Encyclopaedia Britannica Online
Drawing
art
Table of Contents
Introduction
General considerations
History of drawing
Drawing, the art or technique of producing images on a surface, usually paper, by means of marks, usually of ink, graphite, chalk, charcoal, or crayon.
Michelangelo: Profile with Oriental HeaddressProfile with Oriental Headdress, sanguine drawing by Michelangelo, c. 1522; in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, England. Courtesy of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, Eng.
Drawing as formal artistic creation might be defined as the primarily linear rendition of objects in the visible world, as well as of concepts, thoughts, attitudes, emotions, and fantasies given visual form, of symbols and even of abstract forms. This definition, however, applies to all graphic arts and techniques that are characterized by an emphasis on form or shape rather than mass and colour, as in painting. Drawing as such differs from graphic printing processes in that a direct relationship exists between production and result. Drawing, in short, is the end product of a successive effort applied directly to the carrier. Whereas a drawing may form the basis for reproduction or copying, it is nonetheless unique by its very nature.
Although not every artwork has been preceded by a drawing in the form of a preliminary sketch, drawing is in effect the basis of all visual arts. Often the drawing is absorbed by the completed work or destroyed in the course of completion. Thus, the usefulness of a ground plan drawing of a building that is to be erected decreases as the building goes up. Similarly, points and lines marked on a raw stone block represent auxiliary drawings for the sculpture that will be hewn out of the material. Essentially, every painting is built up of lines and pre-sketched in its main contours; only as the work proceeds is it consolidated into coloured surfaces. As shown by an increasing number of findings and investigations, drawings form the material basis of mural, panel, and book paintings. Such preliminary sketches may merely indicate the main contours or may predetermine the final execution down to exact details. They may also be mere probing sketches. Long before the appearance of actual small-scale drawing, this procedure was much used for monumental murals. With sinopia—the preliminary sketch found on a layer of its own on the wall underneath the fresco, or painting on freshly spread, moist plaster—one reaches the point at which a work that merely served as technical preparation becomes a formal drawing expressing an artistic intention.
Not until the late 14th century, however, did drawing come into its own—no longer necessarily subordinate, conceptually or materially, to another art form. Autonomous, or independent, drawings, as the name implies, are themselves the ultimate aim of an artistic effort; therefore, they are usually characterized by a pictorial structure and by precise execution down to details.
Formally, drawing offers the widest possible scope for the expression of artistic intentions. Bodies, space, depth, substantiality, and even motion can be made visible through drawing. Furthermore, because of the immediacy of its statement, drawing expresses the draftsman’s personality spontaneously in the flow of the line; it is, in fact, the most personal of all artistic statements. It is thus plausible that the esteem in which drawing was held should have developed parallel to the value placed on individual artistic talent. Ever since the Renaissance, drawing has gradually been losing its anonymous and utilitarian status in the eyes of artists and the public, and its documents have been increasingly valued and collected.
This article deals with the aesthetic characteristics, the mediums of expression, the subject matter, and the history of drawing. General considerations Elements and principles of design
The principal element of drawing is the line. Through practically the entire development of Western drawing, this figure, essentially abstract, not present in nature, and appearing only as a border setting of bodies, colours, or planes, has been the vehicle of a representational more or less illusionist rendition of objects. Only in very recent times has the line been conceived of as an autonomous element of form, independent of an object to be represented.
Conscious and purposeful drawing represents a considerable mental achievement, for the ability to reduce the spatial objects in the world around one to lines drawn on a plane presupposes a great gift for abstraction. The identification of the motif of a drawing by the viewer is no less an achievement, although it is mastered by practically all human beings. The visual interpretation of a line as a representation of a given object is made possible through certain forms of that line that call forth associations. The angular meeting of two lines, for example, may be considered as representing the borders of a plane; the addition of a third line can suggest the idea of a cubic body. Vaulting lines stand for arches, convergent lines for depth.
With the aid of this modest basic vocabulary, one can distill comprehensible images from a variety of linear phenomena. The simple outline sketch—Greek legend has it that the first “picture” originated from copying the shadows on the sand—represents one of the oldest and most popular possibilities of graphic rendition. After decisively characterizing the form of Egyptian drawing and the archaic art of Greece, the outline sketch became the chief vehicle of artistic communication in late antiquity and the Middle Ages. Used in a variety of ways in the early Renaissance, it became dominant once again in Neoclassicism, as it is, for that matter, in the classicist period of a given artist’s total work.
The outline sketch is elaborated into the detailed drawing by means of the line, which differentiates between the plastic and the spatial values of the object. Borders of individual objects, changes in the spatial plane, and varying intensities of colour applied within an outline sketch all tend to enrich and clarify the relationship between the whole and its component parts.
The free beginning, the disappearance, or the interruption of a line provides opportunities for gradually slurring an edge until it becomes a plane, for letting colour transitions fade away, for having the line vanish in the depth.
The thickening or thinning of a line can also be used to indicate, spatially or by means of colour, a change in the object designated by that line. Even light-and-shadow values may be rendered by differences in stroke strength.
While the chopping up of a line into several brief segments, and, even more, the drawing of individual lines running parallel in one direction, makes the outlined form appear less corporeal and firm, it reproduces the visual impact of the form in a more pictorial manner. Slight shifts in the flow of the line are intended to represent smooth curves and transitions; they also reinforce the effect of light striking a surface and thus give the corporeal appearance. Finally, short, curving segments of a line that do not stand in a clearly angular relationship to one another but are arranged on the sheet in loose formation allow the pictorial and colour component to dominate, as in the work of the 16th-century Italian artist Jacopo Tintoretto. An extreme case is the complete dissolution of the linear stroke into dots and spots, as, for example, in the drawings of the 19th-century Pointillist painter Georges Seurat.
A mere combination of these varied shapes of the line, without reference to the mediums in which the lines are drawn, provides the artist with a plethora of subjective opportunities for the expression both of general stylistic traits and of personal characteristics. An arrangement of forceful, mainly straight strokes in accentuated, sharp angles lends the drawing an austere character emphasizing dramatic and expressive traits. This method of drawing, in fact, is characteristic of stylistic epochs and artistic regions (not to mention individual artists) that prefer these qualities: in the rather sober city of Florence, in German Expressionism, where it is used to convey mood, but also in the drawings of Rembrandt and Vincent van Gogh. Soft lines, on the other hand, running in drawn-out, smoothly rounded forms and stressing graphic regularity above any statement of content, constitute the formal equivalent to elegant, courtly, and lyric qualities of expression. Accordingly, they are often found in drawings of the Soft style; in the early Renaissance, particularly in the work of artists from the Italian province of Umbria and in young Raphael’s sketches; in the work of Nazarenes, a 19th-century group of Romantic painters whose subjects were mainly religious; in the Jugendstil, a late-19th- and early-20th-century German decorative style parallel to Art Nouveau in its organic foliate forms, sinuous lines, and non-geometric curves; and in a very pure form in one of the classic draftsmen, the 19th-century French painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. A markedly even-stroke texture, with waxing and waning strokes in regular proportions and evenly distributed within the page, brings drawing close to calligraphic writing and is found in all stylistic epochs that value ornamentation.