How to Draw Flames

With organic moving shapes and fierce glowing light, you can easily learn how to draw flames. A roaring fire illustration can consist of glowing hues of orange, yellow, and red. This design is perfect for making stickers, camping clipart and much more. In this tutorial, we will take you step by step, from creating rough sketches to adding color to your flames.

Get all of your supplies together and let's get drawing. You can use any medium you have on hand like pastels, crayons, or drawing software like Procreate, or Affinity.

If you are sketching with Procreate, like we are, you can follow along with these ink Procreate brushes. The brush set will be used to create the sketches and outlines of our drawing.

Don't forget to check out the FREE Procreate brush category, which also includes a selection of palettes. All design resources are available to download instantly and include a commercial and personal use license backed by phenomenal customer care.

Step 1 - Create Rough Sketches of the Flames

Using a medium that is easy to remove, like a pencil, roughly sketch the shape of your flames. There is no right or wrong, you can draw this in any way that you like. You can also use a reference photo to help with your sketching ideas.

We have an awesome tutorial on how to add a reference photo to Procreate if you need it.

Sketch Your Guide Shape

Start by sketching a rounded oval shape. This doesn't have to be perfect. We will use the oval shape as a guide for the size of our drawing.

Create The Flame Sketch Shape

With the oval guide in place, we are now going to create the outer flames. This fiery element has an organic movement, with jagged edges, curves and points. Start at the bottom of your oval guide shape. Now follow the curve and sketch some of the edges and curves. The higher the flames go, the more you should exaggerate your curve lines.

You are welcome to add as many or as few edges as you want to the flames.

Inside the first sketch, at the bottom, draw a slightly smaller flame. Use the same technique as above for the outer sketch with jagged edges, points and curves.

To complete our rough sketch, draw a third, smaller flame and place this inside the last sketch. You can use our drawing below as a guide.

Step 2 - Outline Your Flames

In this step, we can finally outline our sketch. You can skip this step if you don't want to add an outline and go straight to adding color. If you do want to add an outline, we recommend using a permanent medium that you can use to define your outlines. This can be something like a pen, a marker, or a defining brush if you are using Procreate.

Once you are done with your outline, you can go ahead and remove the rough sketches. Our drawing is looking pretty great right now, but it still needs a bit of character.

Step 3 - Add Color to Your Flames

We are now ready to add some color to our flaming sketch. For the color palette, you can use different shades of yellow, orange, and red. Begin by adding yellow to the small flame, then orange to the middle and red to the outer flame.

You can experiment with lighter and darker shades of yellow, orange and red for the shadows and highlights. Or you can leave your design as is, depending on what you want to use it for. It's entirely up to you. Why not use texture brushes to add some shading?

We have an awesome selection of Procreate brushes that will complement your collection. Now that we done with our flame illustration, here is the final result.

You did a flaming good job of drawing this awesome illustration. Why not draw some logs and create a campfire? The techniques followed in this tutorial are a great way to improve your skills.

Take your drawing up a notch and create a fantasy themed idea with glowing blue flames. There is no end to what your imagination can create.