Quotes & Sayings About Drawings

Numbers speak, drawings visualize. — Ibrahim Ibrahim

My mom is a painter, so I've been doing drawings and paintings as early as I can remember. Then there was this gap where I was doing graffiti in high school and making as much [traditional] art. — Alec Monopoly

As a kid I read Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and a few others. As an adult have admired Leonardo da Vinci's drawings and notebooks. — Viggo Mortensen

Drawings are only a few lines on paper. Therefore it's easy to carry around in plastic bags. Drawings are cheaper than paintings. They don't pretend they'll last forever. — Marlene Dumas

I have been doodling since childhood. I have a passion for illustrating but cannot paint or colour for that matter. I illustrate what I am trying to communicate through my writing. My images are like drawings in a science text book. — Devdutt Pattanaik

My drawings inspire, and are not to be defined. They place us, as does music, in the ambiguous realm of the undetermined. — Odilon Redon

I hated art as a kid. I didn't even like art class. I didn't like to draw. I would make my dad do all the drawings because I hated it so much. — Wade Guyton

I was like the family clown. The middle child entertaining. I was a lousy student, but interestingly, the nuns always let me write plays or do drawings, endless special projects. — Eileen Myles

When the bald associate had mentioned a sleeping beauty, he was referring to a fairy tale that you have probably heard one thousand times. Like all fairy tales, the story of Sleeping Beauty begins with 'Once upon a time,' and continues with a foolish young princess who makes a witch very angry, and then takes a nap until her boyfriend wakes her up with a kiss and insists on getting married, at which point the story ends with the phrase 'happily ever after.' The story is usually illustrated with fancy drawings of the napping princess, who always looks very glamorous and elegant, with her hair neatly combed and a long silk gown keeping her comfortable as she snores away for years and years. — Lemony Snicket

And yes, there are things I want to keep, that I like around me - especially when there's very little left. I just want to keep those little bits of reminders of my past. There are certain drawings from the '60s; certain little paintings from the '60s that I keep. — Robert Barry

The worse my drawings were, the more beautiful did the originals appear. — John James Audubon

Abstraction has always been around, since the drawings in the caves. It exists in all cultures all over the world. I thought for a while that it was going to be the major movement. But people always drift back to realism. I guess there is a certain security in that. — Brice Marden

I'm just working with ideas in my head and with drawings that the artists did. And suddenly to see these things come to life in movies - it's just wonderful. — Stan Lee

I don't tend to cast roles in my head because I spend so much time with these characters and the drawings that they're complete in themselves, you know what I mean? — Bryan Lee O'Malley

I want to annihilate that man," her father growled. "He has taken my house. He has taken my drawings. I swear by all that is holy he is trying to take my daughter." At Libby's gasp, her father whirled to fix her with an angry glare. "Yes, my daughter! That man has more tricks up his sleeve than a traveling magician. Don't think he is fascinated by your charms, Libby. The man only wants to take whatever is mine. — Elizabeth Camden

I don't usually go in for reviews of buildings that aren't yet built, since you can tell only so much from drawings and plans, and, besides, has there ever been a building that didn't look great as a model? — Paul Goldberger

You have to take in the whole picture, and ask, "What is it you want? What kind of world do you want?" So, I have drawings of different cities. Those cities have an end goal; they're not just cities. The end goal of those cities is to make things relevant to people that they respond to. There's no other way. — Jacque Fresco

I think context, location matters a lot. Because location obviously in my situation, it's the space in which the work is going to be exhibited. And since some of the work I do is created onsite, it requires a different type of space, versus the smaller drawings or more subject-oriented work. So that the context becomes important. — Shahzia Sikander

In Utero is a testament to the artistic vision of Kurt Cobain. It's kind of a weird record, and it's strangely beautiful at the same time. And if you look at Kurt's paintings and his drawings - he even did a sculpture for me - it's a rising, tortured-spirit person. It's kind of weird. It's done well, but it's like what Dave was saying about having your own sound. Kurt was a great songwriter. He knew he had a good ear for a hook [and was] a great singer, great guitar player, and In Utero is a good representation of what he liked in art and how he expressed himself. — Krist Novoselic

The drawings are terribly good. — Christopher Fowler

We don't sell technical drawings except when they are incorporated into a drawing or a collage. — Christo

Mostly, drawings are things I make for myself - I do them in sketchbooks. They are mental experiments - private inner thoughts when I'm not sure what will come out. — Sigmar Polke

I almost never do drawings, because I have found over the years that doing something in one medium and translating into another doesn't work. I like to conceive a painting in real scale and in color. — Nelson Shanks

If you start with character, you probably will end up with good drawings. — Chuck Jones

In Arlington, people would laugh at you if you tried to get people to look at your drawings or listen to your poetry. It was like you thought you were special. — Eileen Myles

When I was writing songs, I always thought I'd make more of a career out of the drawings, the comics even more than the music. — Daniel Johnston

The space that I can call mine.. is so small that my ideas have become small. I am like a caterpillar in a cocoon of paper; all around me are sketches for sculptures, small drawings that seem like moths fluttering against the windows, beating their wings to escape from this tiny space.. Every day the ideas come more reluctantly, as though they know I will starve them and stunt their growth. — Audrey Niffenegger

I rarely draw myself, in general, and if I do, I tend to do little cute manga-esque, almost bite-sized drawings of myself. — Jim Lee

And although the space they occupy isn't like normal
space, nevertheless they are packed in tightly. Not a cubic inch there but is filled by a claw, a talon, a scale, the tip of a
tail, so the effect is like one of those trick drawings and
your eyeballs eventually realize that the space between each
dragon is, in fact, another dragon. — Terry Pratchett

I suppose we carry photographs now, but I think it's rather wonderful that people used to carry drawings and watercolours. I wish people did that more often. — Alison Jackson

The novels have done so well because the drawings are abstract, black-and-white. This adds to the universality of the story. "Persepolis" also has dreamlike moments, and the drawings help maintain cohesion and consistency. — Marjane Satrapi

Throughout our youth, whenever we had a dispute, Li Wei and I would apologize to each other by exchanging gifts. Mine would be in the form of drawings, crudely done with whatever natural supplies I could find. His would always be carvings. There was only one time the exchange didn't happen, the day I told him I was accepting the apprentice position and would never be able to marry him. — Richelle Mead

All my paintings are usually done in drawing form, very small. I make notations in drawings first, and then I make a collage for color. But drawing is always my notation. — Ellsworth Kelly

The words represent ideas first of all. That is something you have to understand. I mean, it is not just an object, but it is an object with a history and it is loaded with all kinds of implications and ideas. They exist in the world in a very special way. So they kind of represent some aspect of the world that we perceive, as do photographs, as do drawings of trees or whatever. And they are not a one to one. They are not the world, but they kind of refer to the world and they also exist in the world. — Robert Barry

To my way of thinking, the concept drawings that Rembrandt did, the drawings he made that he used to model his artists, to work out the compositions of his paintings: those are cartoons. Look at his sketch for the return of the prodigal son. The expression on the angry younger brother's face. The head is down; the eyebrow is just one curved line over the eyes. It communicates in a very shorthand way. It's beautiful, expressive, and, in a peculiar way, it's more powerful than the kind of stilted, formalized expression in the final painting. — Jim Woodring

All of my answers were drawings of armored unicorns. — Laurie Halse Anderson

When I was a child, my grandmother used to mix a paste for me of flour and water. Then I would go out into the yard and pick grass and make drawings out of pencil and grass pasted to the paper. — Norma Cole

Kuni didn't change his tone at all. If anything, he grew even calmer. "These cartoons are very amateurish. I could show Namen many more tricks about how to insult people artfully. For example, the drawings could have been made much more subtle and also much more lewd." "What? — Ken Liu

For your pleasure I'm creating a collection of erotic drawings so poorly rendered that I feel certain they will completely shake your belief in my understanding of human anatomy. — Ginn Hale

I paint; I'm a woman but I don't paint china. The first time I got a canvas I felt free. Art is overreaction to life. I love these early drawings; they show my innocent beginnings in a small town. Life is a sentence
you live it out. Maybe these portraits jump out at you too much. People like things that conform. — Alice Neel

Most architects think in drawings, or did think in drawings; today, they think on the computer monitor. I always tried to think three dimensionally. The interior eye of the brain should be not flat but three dimensional so that everything is an object in space. We are not living in a two-dimensional world. — Frei Otto

I have seen and drawn dying, poisoned worlds. I published a book of drawings called 'Death of Wood' about one such world, on the border between the Federal Republic of Germany and what was then still the German Democratic Republic. — Gunter Grass

Jerry and I always felt that the character was enjoying himself. He was having fun: he wasn't taking himself seriously. It was always a lark for him, as you can see in my early drawings. — Joe Shuster

Well, what we do is we have a script, of course. But for us, writing is also like storyboarding. It's drawing. And so we will cut all of those drawings together with music, sound effects and dialogue. And we screen this kind of stick-figure version of the film. — Pete Docter

A few grass mats, some cave drawings, the heads of my enemies mounted on the wall ... it could be quite pleasant. — Greg Farshtey

My drawings at first were made altogether in watercolors, but they wanted softness and a great deal of finish. — John James Audubon

The internet. Can we trust in that? Of course not. Give it six months and we'll probably discover Google's sewn together by orphans in sweatshops. Or that Wi-Fi does something horrible to your brain, like eating your fondest memories and replacing them with drawings of cross-eyed bats and a strong smell of puke. There's surely a great dystopian sci-fi novel yet to be written about a world in which it's suddenly discovered that wireless broadband signals deaden the human brain, slowly robbing us of all emotion, until after 10 years of exposure we're all either rutting in stairwells or listlessly reversing our cars over our own offspring with nary the merest glimmer of sympathy or pain on our faces. It'll be set in Basingstoke and called, Cuh, Typical. — Charlie Brooker

I have to hope that my instincts will do the right thing, because I can't erase what I have done. And if I drew something first, then my paintings would be illustrations of drawings. — Francis Bacon

Sometimes the things I learn making paintings or drawings - composition, colour, expressionism, texture - can directly influence the making of a film. Sometimes it's great that they are different, and simply taking a break from one medium to spend time with another, recharges the batteries and I feel refreshed. — Dave McKean

I don't like computers. I still like to do my drawings by hand. — Dieter Rams

There's a difference between sexy and hyper-sexy. The way I have drawn Vampirella, she's definitely sexy, I designed the costume. But her costume, through the years, has gotten briefer and briefer. She has been hypersexualized, but not by me. I mean, I see drawings in which she's got the 'brokeback pose'. I would never do that. — Trina Robbins

The Phoenicians are also credited with the first alphabet. Chinese and Egyptian languages used pictographs, drawings depicting objects or concepts. Babylonian, which became the international language in the Middle East, also — Mark Kurlansky

I was always most interested in drawing - most of my childhood drawings are black-and-white line work. And when I kind of abandoned comics, through college and art school, I was doing a lot of painting. But once I started doing comics again, everything else just fell by the wayside. — Jeffrey Brown

A low, angry growl hit Jatred's ears like a hammer. He turned and saw a massive figure crashing its way through the snow. Although he'd only seen the drawings of the Winter monsters, he knew it was a Garhanan. There was nothing pleasing in the way the creature looked, smelled, or sounded. Even its movements were horrid. A flat nose sat in the middle of the meaty face. The Garhanan's bushy white brows stuck out, shading small beady eyes. Its arms were muscular and swung down past its strong knees. The back, chest, and thighs were colossal too. The beast's whole body was covered in white, sparse, long fur.
"Great," Jatred snarled, his jaws clenching. He tried not to show how much Garhanan scared him. — A.O. Peart

I you look at the drawings of aliens made by people who believe that Earth is under saucer attack, you'll quickly note that most of these invaders fit the Tinseltown mold. But you have to admit: the grays are highly anthropomorphic. — Seth Shostak

My ideas I can find anywhere. And I draw because I have to note down my ideas or flashes - I call them flashes, because they come to me, like that. Not so much in the plant drawings. I have to see them. — Ellsworth Kelly

My dad and I collaborate on the artwork. He does all of the design and layout. He uses my sketches and drawings or weird things to mix into it or put on the merch. — Sherri DuPree

He loved a book because it was a book; he loved its odor, its form, its title. What he loved in a manuscript was its old illegible date, the bizarre and strange Gothic characters, the heavy gilding which loaded its drawings. It was its pages covered with dust - dust of which he breathed the sweet and tender perfume with delight. — Gustave Flaubert

I went into Hollywood and met Mike Aarons and went to Grantray-Lawrence Animation to work on the, by today's standards, extremely cheap and crude Marvel superheroes cartoons which basically consisted of taking stacks of the comic book art, taking parts of the art, pasting it down, extending it down into drawings and occasionally a new piece of art to bridge the comic book panels and limited animation and lip movement. — Mike Royer

After I'd produced about two dozen pen and ink drawings, one evening I decided that they needed poems to accompany them. I still have no idea where that notion came from, but it took me about two hours to produce verses for these creatures. — Jack Prelutsky

I've been creating work by silk-screening images of arms and legs and heads and objects on paper - like drawings of vegetables, guns, hats, whatever - and then also printing sheets of patterns, colorful polka dots and line drawing patterns. — Brian Chippendale

I do remember when it occurred to me the first time, when I got the idea of painting the way I feel at a given moment. I was sitting in a chair and felt it pressing against me. I still have the drawings where I depicted the sensation of sitting. — Maria Lassnig

Don't we all discover, at some stage or another that there are some things we'll never get any better at, even though we have no idea why and hardly ever notice it when it happens, even though we may have enjoyed these things and might not have been lagging behind last time we checked? Learning to draw, for instance, was a familiar catastrophe - all of a sudden, unaware, you just stop getting any better at it, your drawings never progress beyond those of a four-year-old or a six-year-old, you're left behind by those who "can draw," condemned to producing flat, doughy figures on the page, with no sense of perspective to them and (this was what really struck me) no resemblance to the outside world: condemned by your ruined self to a shameful childhood. — Jean-Christophe Valtat

Stu stops munching, looks up at me from under his shaggy hair.
"So, can you read?" He slides a section toward me.
I cock my head toward the paper. The letters are small, blurry drawings. The alphabet might as well be Chinese or Arabic. Strange that I can't read or speak, though I still have language inside my head. Words are a consolation, but not a tool.
"Guess not. You want me to read stuff out loud to you?"
I would, but not right now. If I wanted to show interest in the newspaper I could cross the table and rub against his shoulder. Instead I gaze at him over the bowl of milk.
"It's so weird," he says in a hesitant voice. "You don't look like a cat. When you stare at me, you look like Eliza."
That's the nicest thing he could have said. With a happy lightness to my step I move between the bowls, over his napkin ring and spoon, until I stand on the edge of the table and nip at his prickly chin. This is my way of saying: Hi, there. I like you. — Simone Martel

Draw, draw, hundreds of drawings. Try to remain humble. Smartness kills everything. — Sherwood Anderson

I believe consciousness is non-local and a big part of what we experience with near death and past lives. It's the consciousness that has come into us from other experiences and our consciousness that we remain aware of when we leave our bodies and they communicate with us through dreams, and even through drawings which I do a lot of work with myself. — Bernie Siegel

The Shiv Sena was the handiwork of a cartoonist named Bal Thackeray, whose main target was south Indians, whom he claimed were taking away jobs from the natives. Thackeray lampooned dhoti-clad 'Madrasis' in his writings and drawings; while his followers attacked Udupi restaurants and homes of Tamil and Telugu speakers. — Ramachandra Guha

Express yourself through your art - whether it's your drawings in a sketchpad, tattoos on your skin, the shade of your lipstick, or the clothes that you wear. — Kat Von D.

And they spoke of their Antigonie, who they called Go, as if she were a friend.
Leo hadn't yet written any music, but he had made drawings on butcher paper stolen from the kitchen. They curled around his walls, intricate doodles, extensions of the boy's own lean, slight body. The shape of Leo's jaw in profile, devestating. The way he gnawed his fingernails to the crescents, the fine shining hairs down the center of his nape, the smell of him, up close, pure and clean, bleaching.
The ones made for music are the most beloved of all. Their bodies a container for the spirit within; the best of them is music, the rest only instrument of flesh and bone.
The weather conspired. Snow fell softly in the windows. It was too cold to be out for long. The world colorless, a dreamscape, a blank page, the linger of woodsmoke on the back of the tongue. — Lauren Groff

Art translates human souls. Each passing eon's public display of sophisticated hieroglyphics cast a unique depiction upon the rudimentary art of survival. Humankind cannot exist without the makeshift paradigm of innovative art, which genuine amoeba expresses elusive and unsayable thoughts. Humankind's gallery of artistic impressions ranges from the starkness of personified cave drawings to the free ranging lexis of modern art. Collection of multihued stories of the ages portrays the vivid panoply of enigmatic vitas etched by humankind's self-imposed sense of urgency. Each passing generation's effusion of trope offerings seamlessly folds its shared renderings into the shimmering panorama of the cosmos, the sparkling nightscape that houses the intangible life force all communal souls. — Kilroy J. Oldster

A diary with no drawings of me in it? Where are the torrid fantasies? The romance covers? — Cassandra Clare

All intervening steps, scribbles, sketches, drawings, failed work models, studies thoughts, conversations, are of interest. Those that show the thought process of the artist are sometimes more interesting than the final product — Sol LeWitt

I like to make sculpture because it makes my life social. When I make drawings, I work alone. When I work with sculpture I have someone I can work with. — Camille Henrot

Until I saw my drawings replayed on the iPad, I'd never seen myself draw. Someone watching me would be concentrating on the exact moment, but I'd always be thinking a little bit ahead. That's especially so in a drawing where you are limiting yourself, a line drawing for example. When you are doing them you are very tense, because you have to reduce everything to such simple terms. — David Hockney

Prose, poetry, and drawings stand side by side in a very democratic way in my work. — Gunter Grass

The drawings that interest me most are made with closed eyes. With eyes closed, I feel my hand slide down on the paper. I have an image in mind, but the results always surprise me. — Willem De Kooning

There are 10,000 bad drawings in you; get them out of the way so you can get to the good stuff. — Ron Husband

In Turkey, ancient drawings that are two thousand or more years old show djinn in half human-half reptilian forms with horns, scaly skin, lizard-like eyes, and claws for hands. This depiction is similar to the Christian description of devils and demons. It is also interesting to note that Islamic art dating from only eight hundred years ago shows the djinn as more human-like. — Rosemary Ellen Guiley

We've had fiction from the time of cave drawings. I think fiction, storytelling, and narrative in general will always exist in some form. — Edwidge Danticat

I do make some drawings for wall pieces. I do work out some ideas for large-scale wall pieces where I have to organize words or get proportions right. I do keep them in my files. Not an exhibit or a show; just as part of my records, my archives. — Robert Barry

I used to always make art for girls. That was the thing I did for girls to like me. I did portraits, drawings, letters that formed outlines of significant things in our relationship. Art. I just used art in general. It usually worked. — Cary Fukunaga

Future is an empty paper, but not absolutely empty; the shadows of the drawings of the past is there, on the paper! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

I think something more mysterious might be happening, less articulate than any of the captioned and numeraled drawings in the 'The Spiritist's Telegraph.' Mothers burning inside the risen suns of their children. — Karen Russell

If there is no idea in the drawing, there is no idea in the constructed project. That's the expression of the idea. Architects make drawings that other people build. I make the drawings. If someone wants to build from those, that's up to them. I feel I'm making architecture. I believe the building comes into being as soon as it's drawn. — Lebbeus Woods

It's fun to sit down and do a few drawings, but when you have to sit down and do hundreds of drawings whose value only depends on getting to the end of the chain, then you've created a different kind of monster. — Gary Panter

I like to be able to get swift curves in the plant drawings that are usually drawn in five to ten minutes. — Ellsworth Kelly

Buildings are always better than drawings and models. — Rafael Moneo

Sometimes when looking through my pile of drawings, I find an image that ... awakens in me a passionate desire to inhabit it, as though I were to feel more at home in it than in myself. — Jean Helion

The way I make drawings is just with a desktop Epson C88 printer and they are designed to break, they are really cheap. So I bought a lot of them before it became impossible to find them ... — Wade Guyton

Nick opened Ruth's journal first. He leafed through several pages while shaking his head, it was like his mind was saying, "No, no, no!
He picked up Luedtke's journal and did the same flipping back and forth; suddenly he flipped back and stood completely still staring at the page he was on.He could not make his brain accept what he was seeing; both drawings were the same but labeled differently. The legend on Luedtke's had a subtitle, The Major Demons of Hell. — Lou Berthelson

Over the ten years since she'd been born, the trees of Briary Swamp, West Virginia, had peered through May's window night after night. They had watched over her thoughtful brown eyes, the imaginative crook of her head, the strong character of her knobby knees. The trees had laughed at the jokes May told her cat. Their leaves had whispered over her wild inventions, her colorful stories, her drawings. — Jodi Lynn Anderson

The work, I suppose, is made in the editing, whereby I make literally hundreds of drawings, and then a much smaller percentage of those become the finished work. — David Shrigley

14th- and 15th-century drawings are almost unheard-of - and as a result, they generate jealous desire among dealers and curators. Museums in particular value rarity and pedigree more than attractiveness. — Peter Landesman

Most children are given far too much praise for their early drawings, so much so that they rarely learn the ability to refine their first crude efforts the way their early attempts at language are corrected. — Charles De Lint

Animation is not the art of drawings that move but the art of movements that are drawn. — Norman McLaren

I never talk when I'm drawing a person, especially if I'm making line drawings. I prefer there to be no noise at all so I can concentrate more. — David Hockney

They've found a way to privately, or within a small family group, share expressions, or other images, drawings, and then gain access to some of the world's great expressions and images and make them real, make them tangible. — John Doerr

In the Chauvet Cave, there is a painting of a bison embracing the lower part of a naked female body. Why does Pablo Picasso, who had no knowledge of the Chauvet Cave, use exactly the same motif in his series of drawings of the Minotaur and the woman? Very, very strange. — Werner Herzog

There was scrutiny is Lincoln's eyes as he looked at me. He was studying me. Eyeing me up and down. Taking in my hair, my mouth, my eyes. His gaze fell on the ring pierced through my nose. He stopped at the small leftover drawings illustrated on my wrists from yesterday's English class doodlings--reading me like I was a book that had been on a shelf so long dust embossed the title on the spine. He read me as though he was the first to crack open that cover in over a decade. I felt him blowing off the pages. — Megan Squires

Antonin Artaud wrote on one of his drawings, "Never real and always true," and that is how depression feels. You know that it is not real, that you are someone else, and yet you know that it is absolutely true. — Andrew Solomon