In its broadest sense, drawing includes all kinds of graphic notation, from the most fragmentary to the most highly finished, that is executed by marking directly on a background. It is the art of the draftsman and since the Renaissance has been considered the prerequisite skill basic to the arts of painting, sculpture, and architecture, as well as to the sciences and geometry.

Drawing can be used to record what the artist has seen, or it can be a visualization of imagined forms. It can also be used as a graphic symbol—as in graphs, diagrams, motifs, or floor plans—that has become recognizable because it has a commonly understood meaning. Drawing is usually executed in pen and ink, pencil, metal point, crayon, chalk, charcoal, and similar media. Its basic elements are line, form, value, and texture. It usually stresses form and line rather than color, with light and shade often added by techniques such as hatching, washes, or color highlighting. It is often used for book illustration and can be reproduced by such processes as engraving, etching, or lithography. 

Drawings may be summary suggestions using only a few lines, called sketches, or precisely detailed studies. Most often, they are personal, informal, and intimate direct notations or preliminary inquiries spontaneously executed by the artist for personal use. A drawing can also be a preparatory study—an exemplar of what is to be a work of art in another medium. In the 20th century, drawings have often been considered independent works of art.

The drawings of many great masters, such as Leonard Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Albrecht Durer, Peter Paul Rubens, William Hogarth, Francisco de Goya, Honore Daumier, Paul Klee, and Pablo Picasso, are valued as great works of art in themselves. Such drawings are pertinent statements of the artists' insights into the nature of forms and their underlying ideas.