This accessible book explains the significance of relationships between the body and the mark, visual imitation, drawing and writing and visual storytelling, providing a simple guide to these key ideas. For millennia drawing has been conceived as an exploratory activity, mediating between the vision of the drafter and what they are drawing. Drawing reveals hidden relationships, directs attention, scrutinises the material world and provides plans for further action.

The book unpacks the key ideas that have shaped the rich, complex and foundational activity of drawing. It presents an unexpected, engaging and authoritative range of illustrated examples of drawings made by culturally and historically diverse people for different purposes, with different media, in widely different times and situations.

Educator, author and artist Simon Grennan builds together concepts to create a complete guide to ideas about drawing.

Simon Grennan is Leading Research Fellow at the University of Chester, UK. He is an awarded scholar of visual narrative, graphic novelist and cartoonist. He is the author of Drawing in Drag by Marie Duval (2019), A Theory of Narrative Drawing (2017) and Dispossession (2015), one of The Guardian Books of the Year 2015, which is a graphic adaptation of a novel by Anthony Trollope. He is co-author, with Roger Sabin and Julian Waite, of Marie Duval: Maverick Victorian Cartoonist (2020), Marie Duval (2018) and The Marie Duval Archive (2015), co-author of Key Terms in Comics Studies (2021) and co-editor, with Laurence Grove, of Transforming Anthony Trollope: 'Dispossession', Victorianism and 19th-century Word and Image (2015), among others. Since 1990, he has been half of international artists team Grennan & Sperandio, producer of over forty comics and books (www.kartoonkings.com).