At the start of the 15th century, drawing techniques were emphasized in the early years of training during which the young apprentice might work in the rigorous form of silver-point on prepared coloured paper, or in the more fluid forms of lead-point, charcoal, or pen and ink on plain paper or parchment. Every written source from the period stresses the importance of such practice, which included both the careful observation of nature and the faithful reproduction of the works of recognized masters. During their training, apprentices usually incised their work on a wax tablet for paper, parchment, and even the silver stylus they used were very expensive.

Drawings had multiple uses. Presentation pieces, such as the design for the arch of Alfonso of Aragon, attributed to Pisanello, and the drawing for a fountain in Siena by della Quercia  were, as we have seen, meant to give the patron a good indication of a large-scale monumental project. Others, like the sketches by Leonardo da Vinci for the Sforza horse, were used by the artist himself to work through problems . We know that drawings were carefully listed in artists' inventories and were handed down from father to son, or passed from one shop to another. Nevertheless, despite such contemporary attention, only a tiny percentage of what must have been extensive numbers of drawings remain from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Of these rare survivors, some contain formulaic figures and compositions that the workshop would turn to. Others are more elaborate.

Two carefully prepared and bound books, one on paper, and one primarily on parchment, from the shop of the mid-fifteenth-century Venetian painter Jacopo Bellini (active 1424-d. 1470/1) are quite puzzling. Their survival is due to the fact that they were regarded as valued curiosities rather than as working drawings to be copied, pricked, or reused and redrawn. After Jacopo's death in about 1470, the parchment sketchbook was preserved by his widow who passed it to their son Gentile in 1471. He, in turn, took it to Constantinople in 1479 where it seems to have been acquired by Sultan Mehmed II. The book is now in Paris and scholars are able to say a great deal about how it was actually made. For example, Jacopo used whatever parchment was to hand, reusing sections from an earlier fourteenth- century pattern-book which had drawings for silk- weaving and embroidery. He covered over the support with a fresh ground and then used silver- and lead-point, strengthened with pen and ink, to create elaborate compositions such as the image of Christ Carrying the Cross shown in 31. Yet while scholars have investigated the book's construction in considerable detail there is still no agreement as to why it was created. It is possible that Jacopo Bellini was experimenting with the mathematics needed to create perspectival illusions, or that he was copying works and antiquities which he had seen.

Models and visual ideas such as those created by Bellini were easily transferred from artist to artist, sometimes without their permission. In 1425, for example, Lorenzo Ghiberti complained that he had lent a fellow goldsmith in Siena some drawings of birds which, much to his annoyance, had then been passed on to the specialist wood-sculptor Domenico di Niccolo dei Cori without his knowledge. A design by Antonio Pollaiuolo which had been used in a workshop in Padua was, according to the aggrieved master Francesco Squarcione (1397-1468), stolen by his apprentice Giorgio da Sebenico (d. 1475), who took it back with him to Dalmatia and only returned it, along with seventeen other purloined drawings, much later.