Both cylindrical cup drawing and square cup drawing are analyzed using membrane analysis as well as shell analysis by the elastic-plastic finite element method. An incremental formulation incorporating the effect of large deformation and normal anisotropy is used for the analysis of elastic-plastic non-steady deformation. The computed results are compared with the existing experimental results to show the validity of the analysis. Comparisons are made in the punch load and distribution of thickness strain between the membrane analysis and the shell analysis for both cylindrical and square cup drawing processes. In punch load, both analyses show very little difference and also show generally good agreement with the experiment. For the cylindrical cup deep drawing, the computed thickness strain of a membrane analysis, however, shows a wide difference with the experiment. In the shell analysis, the thickness strain shows good agrement with the experiment. For the square cup deep drawing, both membrane and shell analyses show a wide difference with experiment, this may be attributable to the ignorance of the shear deformation. Concludingly, it has been shown that the membrane approach shows a limitation for the deep drawing process in which the effect of bending is not negligible and more exact information on the thickness strain distribution is required.