Using the canvas, you can painstakingly recreate any drawing you want, from a bunch of lines and triangles to a carefully shaded portrait. But as the complexity of your drawing increases, so does the code. It’s extremely unlikely that you’d write by hand all the code you need to create a finely detailed picture.

Fortunately, you have other options. The drawing context isn’t limited to lines and curves—it also has methods that let you slap down pre-existing images, text, patterns, and even video frames. In the following sections, you’ll learn how to use these methods to get more content on your canvas.