Thinking 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).

List of Illustrations
Introduction: what is drawing?

1. Imitation
The threshold of visualisation and the problem of media
Depiction and visualisation
Imitating vision and imitating drawing
Digital imitation
Analogue imitation
Imitating experience

2. Mark
Tone
Line
Planning
Mapping
Drawing systems representing three dimensions
Typification
Writing
Mark making across media
Introducing the body

3. Trace
The surface
The surface of the drawing as the skin of a body
The surface as a visualisation of an idea
The limits of the drawing
The significance of drawing media
Trace, media and body
Trace and style
Trace as evidence
Movement, mind and absence
Choreographing traces
Trace and depiction

4. Story
Story and point of view
The story of the drawing
Story and style
Drawing style and character

5. Drawing Today
Feeling
Technology old and new
Systematic drawings
Identity and power
Textiles and the line
Conjecture and hypothesis
Collaborative drawing
Performing drawing
Moving drawings
Contemporary drawing and public cultural institutions

Selective glossary
References
Further reading
Index