Everyday life Drawing for Sale

Drawing is undoubtedly one of the oldest forms of human expression. Even in the prehistoric times, humans used drawings to represent the world around them. Drawing has been central not only to artists learning how to capture reality but also for fashion designers wanting to sketch out designs, or architects and engineers needing to create detailed images of buildings or machines. Overtime, drawing has hugely diversified. Innovation by artists and those using drawings for non artistic purposes has resulted in the existence of a wide variety of techniques.

Genre drawing depicts everyday life with ordinary people. Although it changed overtime, even with the first prehistoric drawings we can see aspects of the daily life of men and women represented on the walls of their caves.

In Antiquity, wealthy Romans also used painted mosaics to illustrate their lives and actions in their homes, examples of this were found at the Villa Casale in Sicily (listed as UNESCO World Heritage).There is also some evidence that Romans used metalpoint (generally silver although gold, copper or lead could also be used) on paper or parchment coated with gum powder and coloured pigments to produce artworks.

Artists have always been inspired by their environment and have never ceased to represent the world around them. Drawing forms the basis of artists' understanding of the human body and the world around them. They will first learn to look carefully at the world around them. They might choose to capture simple things around them: a still life or a child playing. With colored pencils, charcoal drawings, chalks or pastels, artists have immortalized the scenes around them from ordinary actions to extraordinary festivities.

Many great masters were fond of genre scenes and everyday life drawings. While these drawings often took the form of preliminary sketches, they could also be artworks in themselves. For example, in the 17th century Rembrandt produced a substantial portfolio with hundreds of drawings, including many depicting scenes of everyday life. For example, “Saskia in Bed", a drawing in pen and brown ink, represents a nurse watching over his wife who lies ill in bed.

Everyday life drawings have evolved throughout art history but still have valued place within the visual arts, particularly in modern and contemporary art. In fact, it is one of the first courses offered to budding artists at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. As Giacometti famously stated, “If we master a bit of drawing, everything else is possible."

Artsper offers a wide selection of drawings representing realistic, figurative or abstract scenes of everyday life. Explore works by famous contemporary artists as well as drawings by new emerging talents like Soufiane Ababri, Virginie Barré and Shadi Alzaqzouz.