Drawing is a means of making an image, illustration or graphic using any of a wide variety of tools and techniques. It generally involves making marks on a surface by applying pressure from a tool, or using dry media such as graphite pencils, pen and ink, inked brushes, wax, colour pencils, crayons, charcoals, pastels, and markers to move a tool across a surface. Digital tools, including pens, stylus, Apple pencil that simulate the effects of these are also used. The main techniques used in drawing are line drawing, hatching, crosshatching, random hatching, scribbling, stippling, and blending.
Drawing is almost as old as humankind, drawing and painting goes back tens of thousands of years. Art of the Upper Paleolithic includes figurative art beginning between about 40,000 to 35,000 years ago. Non-figurative cave paintings consisting of hand stencils and simple geometric shapes are even older. Paleolithic cave representations of animals are found in areas such as Lascaux, France and Altamira, Spain in Europe, Sulawesi in Asia, and Australia. In an instrumental, subordinate role, it developed along with the other arts in antiquity and the Middle Ages. Whether preliminary sketches for mosaics and murals or architectural drawings and designs for statues and reliefs within the streaked artistic production of the Gothic medieval building and artistic workshop, drawing as a heteronomous skill was subordinate to the other arts.
In ancient Egypt, ink drawings on papyrus, showed people, were used as models for painting or sculpture. Drawings on Greek vases, initially geometric, later developed to the human form with black-figure pottery during the 7th century BC.
With paper becoming common in Europe by the 15th century, drawing was adopted by masters such as Sandro Botticelli, Raphael, Michelangelo, and Leonardo da Vinci who sometimes treated drawing as an art in its own right rather than a preparatory stage for painting or sculpture.