The cloth painters of southern India drew their patterns on paper first. One teardrop, turned and resized, is still the entire method.
Dots cannot be counted by the eye, only weighed. That one fact turns a pen and a flat evening into a finished drawing.
Lace is built on a paper pattern that gets thrown away at the end. What survives is thread around holes, and that is the whole trick.
A bouquet looks flat because every flower is facing you. Turn one away and the whole jar gains a room to stand in.
A wall seen from across the road shows you no marks at all. It shows you where it stops. That is the whole of texture, and 47 swatches prove it.
A cut stone looks like the hardest thing on the page. It is ruled lines and flat tones, and the lamp does all the choosing.
Nobody is bad at drawing at 9pm. They are just drawing with the fingers instead of the shoulder, and it shows in the first minute.
The thick part of a brush-pen letter is not pressure. It is a narrow shape somebody filled in, and any pen in the house can draw it.
In 1704 a man counted the ways two floor tiles can sit together. He got 64. You need one ruler and one diagonal line.
A canopy is not a surface. It is a shape with holes in it, and the holes go in first. 21 trees in pen and ink, bark to foliage.