Overview
Drawing is a form of visual expression and is one of the major forms within the visual arts. There are several categories of drawing, including cartooning. Certain drawing methods or approaches, such as "doodling," other informal kinds of drawing, and 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, may or may not be considered part of "drawing" as a "fine art". Likewise, tracing—drawing on a thin piece of paper, sometimes designed for that purpose (tracing paper), around the outline of preexisting shapes that show through the paper—is also not considered fine art, although it may be part of the draftsman's preparation.
The word drawing is both (1) a noun and (2) the present-participle and gerund forms of the verb draw. To draw is to produce a drawing. A quick, unrefined drawing may be called a sketch.
Drawing is generally concerned with the marking of lines and areas of tone onto paper. 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, however, 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.
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.
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