How to Draw a Hot Air Balloon

Today we are taking you on a drawing adventure, and showing you how to draw a hot air balloon. Easily create your hot air balloon in a minimal style or decorate it to fit with a theme. This adventure clipart can be used for travel projects, nursery decor, or sublimated on pillows.

Before you start this drawing guide, gather your supplies to sketch, line, and color your illustration. These can be anything from traditional art mediums to digital drawing apps.

Are you using Procreate to make your hot air balloon illustration? Add designer brushes to your library by checking out our collection of FREE Procreate brushes.

Step 1 - Sketch your Hot Air Balloon

With a sketching medium, let us begin by roughly creating our hot air balloon sketch. For your rough sketches, you can use any removable or light-colored medium to start drawing.

Create the Balloon

To create the balloon part of your drawing, sketch a large circle. On the bottom of your circle, draw a downward-pointing triangle as we did (indicated in blue). The balloon is quick and simple to create, you can even change your shape to a heart, a star, etc.

Add the Basket

Below the balloon sketch a square for the basket (shown in red). Then, connect your basket and balloon by drawing three to four short lines. Looking at our example image below, you can see our lines overlap a small piece at the bottom of the balloon.

Add the Seams

Lastly, we are going to add the seams to our hot air balloon, and round out the tops. Start with drawing a horizontal line above the basket lines. This will create the bottom opening of our hot air balloon.

Then, draw three or more curved lines from the bottom going toward the top. Once you get close to the top sketch of your balloon shape, round out the top. Feel free to mimic our below sketches, or check out our hot air balloon clipart collection for inspiration.

Step 2 - Define your Hot Air Balloon Outline

For our second step, we need to define our hot air balloon outlines. To create your defined outlines use a dark or permanent lining tool. These can be black-colored mediums, pens, markers, or inking brushes.

As you are tracing your sketch lines, make sure to pay close attention to your rough sketches. You should only outline the sketches that you want to make permanent. To help with which sketch lines you should trace, look at our example image below.

Step 3 - Color and Decorate your Hot Air Balloon

With our outlines done, we can now move on to the next step of applying color and decorations to our hot air balloon illustration. We colored our illustration first, using two shades of pink for the balloon and light brown for the basket.

Then, decorate and add some patterns and texture to your flight clipart, using these versatile Procreate brushes. Lastly, we created a colorful edge at the top of our basket with pink shades and white dots.

Off we go on our flying illustration adventure. Great work on following along and drawing your hot air balloon. Why not create more with different colors and patterns to add to your digital collection?

If you had fun with this drawing exercise, be sure to check out our other easy drawing tutorials. You will find all kinds of fun drawings to make, including food and animal clipart.