Deserts

In this short step-by-step tutorial you’ll learn how to draw a deserts from start to finish, including the line art, colouring and shading.

Set of red squiggle lines suggesting shorelines or terrain contours – useful for outlining coastal geography on fantasy maps.

Step 1: Start with a basic shape

We’re going to start simple with a basic shape for our sand dunes. This should be smooth, curvy lines to reflect the dunes that are blown up by the desert winds.

Minimalist black contour lines showing a branching river system – designed for hand-drawn fantasy cartography and terrain planning.

Step 2: Draw the dunes

With the general shape of the dunes desired it is no time to draw in the sand dunes themselves. Just like the basic shapes, the lines for these should be curvy and smooth.

Clean black ink riverbanks with branching paths – minimalist design for marking water features on fantasy map layouts.

Step 3: Add some slopes

Now we’re going to give out dunes some shape by adding lopes to them. Just like before these slopes should be drawn as a smooth curve, gradually getting flatter as it reaches the desert floor.

Hand-drawn black line illustration of a timber-framed medieval cottage – suited for town or village map symbols.

Step 4: Add details

We’re going to start simple with a basic shape for our sand dunes. This should be smooth, curvy lines to reflect the dunes that are blown up by the desert winds.

Sandy yellow texture with sketch lines and subtle shading – used as a desert terrain base for fantasy map creation and region design.

Step 5: Flat colors

Time to get started with adding color. The first thing that we need to do is settle on the colors for the desert. Which colors work best depends a lot on what other colors you use in your map, so play around and see what looks best! For this tutorial set I settled on a yellow (ddd18a).

Sometimes the black of the line art can look too stark on your map. In this case you may want to change the color of the line art. Take a very dark shade of the original colors and apply it to the line art.

Hand-drawn hills and soft terrain elevation lines – ideal for fantasy worldbuilding, map layering, and adventure region design.

Step 6: Shadows

Now let’s add shadows to the dunes. I have my light source in the top left corner, so the right side of the dunes will be covered in shadow.

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Step 7: Highlights

In this step we’ll add the highlights. We’ll do this the same way that we did with the shadows, except we’ll be drawing with a lighter shade of the colors. Make sure the highlights are on the opposite sides of the shadows.