You’ve seen the photos. Those grainy, black-and-white images from 1916 where the ground looks like it’s been chewed up by a giant. But if you sit down to start a drawing of a trench, you realize pretty quickly that a hole in the ground is surprisingly hard to get right. It isn’t just a ditch. Honestly, most people mess this up by making it look like a neat, rectangular swimming pool, but real trenches—the kind that lived and breathed in the Somme or Verdun—were chaotic, messy, and architectural nightmares.
Drawing them is an exercise in texture. You aren't just sketching shapes; you're sketching history, misery, and engineering.
If you’re an artist, an illustrator, or even a tabletop gamer trying to map out a diorama, understanding the anatomy of these earthworks changes everything. A trench is a living system. It has layers. It has specific parts like the fire step, the parados, and those weird zig-zag patterns that look like a heart monitor on paper. If you draw it straight, your "soldiers" are dead. That’s the first rule of military architecture: straight lines are death traps.
The Anatomy Most Artists Miss
When you start your drawing of a trench, you have to think about the "trace." That’s the bird’s-eye view. If you look at the maps preserved by the Imperial War Museums, you’ll see the "crenellated" pattern. It looks like the top of a castle wall laid flat on the ground. Why? Because if an artillery shell hits a straight trench, the blast travels down the whole line like a bowling ball hitting pins. The zig-zags, or traverses, contain the explosion to one small bay.
You’ve got to get the "fire step" right. This was a ledge, usually built about two or three feet off the bottom, where a soldier would stand to actually see over the top. Without it, your drawing just shows people staring at a wall of mud.
Then there’s the "revetment." Mud doesn't like staying vertical. It wants to slump. To stop this, soldiers used whatever they had: corrugated iron, wooden planks, or "fascines" (which are basically bundles of sticks). If your sketch doesn't show the texture of rotting wood or sagging sandbags, it won't feel real. It’ll just look like a hole. Realism lives in the structural failure. You should draw the sandbags as heavy, slumped, and leaking. They weren't perfect bricks. They were burlap bags filled with wet dirt that weighed sixty pounds and hated being there.
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Texturing the Mud and the Misery
Let's talk about the bottom of the trench. It wasn't flat. Most trenches had "duckboards"—slatted wooden walkways—to keep men out of the water. But the water always won. If you’re using charcoal or graphite, this is where you go heavy. The "sump" was a hole dug even deeper to collect the rainwater.
I’ve seen some incredible work by modern historical illustrators like Peter Dennis who capture the sheer "soupy" quality of the terrain. When you’re working on the foreground of your drawing of a trench, your lines should be fluid. Mud isn't a solid. It’s a slow-moving liquid. Use cross-hatching to show the shadows under the duckboards, where the rats lived.
- The Parapet: The front wall, reinforced with sandbags, facing the enemy.
- The Parados: The back wall, often built higher to protect against the "backblast" of shells landing behind the line.
- Sandbags: Never draw them uniform. Some are bursting. Some are wet. Some are covered in frost.
The light in a trench is weird, too. It’s a subterranean world but with no roof. You have high-contrast shadows at noon and long, creeping shadows at dusk. Because the walls are deep, the bottom of the trench is often in total darkness while the top of the parapet is catching the last bit of orange sunlight. This creates a claustrophobic feeling that you absolutely have to capture if you want the viewer to feel the weight of the scene.
The Tools of the Trade
You don’t need much, but you need the right mindset. If you’re going digital, use a "dry media" brush set. You want grit. You want a brush that feels like it’s dragging through gravel.
If you’re using paper, go for something with tooth. A smooth Bristol board is your enemy here. You want a cold-press watercolor paper or a heavy-duty sketchbook that can handle layers of ink and wash. Start with a light 2H pencil to map out the perspective—usually a one-point perspective looking down the length of a traverse works best for drama.
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Don't forget the wire. No drawing of a trench is complete without the "knife rests" or the tangled mess of barbed wire out in No Man's Land. The wire wasn't neat. It was a bramble bush of steel. Use thin, erratic strokes. Don't draw every barb; just suggest them with little "ticks" along the line. It’s more effective and less distracting.
Common Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
The biggest mistake? Cleanliness.
A trench was a dump. It was a construction site that never finished. There should be discarded bully beef tins, broken shovels, and spent shell casings everywhere. Look at the sketches of Otto Dix. He was a German soldier and an artist, and his work is terrifying because it’s so cluttered. He didn't leave empty spaces.
Another mistake is the scale. A standard trench was about eight feet deep. If your characters' heads are popping out over the top while they're standing on the floor, you've drawn a drainage ditch, not a fortification.
Why Perspective Matters
If you draw from a high angle, looking down into the trench, it feels like a map. It’s clinical. It’s informative. But if you drop the "camera" down to the floor of the trench, looking up at the sky, it becomes an emotional piece. The walls tower over the viewer. The sky represents a "death zone" where you can't go. That’s how you tell a story with a drawing of a trench instead of just making a technical diagram.
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Remember that these places were noisy and smelly, even though you can't draw a smell. You can draw the flies. You can draw the steam coming off a soldier's breath or a small tin of tea. These "micro-details" bridge the gap between a generic sketch and a piece of historical art.
Practical Steps for Your First Sketch
If you're ready to start, follow this loose workflow. Don't be too precious about it.
- Block the "Z" shape. Start with a zig-zagging line that recedes toward a vanishing point. This is your floor.
- Raise the walls. Extend vertical lines up from your zig-zag. Make the front wall (parapet) slightly different in texture than the back (parados).
- Layer the revetment. Decide if this is a "fancy" British trench with neat boards or a muddy Russian line from 1915 that's mostly just dirt and hope.
- Add the fire step. About a third of the way up the front wall, draw that ledge. This is the most important structural element for "action" poses.
- Texture the ground. Add your duckboards. Break a few of the slats. Show water peeking through the gaps.
- The "Skyline." Add the sandbags at the very top. Keep them lumpy. Beyond that, draw a few charred "stubs" of trees to show how the landscape has been stripped.
- Deep Shadows. Use your darkest values at the very bottom of the walls and inside any "funk holes" (the small niches where soldiers slept).
Ultimately, a drawing of a trench is a study of contrast. It’s the contrast between the solid, heavy earth and the fragile, soft humans living inside it. Use your pencil to emphasize that. Make the timber look hard and splintered. Make the mud look heavy and suffocating.
Once you’ve finished the basic structure, look at the edges. Nothing in a trench was "sharp" for long. Everything got rounded off by boots, rain, and time. Soften your corners. Blur the lines between the floor and the wall. When you think you're done, add one more layer of "junk"—a lost helmet, a muddy letter, or a tangled coil of wire. That’s what brings the history to life.