Who created Drawing Day?

Art teachers and sketching groups have marked May 16 under the names International Drawing Day and National Drawing Day since at least 2020. No founder, founding organisation or founding year is documented, and the origin year that circulates online has no source behind it.

Why do some calendars list a Drawing Day in June?

A separate event run at drawingday.org aimed to collect a million drawings in a single day and was held on the first Saturday of June from 2008 to 2012. It is a different observance from the May 16 date and its site stopped updating after 2012.

Is this the same as Ireland's National Drawing Day?

No. Ireland's National Drawing Day is co-ordinated by the National Gallery of Ireland on a moving Saturday in May, which fell on 18 May 2024, 17 May 2025 and 16 May 2026.

Drawing Day

Next celebratedSunday, May 16, 2027

A red ochre cross-hatch on a stone flake from Blombos Cave pushed the earliest known drawing back by at least 30,000 years. May 16 invites anyone with a pencil to add to a record 73,000 years long.

See how to celebrate

Countdown to the day

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Last updated September 6, 2026 · by the Holiday Calendar TeamHave an update or spot an error?

YEARLY DATEMay 16

OBSERVED INInternationally

CATEGORYHobbies

SUBCATEGORYArts & Crafts

ORIGIN

Community Origin

FOUNDING ENTITY

Not documented

FIRST OBSERVED

Not documented

HOW THE HOLIDAY CAME TO BE

An observance the record cannot trace to anyone.

No founder, founding organisation, or formal establishment record has been identified for Drawing Day. The origin account that circulates online traces back to unverified holiday listings rather than to any documented source.

+ Know the story? Submit a founder Help us complete this holiday

INTRO

73,000 years of drawing, and a date nobody has claimed

Drawing Day asks for the simplest thing on the arts calendar: put a mark on a surface and see what happens. Humans have been answering that request for a very long time. The oldest object anyone has identified as a drawing is a flake of stone, cross-hatched in red ochre, from Middle Stone Age levels at Blombos Cave in South Africa dated to roughly 73,000 years ago.

That find did not nudge the timeline. It pushed the earliest previously known abstract and figurative drawings back by at least 30,000 years. Microscopic and chemical analysis confirmed the red pigment had been applied on purpose, with an ochre crayon.

Set against a record that long, the day itself is oddly blank. Nobody is on file as having started it, and the origin story that turns up in search results leads back to holiday listings copying one another rather than to any source. Drawing Day is real, observed, and completely unclaimed.

ORIGINS

Drawing Day history

INTRODUCTION

A rock fall closed a cave in the limestone plateau of the Ardèche about 20,000 years ago. It stayed shut until 1994.

What was inside the Grotte Chauvet-Pont d'Arc is now, in UNESCO's words, the earliest-known and best-preserved figurative drawings in the world. The citation credits them with shading, anatomical precision, three-dimensionality and movement. It calls them the first known expressions of human artistic genius.

CHAPTER 01

Drawing became a scientific instrument

Nothing about that skill stayed decorative. Robert Hooke published Micrographia in 1665, while he was the Royal Society's Curator of Experiments. The Society says the book illustrates what is invisible to the naked eye.

The fold-out plates made the book a bestseller. The Society still keeps the copy Hooke donated, and in 2019 it went to a paper and binding conservator to be surface cleaned, its brittle edges consolidated and its folds re-folded.

CHAPTER 02

A Nobel that began as a thwarted art career

Santiago Ramón y Cajal wanted to be an artist. In the rural Spain he grew up in, that was not considered an appropriate ambition, so he studied medicine instead and drew anyway.

He spent a career drawing the brain, and those studies are still as relevant as they were a century ago. In 1906 he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for work on the structure of the nervous system.

CHAPTER 03

A day the record cannot place

Against all that, Drawing Day's own paperwork is empty. No founder, no founding organisation, no first observance anyone wrote down.

The earliest independent sign of it that research turned up is a post from an Urban Sketchers chapter in Hawaii, drawing a gardenia at home on the day in 2020. Two other organised drawing days sit close by on the calendar, and the confusion between them is most of what the day has instead of a history.

TIMELINE

Timeline

Micrographia is published

Robert Hooke's book of drawn plates became a bestseller on the strength of its fold-outs.

A Nobel for drawing the brain

Santiago Ramón y Cajal shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for work on the structure of the nervous system.

Chauvet cave found

A rock fall had sealed the Ardèche cave and its drawings for roughly 20,000 years.

A charity for drawing

The Guild of St George founded the Campaign for Drawing, now known as The Big Draw.

World Heritage listing

Chauvet was inscribed at the World Heritage Committee session in Doha, one of 26 sites added.

Sketchers mark May 16

An Urban Sketchers chapter in Hawaii posted for the day, the earliest independent trace research could find.

WHY THIS DAY MATTERS

Why We Love Drawing Day

COURTS

For some American trials, the only picture is a drawing.

By 1946, photography and radio were banned in US federal courts. The Library of Congress says the artists' sketches provide the only visual record of action inside those courtrooms.

MEMORY

Drawing beats writing for recall

A University of Waterloo team had people either draw a word or write it out repeatedly, then recall the list. Participants often recalled more than twice as many drawn than written words, though the researchers noted the experiments used single words only.

SCHOOLS

Its place in art education is contested

A survey of students, teachers and examiners found that in the UK, drawing skills are considered to be gradually declining and traditional notions of skill are being questioned. The same study found drawing used to think through a problem is increasingly recognised as a skill that enables innovation.

BY THE NUMBERS

Drawing Day by the Numbers

1,000+: Images inventoried at Chauvet
259: Radiocarbon dates behind Chauvet's chronology
3,000+: Cajal's drawings of the brain
96: Courtroom drawings the Library of Congress acquired in 2016

GOOD TO KNOW

Surprising facts about Drawing Day

Drawing is treated as evidence of a modern mind

The Nature paper on the Blombos flake calls abstract and depictive representations produced by drawing a prime indicator of modern cognition and behaviour.

Four seconds of drawing was still enough

The Waterloo researchers found the quality of the drawings did not seem to matter, and people gained a large memory advantage even with only four seconds to draw.

Courtroom artists filed their work by running

At trials, illustrators raced outside to meet mobile film crews so their drawings could be filmed for that evening's broadcast.

The oldest figurative drawings are off-limits

Chauvet will not open to the general public, and no conservation work has been done inside. A full-size facsimile was built for visitors instead.

One library has collected courtroom art since 1965

The Library of Congress has been acquiring courtroom illustrations since then, and calls its holdings the most comprehensive in any American institution.

GET INVOLVED

How to Celebrate Drawing Day

Draw one thing, indoors or out

Put a single object in front of you and give it your whole attention, whether that is a pine cone on a table or a tree across the road. Plein air drawing just means working from what is actually there rather than from a photograph.

Follow a museum drawing session

Galleries run drop-in drawing sessions that teach a method rather than a subject. One Metropolitan Museum of Art session built botanical drawings out of ovals and oblongs first, then went back to refine the real petal shapes.

SET

Set yourself an awkward constraint

Draw with your non-dominant hand, or with a material you have never touched. Constraints push you toward experiment instead of a tidy result.

MAKE

Make one drawing with other people

Give everyone the same small surface, a sheet of paper or a parcel tag, and let the finished wall be the artwork. Collaborative drawing turns a solitary habit into something a room can do together.

HANG

Hang the drawings where people will see them

Schools and studios often close the day with a small exhibition and a vote on categories such as most creative or most imaginative. The Arty Teacher publishes classroom plans for exactly this.

Test your knowledge

How well do you know Drawing Day?

1 / 8

Roughly how old is the earliest object identified as a drawing?

Answer

No. It is an unofficial observance with no legal standing found, so it is a normal working day.

COLOPHON

Sources

How we know what’s on this page. References, not endorsements.

17sources

13primary records

14independently dated

Primary records

Nature2018

An abstract drawing from the 73,000-year-old levels at Blombos Cave, South Africa

The ochre cross-hatch on a stone flake now treated as the oldest known drawing.