• Pencil
• Sketch

Drawing

This article is about the art form. Drawing also refers to a method of producing wire, bars, or tubes.

Common drawing tools are pencils, chalk, charcoal, crayons, pastels, and pen and ink. Many drawing materials are not water or oil based and are applied dry, without any preparation. Water-based drawing media (e.g., "watercolor pencils") exist, which can be drawn with like ordinary pencils, then moistened with a wet brush to get various effects. There are also oil-based pastels and wax-based crayons. Very rarely, artists have drawn with (usually decoded) invisible ink.

One thing that differentiates drawing from painting is that in drawing, an artist uses pure colors and cannot mix them before application. (In painting, new colors are commonly created by mixing.)

The colors of drawing media can mix on the surface because of direct chemical interaction. More usually, the mixing is optical rather than chemical: colors are overlaid (also known as glazing) on previous layers so that light reflected from below the surface comes through, or color strokes are close enough that the eye "mixes" them.

Some artists have started referring to pastel and colored-pencil compositions as "paintings".

Drawing may also be done on a computer. Computer illustration makes use of programs such as Paint, Adobe Photoshop, Pixia, and more. Digital art is fast becoming one of the most popular means of illustration.

Table of contents

1 Drawing media 2 See also 3 External link

Drawing media

The medium is the means by which ink, pigment, or color are delivered onto the drawing surface. Examples include:

• chalk
• charcoal
• colored pencil
• conte
• crayon
• graphite
• ink
• marker
• pastel
• pen and ink
• silverpoint
• computer software; i.e.:

    **Adobe Photoshop
    **Adobe Illustrator
    **Pixia
    **Paint

• engineering drawing

• Drawing Lessons and Resources at About.com