With the advent of contemporary art, many artists are beginning to question the nature and limits of drawing, pushing the boundaries of what a drawing can mean and be. The modern language of visual arts has led to an "expanded field" of operations in all disciplines. (While "expanded field" is a term coined by art historian Rosalind Krauss in 1979 mainly in reference to sculpture, it can equally be applied to the expansion of drawing practice).

While artists continue to use traditional means in creating drawings, utilizing tools such as the pen, pencil or brush for notebook sketches or studies, they are also seeking novel materials and methods to create with, such as but not limited to: processes like cutting, smudging, burning, scratching, sticking, writing and sewing, and materials from wax and gold to diamond dust and feathers. Contemporary drawings can explore the relationship of art to its surroundings, through room installations (i.e. murals), or art to mechanization and technology, through combinations of drawing with printmaking, or through site-specific installations that utilize videography to translate drawings. Commonly held distinctions between drawing and and other mediums such as painting, sculpture, land art and even performance, are collapsed, as a newfound inventiveness in image-making portrays how drawing is as dynamic a medium as ever in the modern age. In aiming to be ever more adventurous with materials and techniques, artists are not only just asking what drawing is, but how it differentiates from other activities. 

By gradually entering the global stage, drawing regains a political urgency in the contemporary art world, and emerges as a convenient, efficient, and often inexpensive medium in which artists can turn to when other forms are not as readily available. Ultimately the meaning of the terms "drawing" and "contemporary" can only be defined by their nature of being undefinable, and completely open to the individual's creative processes.