The visual arts include art forms such as ceramics, drawing, painting, sculpture, printmaking, design, crafts, photography, video, film production, and architecture. Many art disciplines (performing arts, conceptual arts, textile arts) include aspects of the visual arts as well as the arts of other types. Also included in the visual arts are applied arts such as industrial design, graphic design, fashion design, interior design, and decorative arts.

Modern usage of the term “visual arts” includes the visual arts as well as the applied, decorative arts and crafts, but this is not always the case. Before the Arts and Crafts movement in Britain and elsewhere at the turn of the 20th century, the term “artist” was often limited to someone working in the visual arts (such as painting, sculpture, or printmaking) rather than a craft, trade, or applied art. The distinction was emphasized by artists of the Arts and Crafts Movement, who valued folk art forms as high forms. The art schools made a distinction between visual arts and crafts, arguing that the craftsman could not be considered a practitioner of the arts.

“A work of visual art” is a painting, drawing, print or sculpture that exists in a single copy, in a limited edition of 200 copies or less, that is signed and sequentially numbered by the author. A work of fine art does not include a poster, map, globe, diagram, technical drawing, chart, model, applied art, motion picture or other audiovisual work, book, magazine, newspaper, periodical, database, electronic information service, electronic publication or similar publication; does not include merchandise or advertising, promotional, descriptive, covering or packaging material or container;

Education and Training:
The teaching of visual art was usually accomplished through variations of apprentice systems and workshops. In Europe, the Renaissance movement, to raise the prestige of the artist, led to the academy system for training artists, and today most people who pursue careers in art study in art schools at the highest levels. Fine art has now become an elective subject in most education systems. (See also art education.)

Drawing:
Drawing is the means of creating an image using any of a variety of tools and techniques. It usually involves marking a surface by applying pressure from a tool or moving the tool across the surface using a dry medium such as graphite pencils, pen and ink, ink brushes, wax colored pencils, crayons, charcoal, pastels, and markers. Digital tools are also used to simulate their effects. The main methods used in drawing are line drawing, hatching, cross-hatching, random hatching, sketching, hatching, and blending. An artist who is highlighted by a drawing is called a draftsman or draughtsman.

Drawing goes back at least 16,000 years to paleolithic cave animal representations such as Lascaux in France and Altamira in Spain. In ancient Egypt, ink drawings on papyrus, often depicting humans, were used as models for painting or sculpture. The drawings on Greek vases, originally geometric, later evolved to human form with black pottery in the 7th century B.C.

When paper began to spread in Europe in the 15th century, drawings were adopted by such masters as Sandro Botticelli, Raphael, Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, who sometimes treated drawing as an art form in its own right, rather than a preparatory stage for painting or sculpture.

Painting:
Painting, taken literally, is the practice of applying pigment suspended in a medium (or medium) and a binder (glue) to a surface (substrate) such as paper, canvas, or wall. When used in an artistic sense, however, it means using this activity in conjunction with drawing, composition, or other aesthetic considerations to manifest the practitioner’s expressive and conceptual intent. Painting is also used to express spiritual motifs and ideas; sites of this kind of painting range from works of art depicting mythological figures on ceramics to the Sistine Chapel to the human body itself.