palm tree for a tropical scene. Use 2 long, vertical, slightly curved lines to draw the trunk of the palm tree. Draw the leaves like big feathers: make a curved line, and then a bunch of short lines coming off of it, all pointing downward. You can add as many palm trees as you want. Of course, if your beach is somewhere that doesn’t have palm trees, you don’t have to draw them. Draw a little wiggly line under the palm tree to make it clear it’s standing on sand, not just floating. Each tree has its own way of branching. The best way to study them is to start by looking for the overall mass and filling it in from there. If you want to draw realistic trees, remember that we do not see individual leaves from afar, so think of leaves as masses. The one place that we do see individual leaves is where the edge of the foliage meets the sky.

Add a beach umbrella to make it look like people were there. It might be tricky to actually draw people, but you can make the beach look full of life by adding in a beach umbrella. Use a slightly diagonal line to draw the pole coming out of the sand. Draw a curved line facing down for the umbrella, and a bunch of little connected curves for the bottom of the umbrella. You can add a beach towel underneath the towel by drawing a diamond. This will look like a tilted towel.

Sketch a boat in the water to add some fun detail. Draw the hull of the boat by drawing a half circle, and then erasing the part that would be underneath the water. Then draw a straight line for the mast, and a triangle for the sail. If you want your boat to be really far away, you can draw it really tiny on the horizon.

Go over your pencil lines with pen and erase the pencil. Take a pen or a marker and go over the lines that you want to keep in your drawing. You probably made a lot of extra wiggly lines when you were sketching with a pencil, and you don’t need to keep those in. Once you go over the pencil lines with pen, you can erase all the pencil lines. Make sure the ink has dried before you erase the pencil or your eraser will smudge the ink.

Color your picture with colored pencils, crayons, pastels, or markers. You can use yellow or brown for the sand, brown for the palm tree trunks, and green for leaves. If your scene is in the day, color the sky a light blue and the ocean a slightly darker blue-green. If your scene is at sunrise or sunset, color the sky with stripes of color, and make those colors reflect a bit off the water too. Your ocean will look more realistic if you color it with multiple colors, like blue, green, and purple, instead of all one color. You can color in your beach umbrella and beach towel bright colors like pink or yellow for some fun contrast!

Finished.