An open sketchbook on an oak table filled with pencil drawings of lunar craters and a small branching tree, beside a magnifying glass and pencils
AI-generated image, not a photograph of a real person or place.
doodlesketches

DRAWING AS A WAY OF SEEING

Sketches that
changed science.

LOOK then draw

  • Look closely
  • Draw what you see
  • Come back again
  • Pencil first, theory later

Before the camera, discovery was drawn by hand.

Galileo sketched the Moon’s rough face. Hooke drew a flea the size of a page. Darwin doodled a branching tree in a pocket notebook, and Cajal drew nerve cells well enough to share a Nobel Prize. Here are the facts behind five famous sketches, in plain English.

Plain English, with the sources linked.

Updated

Explore the timeline

THE SHORT ANSWER

A pencil was a lab tool.

For centuries, a careful drawing was
how new things were seen and shared.

THE SKY · 1609

Galileo’s Moon

Night after night he drew the shifting shadows and showed the Moon was rough and mountainous, not a perfect globe.

How many drawings?

THE MICROSCOPE · 1665–1906

Hooke and Cajal

From a flea and a slice of cork to the branching cells of the brain, the microscope’s first pictures were drawn.

Read the facts

THE NOTEBOOK · 1837

Darwin’s tree

A quick branching sketch in a postcard-sized notebook became one of the best-known diagrams in biology.

See the timeline

A SKETCH TIMELINE

Five drawings,
four centuries.

Pick a name to see the year and what the drawing showed. The bar marks where it falls between 1500 and today.

Sketch timeline

Choose a sketch
The Moon gets mountains1609

On 30 November 1609 Galileo turned a telescope on the Moon and drew what he saw. Four of his sketches were engraved for Sidereus nuncius in March 1610.

A flea, and the word “cell”1665

Micrographia, published in 1665, held sixty engraved images, including a fold-out flea. Hooke’s look at cork gave biology the word “cell”.

An album enters a royal library1680

An album of Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings was first recorded in the Royal Collection in 1680. The collection now holds around 550 of his drawings.

A tree of life in a pocket notebook1837

In his 1837 B notebook, about the size of a postcard, Darwin sketched a branching tree of species. It is now at Cambridge University Library.

Drawn nerve cells win a Nobel1906

Santiago Ramón y Cajal drew what he saw under the microscope. In 1906 he shared the Nobel Prize with Camillo Golgi for work on the nervous system.

Dates from the sources listed below.

Leonardo’s date is when an album of his drawings was first recorded in the Royal Collection, not when he drew them.

TWO SKETCHBOOKS BY NUMBER

Draw a lot,
publish the best.

The printed pictures were a careful
selection from many more drawings.

6+ to 4

Moon drawings in 18 days, then engravings

Galileo made at least six drawings of the Moon in the eighteen days from 30 November 1609. He chose four of his watercolour sketches to be engraved for Sidereus nuncius in March 1610.

GALILEO · 1609–1610

60

Engraved images in Micrographia

Robert Hooke’s Micrographia held sixty highly detailed engravings of things seen through his microscope, including a large fold-out drawing of a flea.

HOOKE · 1665

Both books turned careful looking into pictures that anyone could study, long before photographs could do the job.

SKETCH LIKE AN OBSERVER

Four habits
borrowed from them.

A hand sketching a fern frond and an oak leaf in a small sketchbook resting on a mossy log in a woodland
AI-generated image, not a photograph of a real person or place.

  1. Draw what is there

    Look at the object more than the page. Draw the shapes and shadows you actually see, not the outline you expect.

  2. Come back to the same subject

    Galileo drew the Moon over many nights as the light changed. Sketch one tree, window or plant across several days.

  3. Get closer

    A hand lens turns a leaf, feather or slice of cork into a new landscape, much as Hooke found. Draw the detail large.

  4. Date every page

    Note the date, place and light beside each sketch. A notebook becomes far more useful when you can see what changed.

THE FACTS

Five sketches,
five stories.

A brass microscope on a wooden desk beside an ink pot, with a hand drawing branching cell-like shapes in pen on cream paper
AI-generated image, not a photograph of a real person or place.

  1. A crescent in Padua

    Galileo first turned his telescope to the Moon on the early evening of 30 November 1609, and recorded its uneven edge in a drawing.

  2. A word borrowed from honeycomb

    Hooke saw cork as “all perforated and porous, much like a Honey-comb”, and in 1665 first used “cell” as a biological term.

  3. The notebook that came back

    Darwin’s 1837 notebooks are about the size of postcards. Missing from Cambridge University Library since 2001, they were returned anonymously on 9 March 2022.

  4. A Nobel Prize for drawing what he saw

    Cajal drew nerve cells as they appeared under the microscope, and shared the 1906 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Camillo Golgi.

  5. Hundreds of Leonardos

    The Royal Collection holds around 550 of Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings, from an album first recorded there in 1680.

QUICK QUESTIONS

Famous sketches, answered.

Short answers to the questions people ask most.

When did Galileo first draw the Moon?

On the early evening of 30 November 1609, in Padua. He made at least five more drawings over the next eighteen days, and four of his sketches were engraved for Sidereus nuncius, published the following March.

Where did the biological word “cell” come from?

From Robert Hooke. Looking at cork under a microscope, he saw a structure “much like a Honey-comb” and first used “cell” as a biological term in Micrographia, published in 1665.

What is Darwin’s “tree of life” sketch?

A small branching diagram in Darwin’s B notebook of 1837, showing species splitting from common lines. The postcard-sized notebook went missing from Cambridge University Library in 2001 and was returned on 9 March 2022.

Why are Cajal’s drawings so famous?

Santiago Ramón y Cajal drew the nervous system as he saw it under the microscope, with remarkable clarity. He shared the 1906 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Camillo Golgi for their work on its structure.

Where can I see Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings?

The Royal Collection holds around 550 of them, from an album first recorded in the collection in 1680. They are regularly shown at The King’s Galleries and lent to exhibitions around the world.

Sources

Where the facts come from

  1. The Face of the Moon: Galileo and Sidereus nunciusLinda Hall Library
  2. “Much like a Honey-comb”: discovering the cellBritish Society for Haematology
  3. Robert Hooke, Micrographia (1665)Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford
  4. Darwin’s Tree of Life notebooks returnedUniversity of Cambridge
  5. Art and science meet in Cajal’s nerve cell drawingsNobel Prize Museum
  6. Leonardo da Vinci: A Life in DrawingRoyal Collection Trust

A NAME WORTH DRAWING ON

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