DRAWING NOT DRAWING

There are four requirements for a drawing, an analogue drawing.  Pencil.  Paper.  Hand.  Brain.   If any of these items are missing, it is not a drawing.

If to make your image, you input digitally, it is not a drawing.  If you import JPEG images and distort and trim them so that they fit into what is on your screen, it is not a drawing.  And the mouse / tablet / wand manipulation to do this is not drawing.  If you have a cool technique in which you make an analogue drawing and then you print over that digitally, it is not a drawing.

Everything on this site is a drawing.  I put pencil to paper with my brain controlling my hand, as best I can.

The contract documents that I made decades ago with a lead holder, a parallel rule and a sheet of vellum is a drawing.  But the image that comes out of your and my digital plotter / printer is not a drawing.  The images in the Post-Digital Drawing article are not drawings.

What is confusing all of us is our continual employment of the word drawing to all sorts of non drawing manipulations.  As usual, our language has let us down.  We need new terms and words that describe the Illustrator collage that is on our screens .  We need new terms for the piece of paper that comes out of our plotters that was digitally input and digitally printed.  How about Draughter?  As in, “Hey, can you bring those draughters that are on the plotter over here for our meeting?”

No doubt, those of you who are good with words, can come up with something better.  We just have to stop using the word drawing for all of the techniques that we now have to make images.

If the marks and the tones and the colors are input digitally, then it is not a drawing.