Technique for executing a design with a pointed instrument by tracing a light groove on a hard surface and, for synecdoche, the design itself. The pictorial technique of incision drawing, practiced with special tools (see stylus, burin, style), finds use not only for delineating fundamental lines of the composition on the preparation, which act as guidelines for the application of the paint (direct incision), but also to identify areas to gild and those to leave clear, and as a decorative technique to create richer cloaks, halos, etc. (see gilding). Incision Drawing also appears among the traditional techniques for the transfer of the drawing onto a pre-chosen support (see indirect incision), and more rarely, to determine, through the roughness of the grooves, a series of points of reference in the application of the various layers of the preparation.