Christmas lights — those colourful strings of glowing bulbs draped across trees, houses, and mantelpieces — are a simple and cheerful festive drawing. They teach repetition, pattern, and how to make things look like they glow. Parikshet shows you how to draw a string of Christmas lights step by step.

🖍️ What You Need

  • Pencil and eraser
  • Green or black marker for the wire
  • Red, blue, yellow, green markers for the bulbs
  • White gel pen for glow highlights

How to Draw Christmas Lights Step by Step

  1. Draw the wire — a long, gently drooping curved line across your page (or several swooping loops). The wire dips down between each point where a bulb will hang.
  2. Mark the bulb positions — make small marks evenly spaced along the wire where each light will go.
  3. Draw the bulb bases — at each mark, draw a tiny rectangle (the bulb's screw base) connecting it to the wire.
  4. Add the bulbs — below each base, draw a teardrop or oval bulb shape. Classic Christmas bulbs are rounded with a slightly pointed tip.
  5. Alternate the colours — colour the bulbs in a repeating pattern: red, blue, yellow, green, then repeat. A consistent colour pattern looks cheerful and organised.
  6. Add the glow effect — around each bulb, add a few short lines radiating outward, and a small white highlight on each bulb, to make them look lit up.
  7. Add a soft halo (optional) — a faint circle of the bulb's colour around each light suggests it is glowing in the dark.
  8. Set the scene — drape the lights along a rooftop, around a window, or across a Christmas tree.
💡 Parikshet's Tip: To make the lights look like they are actually GLOWING, add short radiating lines around each bulb plus a small white highlight dot, and draw them against a darker background. Lights only look like they glow when there is darkness around them — a night scene makes Christmas lights shine.

🌟 Did You Know?

Before electric Christmas lights, people decorated trees with real lit candles — which was beautiful but dangerously caused many house fires! The first electric Christmas lights were created in 1882 by Edward H. Johnson, a colleague of inventor Thomas Edison, who hand-wired 80 small bulbs and wrapped them around his tree. Today, some Christmas light displays use millions of bulbs and can be seen from far away.

Christmas Light Drawing Tips

  • Drooping wire — the line dips between each bulb
  • Even spacing — bulbs evenly placed along the wire
  • Repeating colour pattern — red, blue, yellow, green, repeat
  • Glow effect — radiating lines + highlight + dark background

🎯 Try This: Light Up a Christmas House

  1. Draw a simple house at night (dark blue sky).
  2. Drape strings of your Christmas lights along the rooftop and around the door.
  3. Add a glowing Christmas tree visible through the window.
  4. Make all the lights glow against the dark — the contrast makes them shine.