Drawing is one of the oldest forms of human expression
within the visual arts. It is generally concerned with the marking of
lines and areas of tone onto paper/other material, where the accurate
representation of the visual world is expressed upon a plane
surface.Traditional drawings were monochrome, or at least had little
colour, while modern colored-pencil drawings may approach or cross a
boundary between drawing and painting. In Western terminology, drawing is
distinct from painting, even though similar media often are employed in
both tasks. Dry media, normally associated with drawing, such as chalk,
may be used in pastel paintings. Drawing may be done with a liquid medium,
applied with brushes or pens. Similar supports likewise can serve both:
painting generally involves the application of liquid paint onto prepared
canvas or panels, but sometimes an underdrawing is drawn first on that
same support.
Drawing is often exploratory, with considerable
emphasis on observation, problem-solving and composition. Drawing is also
regularly used in preparation for a painting, further obfuscating their
distinction. Drawings created for these purposes are called studies. There
are several categories of drawing, including
figure drawing, cartooning, doodling, and freehand. There are
also many drawing methods, such as
line drawing, stippling, shading, the surrealist method of entopic
graphomania
(in which dots are made at the sites of impurities in a blank sheet of
paper, and lines are then made between the dots), and
tracing (drawing on a translucent paper, such as tracing
paper, around the outline of preexisting shapes that show through the
paper). A quick, unrefined drawing may be called a sketch. In
fields outside art, technical drawings or plans of buildings, machinery,
circuitry and other things are often called "drawings" even when they have
been transferred to another medium by printing.