Okay, so today I decided to mess around with drawing soccer balls. I’ve always thought they looked kind of cool with their mix of hexagons and pentagons, so I wanted to see if I could draw one myself.

Getting Started
First, I grabbed a piece of paper and a pencil. I thought about using a ruler and compass, you know, to make it all precise, but then I was like, “Nah, let’s just freehand this thing.” So, I started with a circle. Well, it was supposed to be a circle. It ended up looking more like a wobbly potato, but hey, that’s part of the charm, right?
The Pattern
Next up, the fun part – the pattern! I remembered that soccer balls have those black and white patches, so I started drawing some hexagons. Hexagons, by the way, are those six-sided shapes. I put one right in the middle, and then started drawing more around it. It got tricky pretty quick because I had to fit in those five-sided shapes too, the pentagons.
- Started with a (kind of) circle.
- Drew a hexagon in the center.
- Added more hexagons around the center one.
- Started squeezing in pentagons where they fit.
Making it 3D-ish
After I had my pattern of hexagons and pentagons, I thought I should try and make it look a little bit three-dimensional. A real soccer ball is a sphere or at least as near to a sphere as you can get when it is made out of flat panels.
I figured I could use my pencil to darken in some of the areas to look like shadows on a curved surface, to try and make my flat drawing look more three-dimensional.
The End Result
It took a little bit of scribbling and erasing, and to be honest, it still looked a little flat. But, with a bit of imagination, you could kinda see a soccer ball in there. It definitely wasn’t perfect, far from it, but I had fun doing it, and that’s what matters, right?

I might try this again later, maybe with some colored pens or even on the computer. Who knows, maybe I’ll get better at it with some practice!