How To Draw Classic Fantasy Castles

Just like drawing anything, castles have their own way of drawing them and these are what make them look rather good, but first there is an excellent resource that has lots of reference pictures of castles and castle ruins from all over the world and it is great to take parts of existing castles and make your own fantasy castle that just exists in your own made up worlds.

Here is that website:

Castles Of The World

Now there are only a few rules that I like to apply to my castles, just avoid these rules if you'd rather do your own castles.

First - The castle has to be located on an impossibly balanced ruin of a mountain as that is part of the charm of castles.

Second - Lots of towers equals a large castle

Third - A full moon in the background with lots of dark clouds just sets it off for me.

Fourth - A visible entrance or doorway.

And that is the simple rules that I myself always go by when drawing castles.

 The initial drawing stage of working out your castle drawing is the best stage for drawing it is the process of making your drawing work based on an idea that you may have at the back of your mind or at the forefront of your creative thoughts.

Seeing this idea transfer to paper is the exciting part and most satisfying when you get it right almost straight away. Castles always work best when you look at what castles look like today in real life and then do the exact opposite when it's time to draw the castle building.

The drawing to the right is the essential foundation of the next stage, which is as I always say, the defining stage, the process of filling in some of the gaps by random lines and made up pencil marks to form the basis of your castle building as best you can to your ability.

 It's important to draw and define your towers and windows at this point as well as some structural issues to help support the fact that your castle is standing on one of the worlds most unstable mountain ruins.

At this point, adding more solid lines that you know are going to stay is the order of the day and also finding out where your light source is going to come from is important for the next step.

The details don't have to be exact at this stage as you can work this out in the trasition of this step to the next and be sure that all of your composition works because next we wil start to add some of the background elements to create a scene that looks like it exists and is part of a full fantasy world.

 The drawing starts to show through at this stage and you can still change some stuff at this point, and when you add the heavier pencil lines you get to know where your castle drawing is headed.

The idea here is to define everything and see what it looks like for the ext stage of inking in black ink.

Inking the castle at this stage makes the castle drawing more permanent and working out the recesses of the darkness that the moon will cast upon the castle subject.

At this stage of the castle drawing I have started to add a little shading on the mountains and this will be finished in the final stages of the castles drawing.

 After all of this sketching lightly and then inking, we go over the shading to create more depth in your concept castle drawing, I like drawing and adding depth to mountainous rubble and the final castle drawing you can really draw them anyway you want, the castle can be a fixed point and actually part of the mountain or something entirely different, this little drawing tutorial is not meant to make you draw the way I do or something like that, I wanted to write and draw a step by step guide just to give a few pointers as to draw a fantasy castle, the rest is up to you as an artist...Go draw castles...and maybe make your own hubpage about it!!