The first graveyard I ever drew looked like a row of garden ornaments, and it took me a while to work out why.
I had drawn five headstones. All the same size, all standing perfectly upright, all evenly spaced along a straight line. Every individual stone was fine. Together they read as a fence.
A graveyard is not a collection of headstones. It is a scene, and scenes need depth. Depth comes from three things that have nothing to do with how well you draw a stone: different sizes, overlap, and lean.
Get those three right and how to draw a graveyard stops being about drawing skill at all. You can build a convincing one from shapes a child could manage. Get them wrong and no amount of cracked stone texture will save it.
What You’ll Need
- A pencil, an eraser, and paper.
- A black fineliner if you want to ink it at the end.
That is the whole kit. This is a silhouette heavy subject and it does not reward a big pencil set.
You can also have a look on easy coffin drawing tutorial for Halloween.
How to Draw a Graveyard Step by Step
Step 1: A horizon and some uneven ground
Draw a horizontal line across the lower third of the page. That is your horizon.
Then break the ground in front of it with two or three low humps. Not neat mounds, just gentle rises and dips. Perfectly flat ground is the first thing that makes a graveyard look like a car park.
Keep the horizon low. More sky means more room for atmosphere later.
Step 2: Three stones, three sizes
Draw three simple headstone shapes. A rectangle with a rounded top is enough.
Make them clearly different sizes. One large near the bottom of the page, one medium in the middle, one small up near the horizon. Different sizes at different heights is what tells the eye they are at different distances.
Do not space them evenly. Two close together and one apart looks natural. Three evenly spaced looks like a diagram.
Step 3: Lean them and sink them
This is the step that does the most work in the whole drawing.
Tilt each stone a different way. One leaning left, one leaning right, one nearly upright. Not dramatically, just a few degrees. Upright stones read as a well kept cemetery. Leaning ones read as old, forgotten, and slightly wrong, which is what you want.
Then sink them. Draw the base of each stone slightly below the ground line rather than sitting on top of it, and add a small mound of earth or grass around the bottom.
A stone that sits on the ground looks placed. A stone that comes out of the ground looks like it has been there a hundred years.
Step 4: Fill the middle distance with overlap
Add four or five more shapes behind the first three: crosses, flat slabs, a broken stone with the top missing.
The rule here is overlap. E