How to Draw Shoes

Get ready to step up your drawing skills with this beginner-friendly tutorial on how to draw shoes! Today, we will show you how to draw a stylish sneaker in four simple steps. Use your shoe illustration to create various projects and crafts, from fashion clipart and boho wall art to stickers and sublimation designs for t-shirts and tumblers.

To begin this clothing drawing guide, get all the necessary supplies you want to work with. You can use any available medium to make rough sketches, define outlines, apply color, and decorate. We will use Procreate, and these Procreate texture brushes to create our easy shoe drawing.

Get inspired by fashion and expand your artistic skills with our beginner drawing tutorials. We have excellent step-by-step drawing exercises where you can learn how to draw a hoodie and draw a backpack.

Step 1 - Create a Shoe Guide

The first step in drawing a shoe is to start with guides. These guides will help you get a sense of the overall shape and proportion of the shoes. To create your shoe guides, use a pencil or light-colored medium.

Draw a simple rectangle with a line vertically and horizontally through the middle. Change the type of shoe you draw by adjusting the height of your rectangle. For example, creating high heels would have a square guide, and a sneaker drawing would look like our guide sketch below.

Next, draw a circle for the shoe opening in the top right corner.

Step 2 - Add Shape to your Shoes

Once you have your guides sketched, let’s start adding shape to your shoe. Keep using the same sketching medium as your guide so that you can easily make changes, erase or cover it up later in this tutorial.

Create the Outer Shape

Using our sneaker example image below to help guide you, begin adding curves and lines to shape the outer form of your show. Starting at the top, draw a long curved line from the circle toward the horizontal guideline (shown in red).

Define the sides by drawing a straight line from the back of the circle to the bottom. And a short curve from the center horizontal line to roughly the middle of the bottom left section.

Lastly, sketch the slight upward curve on the bottom of the shoe front by drawing a curve as we did in our green example sketch.

Create the Inner Shapes

Next, draw the shape of the shoe tongue at the top curve, from roughly the center of the top left section to the circle. Along the bottom edge, draw a long line to shape the shoe sole.

Define the shoe opening, shown in red, inside the circle as we did below. Then following the curves of the circle guide, draw a short curve on the left and five small circles inside the shoe tongue for the lace holes (blue lines).

Add the Shoelaces

At each shoelace hole, draw angled lines towards the top shape of your shoe and smaller shapes between to create the shoelace on your sneaker clipart.

Lastly, sketch the shoelace loops close to the circle as we did in our example image below. Feel free to add any additional elements to your shoe sketch that aren’t part of a design or pattern decoration.

Step 3 - Outline your Shoe Sketches

Your shoe has been shaped and is ready to darken your rough sketches to make a defined shoe outline. For your line drawing, use a permanent or black medium such as a Procreate monoline brush, pen, or black color medium.

Carefully trace the lines of your sketches, paying attention to overlapping drawings. To get a clean sneaker outline, trace the shoelace loops and laces first.

Then move on to defining the outer sketch lines of your sneaker shape.

Lastly, outline the inner lines around the tongue, opening, and sole edge. If you added extra details, define them and then erase your remaining sketches.

Step 4 - Decorate your Shoe Illustration

In our final step, it’s time to get creative and decorate your shoe clipart with color, shading, and elements. You can use any coloring medium and color palette you want. Start by adding a base color to your drawing in different color shades to create contrast.

Then add texture and shading to your sneaker illustration to create depth. Create unique artwork by mixing different styles, such as adding line work and one of these four methods to blend color in Procreate.

Combine your artwork with other elements to create themed illustrations like stamp brushes, retro clipart, or quotes using a cute handwriting font.

Thank you for following along and learning how to sketch, outline and decorate shoes with us. Why not use your newly created illustration and decorate the opening with this boho watercolor clipart to make unique wall art?