How to draw ice cream

Six frames, two ice creams: a three-scoop sundae in a tall glass beside a two-scoop cone. The cone's scoops first, the cherry last.

An ice cream is a stack of simple shapes and an excellent exercise in one specific skill: making a round thing look soft. The difference between a drawn scoop that looks like ice cream and one that looks like a tennis ball is entirely in the outline. This sheet gives you two ice creams side by side — a tall sundae glass with three scoops, a wafer and a cherry, and a plain waffle cone with two — so the same shape gets drawn five times across six frames.

Frame one is two things at once, and they are the two largest closed shapes rather than the two that belong together: the cone's pair of scoops over on the right, and on the left the inner bowl of the sundae glass with its wavy cream rim, standing on nothing. The crucial instruction for the scoops is not to draw a circle. A scoop has a bumpy, slightly irregular edge where it has been dragged out of the tub. Four or five shallow bumps around an otherwise round shape is enough, and it is the whole trick.

The bumps should be uneven. Regularly spaced identical bumps read as a flower or a cloud; irregular ones of different sizes read as something soft that has been scooped. This is the same principle as the tree's baubles and the flower's petals, and it comes up constantly in drawing.

The sundae's two lower scoops follow in frame two, along with the striped wafer leaning out of the glass. They sit side by side rather than stacked, which is what a glass allows and a cone does not; the third scoop balances on top of them in frame four, set slightly off-centre rather than exactly in the middle. A perfectly stacked pair looks like a snowman; one leaning a little to one side looks like an actual ice cream about to become a problem, which is much more appealing.

The scoops should also overlap slightly, with the upper one's lower edge disappearing behind the top of the lower one. Two scoops merely touching look like two balls on a stick. The overlap is what makes them read as one soft mass.

The cone arrives in frame four, three frames after the scoops that sit on it, as a narrow triangle beneath — and it should be longer and thinner than instinct suggests. A short wide cone makes the whole thing look squat. The top of the cone is hidden behind the lower scoop, which saves you from having to draw a join.

The waffle pattern goes on the cone as two sets of parallel lines crossing at an angle to make diamonds. Both sets should follow the cone's taper, converging slightly towards the point rather than running as a flat grid. A grid drawn without taper makes the cone look like a flat triangle.

The topping is the last shape on the sheet, and it belongs to the sundae rather than the cone: a single cherry with a curling stalk, added in frame six alongside the glass's foot. A cherry, a flake or a drizzle running down one side all work. A drizzle is the most interesting of the three to draw, because it should follow the bumps of the scoop and pool slightly where two scoops meet, which is a small piece of observation that makes the drawing look considered.

If you want the ice cream to be melting, a single drip running down over the cone does more than any amount of extra detail elsewhere, and it gives the drawing a moment in time rather than a pose. It is one line and a small blob.

The frames go from the largest closed shape to the smallest, and because the two desserts are interleaved that means the cone's scoops and the glass bowl together, then the sundae's lower scoops and wafer, then the glass's stem and foot, then the cone with its waffle grid, then the last lines and the cherry. It is an easy order to copy and there is no reason it has to be the one you use.

If you would like a harder version, the sundae on this sheet is already it: three scoops instead of two, and the difficulty is not the extra shape but the balance. Three scoops lean, and deciding which way they lean and letting the glass or the cone tilt to match is a genuine composition problem hiding inside a very simple picture. Draw the cone first and the sundae second and you will feel the difference between them.

Published 28 August 2026Updated 28 August 2026765 words