How to draw candlestick charts by hand, candle by candle
To draw a candlestick chart, draw each candlestick as a body from its open to its close with a wick to its high and low. On a canvas, get candles onto it in one of four ways: draw each candle, generate a whole chart with the chart generator, import a CSV of open, high, low and close prices, or sketch the move and convert it. Then set each candle’s open, high, low and close with its handles, annotate the argument, and export the chart as an image.
Drawing a candlestick chart by hand is worth doing when the chart you need to show does not exist yet, or when a screenshot brings more clutter than content. This page covers the whole path: getting candles onto a canvas, setting every open, high, low and close exactly, annotating the argument, and exporting a clean image.
If the four numbers are new to you, read what a candlestick chart is first.
Start by deciding what the chart is for
There are two quite different reasons to draw a candlestick chart by hand, and they want different things from the drawing.
One is to show a chart that exists: a session you traded, a move you are writing up. Here accuracy to the real prices is the whole point, and the fastest route is to import the data rather than reproduce it.
The other is to show a chart that does not exist: the textbook example, the setup still forming, the version where it failed. Nothing can be imported, because none of it happened. This is the case screenshots cannot serve at all, and it is the one drawing is for.
Get candles onto the canvas
Four routes, and they all arrive at the same editable candles, so the choice is about where you are starting from rather than what you end up with.
Draw them. Place each candle directly. Complete control, and the right choice for a short illustrative sequence where every candle is making a point.
Generate them. Produce a plausible starting chart from market statistics, then shape it. Faster than drawing thirty candles to get to the five that matter, and the generated shape is calibrated per timeframe rather than random. The next section covers it step by step.
Import them. Load real forex candles by pair and date range from the Data section of the profile menu, or import a CSV with Open, High, Low and Close columns. Most trading terminals export one, and free historical archives publish them for a long list of instruments. This is the accurate route when the chart is of something that really happened.
Sketch and convert. Draw the shape of the move as a zig-zag and convert it into a real candle sequence. Useful when you know the shape of the story before you know the candles.
Generate a whole chart in one step
When the chart needs a realistic stretch of price rather than five hand-placed candles, start from a generated one. CandleDraw’s candlestick chart generator builds the whole sequence from market statistics for each timeframe: how often a candle has no wick, how large the body is against the wicks, and how a candle’s size follows the one before it. The result reads like a real chart because it is shaped like one.
Open Generate chart on the tool rail (or press G), set how many candles you want, the timeframe they are shaped for, the trend from down through none to up, and the volatility, then choose Generate. Every candle it makes is an ordinary editable candle, so the next step is the same as for a drawn chart: keep the stretch that works and drag the handles of the few candles your point depends on.
Draw a single candlestick
Candlestick drawing (also written candle stick drawing) comes down to one shape repeated. A candle is a body from the open to the close and a thin wick from the body up to the high and down to the low. The body is filled in one color when the close is above the open and in another when it is below, so a reader sees the direction before the numbers.
On paper, draw the body first, then the two wicks, and keep every candle the same width. In CandleDraw, choose Draw candle and press where the candle opens, then drag to where it closes. Drag on past the close and back to pull out the wicks: the furthest point you reach on each side becomes the high and the low. A click without a drag draws a body with no wicks, which you can then shape.
Set each open, high, low and close
This is the step that separates a drawing of a chart from a chart. A candle whose four numbers are not deliberate reads as approximately right, and a reader who knows candles will notice.
Work on the body first: it sets the open and the close, which is the part of the candle a reader takes in first. Then the wicks, which set the high and the low. In CandleDraw each of the four is a handle on the candle itself, so you set them by dragging on the chart rather than typing numbers into a panel beside it.
Keep the wicks honest relative to the bodies. The most common tell of an invented chart is wicks that are too long and too uniform, because real bars at most timeframes have a good proportion with no wick on one side at all.
Say what the chart is for, on the chart
A chart in a journal, a lesson or a post is making an argument, and an unannotated one leaves the reader to find it. Mark the level that mattered, shade the zone, label the candle you are talking about.
The restraint worth keeping: annotate the thing you are explaining and nothing else. Every additional line costs the reader attention, and a chart covered in them is harder to read than the bare candles were.
Export it at the size you will use it
The last step is the one that decides whether the work was worth doing. A chart exported as a clean image sits in a document, a slide or a post without the window chrome, timestamps and grid noise a screenshot brings with it.
Export at the size it will be seen at. A chart shrunk into a column loses its wicks first, so a sequence meant for a narrow space usually wants fewer candles drawn larger rather than the same chart made smaller.
