How to Draw Tteokbokki — Free Practice Sheets

Tteokbokki is a Korean rice cake dish, and its drawing is mostly a problem of stacking shapes inside a bowl. This page shows how to build the silhouette first, then place the rice cakes, sauce and garnish so the food reads clearly. The method suits tracing, grid copying or free drawing from a reference. Because drawings can differ and still be correct, judge your work by visible features and proportions rather than an exact match.

Build the bowl before the food

Start with the container, because it controls where everything else can sit. A tteokbokki bowl is usually wide and shallow, with a clear rim and a small footed base. Draw a large horizontal oval for the rim opening. From the ends of that oval, curve a lower edge downward to suggest the outside of the bowl. Add a short, narrow base beneath the curve so the bowl appears to rest on a surface rather than float.

Keep the rim oval wide rather than circular. A narrow oval makes the bowl look tall and cup-like, which changes the dish's character. Check that the left and right sides of the lower edge are roughly balanced, and that the base sits near the center of the bowl's width.

1. Draw a large horizontal oval for the bowl rim.
2. Add a curved lower edge from the oval's ends.
3. Draw a small footed base beneath the bowl.

Stack the rice cakes as short cylinders

Inside the rim, sketch a mound of overlapping short cylinders. Each rice cake is a rounded rectangle with slightly curved ends, drawn at a similar length. Overlap them so some sit in front of others, which creates depth without needing shading. Keep the mound inside the rim oval, leaving a margin so the bowl edge stays visible.

Vary the angle slightly from cake to cake. Perfectly parallel cylinders look like a diagram; small tilts look like food piled in a bowl. Avoid making individual cakes much longer than the bowl's width, since that breaks the scale.

1. Sketch overlapping rounded rectangles inside the rim.
2. Tilt each cylinder slightly for a natural pile.
3. Leave a margin so the rim remains visible.

Sauce, gloss and garnish

Fill the gaps between and around the cylinders with dark sauce shapes. Let the sauce pool near the bottom of the bowl and creep between the rice cakes. Leave a few white gaps on the sauce and on the upper edges of the cakes to suggest glossy highlights. Gloss is shown by contrast, not by adding a separate shiny object.

Finish with small pointed garnish shapes on top of the mound to indicate scallions. Keep them short and scattered rather than evenly spaced. A few pieces resting against the rim can help the food feel contained by the bowl.

1. Fill gaps with dark sauce shapes.
2. Leave white gaps for glossy highlights.
3. Add short pointed scallion shapes on top.

Check your drawing against the reference

Compare your drawing with the separate full reference sheet after finishing, not while drawing every line. Look for the wide oval rim, the footed base, the stacked cylinders, the dark sauce with highlights and the garnish. If one feature is missing, adjust that area rather than redrawing everything.

When tracing, follow the outline first and then practise the contour independently. When copying onto a grid, use matching intersections to place the bowl and the mound before adding sauce and garnish. When completing a blank portion, use the full reference to judge where the missing shapes belong.

1. Compare finished drawing with the full reference.
2. Identify missing or misplaced features.
3. Adjust only the affected area.

Common mistakes and fixes

Most problems come from drawing the food before the bowl, or from treating the sauce as a flat fill. Correcting the order and the contrast usually solves them.

Check your work

• The bowl rim is a wide horizontal oval, not a narrow circle.
• A curved lower edge and a small footed base make the bowl read as a container.
• Rice cakes appear as overlapping short cylinders of similar length.
• The mound stays inside the rim with a visible margin.
• Dark sauce fills gaps and pools around the rice cakes.
• White gaps suggest gloss on the sauce and cake edges.
• Small pointed garnish shapes sit on top of the mound.
• Overall proportions keep the food contained within the bowl.

Worked example

tteokbokki: Trace the reference outline, then practise the contour independently. Compare with the separate full reference sheet.

Common mistakes

• Drawing a narrow, circular rim that makes the bowl look like a cup. Redraw the rim as a wide horizontal oval and keep the lower edge shallow.
• Making rice cakes parallel and evenly spaced. Tilt each cylinder slightly and overlap them so the pile looks natural.
• Filling the sauce as one flat dark shape with no highlights. Leave small white gaps on the sauce and upper cake edges to show gloss.

Questions and answers