If you are looking for the best sayings and quotes about drawing, congratulations – you are in the right place! ✏️
Below is a list of creative, artistic, quotes about drawing that will surely motivate you and inspire you to unleash your inner creativity and the artist in you.
Side note: If you know more quotes about drawing I might’ve missed, make sure to share them down below and I will add them to this list!
87+ Creative Quotes About Drawing
1. “Drawing is vision on paper.” – Andrew Loomis
2. “Every artist was first an amateur.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
3. “Drawing is putting a line around an idea.” – Henri Matisse
4. “Drawing takes time. A line has time in it.” – David Hockney
5. “I draw like other people bite their nails.” – Pablo Picasso
6. “All the visible world is only light on form.” – Andrew Loomis
7. “A drawing is simply a line going for a walk.” – Paul Klee
8. “Life is the art of drawing without an eraser.” – John W. Gardner
9. “To learn to draw is to draw and draw and draw.” – Andrew Loomis
10. “This world is but a canvas to our imagination.” – Henry David Thoreau
11. “An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one.” – Charles Horton Cooley
12. “Never become an artist if you can’t learn to draw.” – Sergei Bongart
13. “Drawing is an exercise for a restless imagination.” – Tim Burton
14. “Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.” – Pablo Picasso
15. “The painter draws with his eyes, not with his hands.” – Maurice Grosser
16. “In drawing, nothing is better than the first attempt.” – Pablo Picasso
17. “Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.” – Edgar Degas
18. “To create one’s world in any of the arts takes courage.” – Georgia O’Keeffe
19. “Drawing is a frame of mind, a loving embrace if you will.” – Susan Avishai
20. “Drawing is not the same as form, it is a way of seeing form.” – Edgar Degas
21. “I sometimes think there is nothing so delightful as drawing.” – Vincent van Gogh
22. “A drawing is always dragged down to the level of its caption.” – James Thurber
23. “Drawing is not what one sees but what one can make others see.” – Edgar Degas
24. “Photography is an immediate reaction, drawing is a meditation.” – Henri Cartier-Bresson
25. “Drawing is speaking to the eye; talking is painting to the ear.” – Joseph Joubert
26. “Keep a bad drawing until by study you have found out why it is bad.” – Robert Henri
27. “Drawing is the discipline by which I constantly rediscover the world.” – Frederick Franck
28. “Drawing teaches habits of close observation that will always be useful.” – Susanna Clarke
29. “I love the quality of pencil. It helps me to get to the core of a thing.” – Andrew Wyeth
30. “An artist must have his measuring tools not in the hand, but in the eye.” – Michelangelo Buonarroti
31. “The ability to draw depends on one’s ability to see the way an artist sees.” – Betty Edwards
32. “Drawing at its best is not what your eyes see but what our mind understands.” – Millard Sheets
33. “One must always draw, draw with the eyes, when one cannot draw with a pencil.” – Balthus
34. “The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.” – Emile Zola
35. “We all have 10,000 bad drawings in us. The sooner we get them out the better.” – Walt Stanchfield
36. “Drawing is like making an expressive gesture with the advantage of permanence.” – Henri Matisse
37. “You can’t do sketches enough. Sketch everything and keep your curiosity fresh.” – John Singer Sargent
38. “I prefer drawing to talking. Drawing is faster, and leaves less room for lies.” – Le Corbusier
39. “A drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.” – William Strunk Jr
40. “Writing, like drawing is an art, and whatever conveys the meaning is justified.” – Maxwell Perkins
41. “For me drawing is an attempt to understand what I feel about the world I live in.” – Brian Froud
42. “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.” – Pablo Picasso
43. “In drawing, one must look for or suspect that there is more than is casually seen.” – George Bridgman
44. “A mistake in drawing becomes difficult to detect when the eye is familiar with it.” – Walter J. Phillips
45. “Drawing is not following a line on the model, it is drawing your sense of the thing.” – Robert Henri
46. “Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.” – Scott Adams
47. “At its essence, art is an alchemical process. Alchemy is a process of transformation.” – Julia Cameron
48. “Animation is not the art of drawings that move but the art of movements that are drawn.” – Norman McLaren
49. “If you can draw well, tracing won’t hurt; and if you can’t draw well, tracing won’t help.” – Bradley Schmehl
50. “Drawing makes you see things clearer, and clearer and clearer still, until your eyes ache.” – David Hockney
51. “Drawing a good picture is like telling a really good lie the key is in the incidental detail.” – Shaun Tan
52. “All artists are willing to suffer for their work. But why are so few prepared to learn to draw?” – Banksy
53. “Drawing is the basis of art. A bad painter cannot draw. But one who draws well can always paint.” – Arshile Gorky
54. “Originality depends only on the character of the drawing and the vision peculiar to each artist.” – Georges Seurat
55. “The important thing is to keep on drawing when you start to paint. Never graduate from drawing.” – John Sloan
56. “Drawing is the honesty of the art. There is no possibility of cheating. It is either good or bad.” – Salvador Dali
57. “Drawing is rather like playing chess: your mind races ahead of the moves that you eventually make.” – David Hockney
58. “It took me a few seconds to draw it, but it took me 34 years to learn to draw it in a few seconds.” – Paula Scher
59. “Drawing general conclusions about your main weaknesses can provide a great stimulus to further growth.” – Alexander Kotov
60. “Real development is not leaving things behind, as on a road, but drawing life from them, as on a root.” – Gilbert K Chesterton
61. “Pure drawing is an abstraction. Drawing and colour are not distinct, everything in nature is coloured.” – Paul Cezanne
62. “How you draw is a reflection of how you feel about the world. You’re not capturing it, you’re interpreting it.” – Juliette Aristides
63. “Drawing includes three and a half quarters of the content of painting…Drawing contains everything, except the hue.” – Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
64. “Drawing is a kind of hypnotism: one looks in such a way at the model, that he comes and takes a seat on the paper.” – Pablo Picasso
65. “Realize that a drawing is not a copy. It is a construction in very different materials. A drawing is an invention.” – Robert Henri
66. “By drawing our senses of perception inward, we are able to experience the control, silence, and quietness of the mind.” – BKS Iyengar
67. “If drawing belongs to the world of spirit and color to that of the senses, you must draw first to cultivate the spirit. ” – Henri Matisse
68. “Begin by learning to draw and paint like the old masters. After that, you can do as you like; everyone will respect you.” – Unknown
69. “As practice makes perfect, I cannot but make progress; each drawing one makes, each study one paints, is a step forward.” – Vincent Van Gogh
70. “Drawing is giving a performance; an artist is an actor who is not limited by the body, only by his ability and, perhaps, experience.” – Marc Davis
71. “Sketching is almost everything. It is the painter’s identity, his style, his conviction, and then color is just a gift to the drawing.” – Fernando Botero
72. “Art begins with resistance – at the point where resistance is overcome. No human masterpiece has ever been created without great labor.” – Andre Gide
73. “Drawing is still basically the same as it has been since prehistoric times. It brings together man and the world. It lives through magic.” – Keith Haring
74. “Learning to draw is really a matter of learning to see – to see correctly – and that means a good deal more than merely looking with the eye.” – Kimon Nicolaides
75. “Drawing is like the first kiss. It carries within it the deepest emotion and the challenge of the first step. It is the first cry after birth.” – Ala Bashir
76. “Drawing is the artist’s most direct and spontaneous expression, a species of writing: it reveals, better than does painting, his true personality.” – Edgar Degas
77. “If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don’t write, because our culture has no use for it.” – Anais Nin
78. “Drawing used to be a civilized thing to do, like reading and writing. It was taught in elementary schools. It was democratic. It was a boon to happiness.” – Michael Kimmelman
79. “What do drawings mean to me? I really don’t know. The activity absorbs me. I forget everything else in a way that I don’t think happens with any other activity.” – John Berger
80. “Drawing is a form of probing. And the first generic impulse to draw derives from the human need to search, to plot points, to place things and to place oneself.” – John Berger
81. “I have learned that what I have not drawn, I have never really seen, and that when I start drawing an ordinary thing, I realize how extraordinary it is, sheer miracle.” – Frederick Franck
82. “Drawing is the cornerstone of the graphic, plastic arts. Drawing is the coordination of line, tone, and color symbols into formations that express the artist’s thought.” – John French Sloan
83. “Above and beyond drawing my creations, I try to incorporate some kind of message. I try not to end as merely a question but try to provide a conclusion within the work.” – Natsuki Takaya
84. “It is only by drawing often, drawing everything, drawing incessantly, that one fine day you discover, to your surprise, that you have rendered something in its true character.” – Camille Pissarro
85. “Technique should be taught, not as an end in itself, but as something related to individual expression, as a means toward an end. One cannot separate technique from expression. There is only expression.” – Kimon Nicolaides
86. “Drawing makes you see things clearer, and clearer, and clearer still. The image is passing through you in a physiological way, into your brain, into your memory – where it stays – it’s transmitted by your hands.” – Martin Gayford
87. “Drawing things makes them seem more real and makes me feel more alive. It also makes me pin down and remember things landscapes, season, weather, occasions, incidents, people that would otherwise have melted from my memory.” – David Gentleman