DRAWING

When Michaelangelo stood atop a 60-foot scaffold to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, he was creating a fresco. Frescoing is the art of painting on freshly spread plaster. His assistants would lay down the plaster and before it dried he would sketch images into it that would be eventually become the articulated forms of God, angels, and humans from Christian theology. Without these sketches to guide him, the great artist's back-breaking work would have been nearly impossible.

Drawing is fundamental and basic to visual art. Scultpures often begin with a sketch on paper before they move to their three-dumensional medium. A doodle on a page can become the ispiration for a lithography. And, of course, drawing is an end in itself as we see in the illustrations of William Blake, and the more modern advent of cartoons, animations, and digital drawings on TV, the internet, and hung in galleries.

The line between what is drawing and what is painting can quickly become blurry. Drawings can have painterly elements and vice versa. For example, using techniques like shading and blending can greatly increase a drawing's sense of dimension, texture, and tonal value.

The large variety of drawing instruments offers the artist some scope and room for experimentation in finding which is most effective. Most common of these instruments are pencils, pens, inked brushes, colored pencils, crayons, chalk, pastels. Markers and spraypaint are the drawing instruments of the graffiti artist, and the question of which two dimensional surfaces are acceptable to draw on provides controversy far beyond the walls of the art museum. But artists and non-artists alike have always found a way to inscribe images in their environments: on foggy car windows, with fingers in the sand, or with sticks in the snow.