Drawing — alongside painting, sculpture or printmaking—is a branch of the visual arts. Its most important means of expression is the line combined with the elimination of such factors as color or chiaroscuro. A drawing can be both a complete artistic expression and a preparatory phase of it (as a sketch, design).

The basic tools for making drawings are pencil, charcoal, pen, sanguine, pastel, marker and others. Drawing is one of the oldest modes of human expression. “It is a subject as old as our civilization. If Pliny, who described the creation of the first drawing, is to be believed, it was a shadow silhouette of a young man setting off on a war expedition, which his girlfriend had outlined on a wall before the parting. Pliny, however, gives no date for this event. Archaeologists have discovered drawings of animals from the end of the Paleolithic period in the cave of La Madeleine. “*

On our site, it appears as one of the overarching categories, alongside painting and inkography. We include in this section those works in which line is the dominant quality. Among the techniques (given in the additional information next to each work), we mainly include works on paper, using the media mentioned above (such as pencil or marker).

Based on The Little Dictionary of Artistic Terms by K. Zwolińska and Z. Malicki, Wiedza Powszechna
* Disegno—drawing at the origins of modern art. Materials from a scientific session in Toruń 26-27 October 2000