drawing

drawing, art of the draftsman. In its broadest sense it includes every use of the delineated line and is thus basic to the arts of painting, architecture, sculpture, calligraphy, and geometry. The word drawing is commonly used to denote works in pen, pencil, crayon, chalk, charcoal, or similar media in which form rather than color is emphasized. For centuries drawings have been made either as preparatory studies (see cartoon) or as finished works of art. Preparatory drawings sometimes reveal a vigor and spontaneity lacking in the completed work. Among the many artists acclaimed for their drawings are Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Dürer, Rubens, Hogarth, Goya, Daumier, Klee, Picasso, and Matisse. Drawings are often used as illustrations and are reproduced by such processes as etching, engraving, and lithography.

Bibliography

See H. Hutter, Drawing: History and Technique (tr. 1968); K. T. Parker, ed., Old Master Drawings (14 vol., 1940, repr. 1970); J. Meder et al., The Mastery of Drawing (2 vol., 1978).

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drawing

Art or technique of producing images on a surface, usually paper, by means of marks in graphite, ink, chalk, charcoal, or crayon. It is often a preliminary stage to work in other media. According to Giorgio Vasari, disegno (drawing and design) was the foundation of the three arts of painting, sculpture, and architecture. Beginning in the Italian Renaissance, debate arose regarding the role of drawing, as some saw it as an independent art form and others saw it as a preliminary stage in creating a painting or sculpture. By the 17th century, drawings had definite market value; connoisseurs specialized in collecting them, and forgers began to exploit the demand. In the 20th century, the drawing became fully autonomous as an art form, figuring significantly among the works of virtually every major artist, and the line itself was exploited both for its representational and its purely expressive qualities.

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drawing

 or drafting

In yarn manufacture, process of attenuating a loose assemblage of fibres. These fibres, called sliver, pass through a series of rollers, which straighten the individual fibres and make them more parallel. Each pair of rollers spins faster than the previous one. Drawing reduces a soft mass of fibres to a firm uniform strand of usable size. For synthetic fibres, drawing is a stretching process applied to fibres in the plastic state, increasing orientation and reducing size. In metalworking, drawing refers to the process of shaping sheet metal into complex, three-dimensional forms with metal dies. See also carding, wire drawing.