Step by Step Flaming Heart Drawing
Learning how to draw a heart with flames is easy and fun. In today’s art tutorial we’re not going to be drawing a typical heart.
Instead, we’re going to draw a crazy, stylized heart. But you could adapt this lesson to any style of heart you might want to draw.
Let’s grab some supplies and get started.
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Art Supplies
- Thin black marker
- Paper or cardstock
- Markers
- Pencil
- Click Eraser, Pink Pearl Eraser
- White Gelly Roll pen
About Hearts with Flames
The flaming heart has historical significance in religious and artistic context. It is commonly associated with the Sacred Heart in Christian iconography, symbolizing divine love and devotion.
Artists have used the flaming heart as a powerful symbol, conveying themes of passion, spirituality, and sacrifice in diverse visual representations.
Flaming hearts in tattoos often draw inspiration from traditional tattoo art, incorporating elements of the Sacred Heart symbol. The imagery gained popularity in tattoo culture during the early to mid-20th century.
Sailors and servicemen frequently adorned themselves with these designs, symbolizing love, loyalty, and courage.
Over time, the flaming heart tattoo evolved, with various styles and interpretations emerging in tattoo art. It continues to be a symbol of passion, resilience, and intense emotions, representing a fusion of religious and secular themes in contemporary tattooing.
Flaming Heart Sketch Practice
When drawing a non traditional style heart, you may want to do some quick practice sketches first. This is totally optional, but often extremely beneficial. It’s a great way to warm up your drawing muscles and get prepared for your art session.
Here’s how it’s done.
- Get some paper and something to sketch with (pencil, pen, marker, etc.)
- Pull up some reference photos of hearts
- Set a timer for three or five minutes
Then simply sketch out as many crazy heart sketches as you can before the timer goes off. Or, you can simply sketch until you run out of room on your paper.
Either way is fine, just keep your sketches quick and loose.
How to Draw a Heart with Flames
Drawing a heart with flames is really easy, but you could also make your drawing more interesting and complex. Below is just one way to draw your flaming heart.
My drawing was done on an artist trading card (ATC), but any size paper will work. But I love working on a smaller scale so I can do more drawings in less time, which gives me the freedom to try new things.
Step 1: Basic Shapes
Starting your drawings with simple shapes is the easiest way to begin. Getting some initial marks on your paper will get you past the blank page syndrome that stops so many artists.
And it’s perfect for getting a rough idea of what your drawing is going to look like before spending a bunch of time on it, just to realize something is off.
So let’s start with a couple of small circles. Since I want to make my heart more stylized I’m going to draw one circle slightly larger than the other one.
Next, draw a curved line that will be the center guide for the bottom of your heart.
Step 2: Rough Sketch
The next step is to get your rough sketch drawn out. For our heart drawing it means refining the shape of our heart.
Don’t worry about all the final details yet. Just get the rough idea down for how you want your heart to look.
Step 3: Add Details
Now we need to start adding in all the details. Since I want my heart to be a little crazy and stylized, I need to start drawing out those details now.
And of course we need to add in some flames. For this heart with flames, I’m only going to be adding some fire at the very top of the heart. If you need more help drawing flames check out, How to Draw Flames (step by step).
You could easily bring the flames down further or wrap them around the sides.
Heart with Flames Outline
When you’re finished with your flaming heart drawing, you can add an outline before adding color.
This can be done with a black pen or marker. Other colors could be used as well. This would be a good element of the drawing to experiment with and try different variations of your drawing.
Simply trace over the pencil lines that you want to keep. You can make your lines thick, thin, or a combination of line weights. I used a thicker line for my heart, and a thinner line for the flames.
You can also add some hatching or cross hatching with your pen as well. This is optional, but can help take your drawing to the next level.
How to Draw a Flaming Heart with Markers
After you’ve finished your outline, you can start to add some color to your heart and flames. If you’re using markers there are a few things to keep in mind.
First, if you want to be able to blend your colors together you need to use alcohol based markers. Bic, Sharpie, and Copic for example. As well as many others.
Second, you need to work while the colors are still wet or they won’t mix together. This isn’t a big deal. Just make sure you work on a section at a time.
Third, you need to use colors that are similar to each other if you want to create a smooth transition of color. If your markers are too different they will leave a harder edge.
I like to start with my lightest color first, which will be pink for the heart. I’ll fill the entire heart in with the lightest color, even though some of it will get covered up.
If you’re working on a larger drawing, be sure to work on smaller sections if you’re blending your markers.
Then I’ll add the next lightest markers to the areas where I want it to be darker. So for this drawing I’ll add a red color that’s similar to the pink. I use the lighter marker to blend the areas where the two markers overlap.
I finished with a darker red for the darkest areas of the heart. And I used the red marker to blend those areas.
You can also use a colorless blender to blend the markers together. But I just use the lighter color to do it so I have less markers laying out.
For the flames, I used yellow, orange, and a darker orange.
Then just fill in the background and you’re done.
A white Gelly Roll pen can be used to add highlights.
Heart with Flames Drawing – Conclusion
As you can see, drawing a heart with flames is pretty easy. But it might take some practice to get yours to turn out the way you want it to.
Or you might want to try some different ideas and see what you can come up with on your own. Doing a drawing challenge, or a series of drawings, is a great way to learn and grow as an artist.
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