Fine Art Drawings

Portraiture has existed for many centuries. The Greeks produced portraits for funeral and religious rituals; they aimed to “bring back to life those who have passed away.” In the Roman era, portraits were often reserved for the ruling figures of society; for example, a warrior would have his portrait painted to illustrate his bravery during a battle. In Europe, it is only during the late Middle Ages and Renaissance that Italian and Flemish painters started to practice the art of portraiture. In the 14th and 15th centuries, painters created works commissioned by wealthy patrons. Painters sketched out preliminary freehand drawings, which were often then approved by the patron, before beginning to work on their oil paint or, later, watercolour. Facial features were sometimes improved to the detriment of realism, although some painters were known for their ability to reproduce their models’ expressions. Some artists worked in great detail while others focussed more heavily on trying to capture the real personality of their model. For much of its history, portrait not only told a story but it also conveyed a message of power, promoting a well-controlled image to the wider population and establishing the sitter’s authority through its circulation. For example, Florentine elites would use paintings and drawings as a mean of controlling their image and establishing their authority. Portraits were a way for someone to live on long after their death. Today we find the faces of aristocracies and the European bourgeoisie in many museums, immortalised by artists such as Leonardo da Vinci or Rembrandt. The results obtained through drawing depended largely on the tools and materials used. Red chalk was very popular (especially at the beginning of the 16th century) to represent the facial features and the warmth of the skin, while charcoal produced harder lines and pastel created a softer, colourful touch. Artists adapted their technique depending on the subject and the emotion they wanted to convey. The commercialisation of pencils in the nineteenth century made it a popular medium for artists and amateurs alike. Pencil art became more popular and the tool was often used for sketching portraits. One thing is certain; capturing facial expressions is a demanding art form and the art of portraiture requires a lot of practice. Drawing a face down to its finest details may take hours to obtain the desired result: a protruding jaw, the shape of a skull, thick brows, smiling eyes, dilated pupils… Even more difficult, are children’s portraits? It can be difficult to get them to stay still for long. The artist has to be skilled enough to immortalise these men, women and children full of life. Gradually, sketched portraits became less and less realistic but increasingly daring and experimental in terms of colour. On Artsper, discover drawings by Jean Cocteau, Julien Calot, Alice de Miramon, Philippe Pasqua, Sabine Danzé, Bahareh Navabi and Stéphanie Stindel.

Today street art is present in many of our cities and it is becoming a major contemporary art movement. One way of defining street art is to say it includes all forms of art created in the street or more generally in public spaces. Key to this movement is the use of public spaces as a way of communicating with a large number of people. The history of street art as we know it today, originated in the 1960s in the United States, in the city of Philadelphia with the development of graffiti. One man, wanting to profess his love and hoping to catch his loved one’s eye, started to write his name on walls throughout the city. Several others across the city imitated him. This was the birth of “tags”, a type a signature, often used to mark out territories but now used in art. As the swinging 60s came to a close, graffiti had spread to several cities and had successfully reached New York, the city that would help project this new art form into the spotlight. The late 60s and early 70s were a time of rapid urbanisation, growing suburbs, and omnipresent advertising. The development of street art was also helped by the commercialisation of spray-paints - budding street artists could now easily have access to their medium of choice. The initial street art movement was linked to vandalism and graffiti could be found all over the city, on public or private property and on trains. Quik, Futura 2000 and Phase 2 were some of the most famous graffiti artists of the time. The art movement made its debut in France in the early 1970s but it didn’t gain much recognition until the 1980s. Key players of the French street art movement include Blek le Rat, Jérôme Mesnager and Jef Aérosol. Street art now comes in all shapes and sizes, from tagging to huge frescos as well as sculpture and drawings. As street art evolved and spread worldwide, new methods appeared including collage, stencilling and stickers. Increasingly, especially as the police enforced stricter laws on graffiti and punishment became more severe in the 1980s and 1990s, artists started to work in studios. Gallery owners started to catch on to the trend and began to represent street artists. The first exhibition of graffiti art took place in 1972 in New York. Drawing eventually became a medium used by street artists. Graffiti artists let their imaginations run free using paper as their chosen support. They worked with a whole array of paper types, including Canson paper, newspaper and even bank notes, as demonstrated by Death NYC and Philippe Sainte Fauste… As the movement’s importance in the art market grew more prominent, many artists feared its institutionalisation and believed that it undermined the movement’s very essence. Today, many artists combine street work and works created in a studio, using spray-paints, coloured pencils, chalk and charcoal. The street is now considered a helpful springboard for achieving recognition. Many of the most expensive street artists now work in urban areas legally often thanks to commissions. Some of today’s most famous street artists include: Jef Aérosol, Banksy and Miss Tic. So why not buy a street art drawing from Artsper’s collection and treat yourself to a unique, modern or contemporary work of art? You will find a wide range of styles, including works by emerging and well-established artists. Don’t miss our selection of works from renowned contemporary street artists such as JR,JonOne and Shepard Fairey (Obey)!

Watercolor painting is a technique that uses paint pigments and a water-based solution. It is popular thanks to its blurred, hazy effect which can't be obtained through other binding elements, such as egg or oil. Gouache is also a watercolour medium but it is noticeably more adhesive and opaque. Watercolor usually takes shape thanks to a faint pencil outline, drawn onto the paper before the paint is applied.One of the other advantages for watercolor artists is that they can work quickly, using their time efficiently. Pigments spread out across the canvas in a rather unusual way, becoming more concentrated around the edges. This gives watercolor prints the transparent quality they're known for, enhancing the paper's luminosity. There are several key techniques to watercolor painting, the first of which is called the dry-on-wet technique. For this method, the painting's base is laid out in watercolor and then elaborated on with fewer pigments. There is also the wet-on-wet technique, which involves wetting the paper before the paint is applied in order to achieve greater color saturation. Watercolor is also easily erasable! Artists working with this medium can rework their watercolor print's by diluting the paint with water again, this time directly on the paper. These are just a few of the reasons for why watercolor is a preferred method for plein-air painters, who set out to represent landscapes and the sky in situ...  Artworks using watercolor are typically carried out on paper, also contributing to why watercolor drawing is so popular. The weight of the paper, its resistance to moisture, the paper's color… all of these aspects play a decisive role in creating the painting's final effect. The type of paper typically used for this artistic technique is made from linen cloths, wood or straw. Certain artists, such as the illustrator Oga Kazuo from Studio Ghibli, work with wet paper spread across varnished wood, while others prefer to use plexiglas. The result is that the water takes longer to evaporate, producing a very different color effect. Although water-based paints date back to cave painting, it wasn't until the Renaissance that watercolor painting became commonplace. Art history tells us that oil painting was the most commonly used technique at the time, yet Northern European masters such as Albrecht Dürer chose watercolor to depict landscapes.  Venetian painters also gravitated towards this medium for their representations of the city's sublime canals. What could be a better way to portray water than with water-based paints? Landscape painting is the most popular genre among watercolor artists. Claude Lorrain is an example of this from the 17th century, to be followed by William Turner, Samuel Palmer and Richard Bonington in the 19th century. Many artists chose watercolor painting to express the shades of the sky, ocean waves and expansive fields. In the 20th century, artists such as Vassily Kandinsky, Jean Bazaine and Raoul Dufy elaborated different abstract, watercolor techniques. Discover Artsper's collection of watercolor paintings, offering some of the most renowned artists such as Paul Jenkins, Walasse Ting, Vittoretti and Philippe Pasqua. If you're curious for more, head over to our unique selection of Chinese ink drawings, charcoal portraits or pastel and chalk portraits...

What would you choose between a summery and fauvist landscape with pine tree or a snowy blueish landscapes like impressionists did? Both of course! That is great because Artsper drawings collection has so many different kind of sketches. Sanguin, ink, watercolor or charcoal, every material is great to draw our environment. Thank to the colorful drawings of Hélène Duclos or the charcoal sketchings of Muriel Patarroni, escape from your everyday life! Here are all our landscapes drawings. 

If you love animals, then these artworks will be right up your street. Artsper brings you a selection of drawings by contemporary artists all inspired by the wonders of the animal kingdom. From proud lions to wise owls and cunning foxes, along with everything in-between, we're sure you'll be able to spot your favourite species in the mix.

Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque are often credited with the invention of the collage technique within the visual arts. When the two artists created cubism between 1908 and 1914, they invented a method for representing space and perspectives that allowed them to comprehend objects from different angles, thus offering a more complete vision of reality through painting and sculpture. In 1912, they start experimenting with a brand new medium, collage. To obtain the desired composition, they used fragments of several images that they assembled to build objects. It is by following this process that they created the famous work “Nature Morte à la Chaise Cannée”, one of the first collages to be recognised as an artwork. They gave up on using collage a few years later but numerous artistic movements of the 20th century went on to make use of this innovative technique. This was to the delight of the poet Charles Baudelaire, who wished to see artists transform and work with elements of “the shop of the images and signs” that made up reality. Surrealist, Dadaist, and Futurist artists adopt this technique and start to cut and combine different elements: newsprint, cardboard (to create embossed designs), old magazines (for vintage collages), several photos and various objects were assembled to produce a single work. The use of disparate collages marked the end of the reign of noble materials and oil painting, opening the way for deconstruction and reconstruction, random and unlikely combinations. Louis Aragon, André Breton, Jacques Prévert et Pierre-Olivier Walzer start introducing this practice in literature through the odd juxtapositions of ideas in their texts, followed by Edward Verral Lucas and George Morrow who produced the first collage book, which narrates the story of an English dandy using images from a department store. The Dadaists Raoul Hausmann, Hannah Hoch, Max Ernst, and John Heartfield were fond of the collage technique, particularly for interpreting the contemporary events. Painters such as Paul Klee and Henri Matisse also engaged in the technique of artistic collage: Paul Klee by giving a second life and second identity to old works, and Henri Matisse by cutting painted paper which he pieced together to create stunning compositions. By adapting collage to their own style, each artist creates uniques effects with this technique: Jean Dubuffet assembles his own paintings to draw meandering lines, Jiri Kolar fragments his collages to create geometrical optics, Bernard Réquichot accumulates images of a single subject to provoke disgust, Pop Art artists pick up the symbols of capitalism in magazines… As for contemporary art, collage manifests itself in Street Art, for example in the works of the artist Madame. On Artsper you’ll find a wide variety of collage works, such as Philippe Garnier de la Baudinière’s minimalist works, Bonnie and Clyde’s exotic collages, Matthew Rose’s assemblages of photographs, words and drawings, the stories told by Alexandre Taillandier in modern paintings…

Traditionally thought of as being at the bottom of the artistic hierarchy, still life drawings are now super on trend! Whilst Clara Peeters' still lifes are gorgeous and those by Chardin Ray are unmissable, now there are new, modern styles of this iconic genre. With their pens, our contemporary artists are creating amazing still lifes. What was once just lemons, bunches of flowers or cherries are  now sketches of trainers or tropical fruits! Always full of imagination to grow and reinvent the small objects of our everyday life, the still life drawings of our artists are not to be missed. 

The start of the 20th century was an incredibly promising time for Western societies. Major technological and industrial breakthroughs brought about key societal changes and revolutionised the daily lives of entire populations. The two World Wars devastated the world during the first half of the 20th century and deeply scarred the generations who lived through them. Their violence had a profound influence on the art movements of the time. Within art and literature, artists started to move away from rational thinking. In art, new movements emerged which completely broke away from traditional artistic conventions, including Surrealism, Dadaism, Figurative art, Expressionism, Cubism and also Abstract Art. The first abstract tendencies were seen in Germany with Wilhem Worringer, who used abstract art, more specifically geometric shapes, as the means to express and portray his fears. Fauve artists had already used pure colours but this technique became even more commonplace in abstract works. The invention of photography also had a key impact on painters as it meant that they became less concerned about their work being realistic. The origins of the abstract movement are difficult to pin down as its several initiatives developed at the same time in several different countries, without any kind of dialogue unifying them. It was a watercolour by Vassily Kandinsky, the figurehead of the abstract movement, which triggered the shift in artistic attitudes. Like a piece of cacophonous music, shapes and colours create a sense of movement in his abstracts paintings, communicating specific emotions. From this point on, new artists concentrated on trying to depict a ‘contraction of reality’, by simplifying shapes and drawing nothing more than its essence or the underlying idea. Piet Mondrian decided to work with geometric shapes. As for Malévich, he chose to showcase the invisible in his highly symbolic and spiritual works, including his most famous painting ‘Black Square.’ In his own unique way, Jackson Pollock created nearly 700 impressive modern paintings. His brush rarely ever touching the canvas as he preferred the pouring technique, which involves pouring paint directly onto the painting from a paint pot or stick. Just like oil painting or abstract sculpture, abstract drawing can come in various different forms. On Artsper, you will find a collection of works made with ink, gouache, watercolour, pen, charcoal, thin lead pencils or felt-tip pens and often on paper. Similar to painting, abstract drawing can highlight shapes, textures, lines or colours. What the artists decide to focus on is dependent on their artistic vision. Discover abstract drawings by the abstract artists Paul Jenkins, Ellen Priest and Abigail Lazkoz on Artsper. Read more