Lots of scope here, from the keys in your pocket to one of the elaborate medieval keys that can be found in books or online. Or even earlier - this is a Roman key that, in absence of pockets, can be worn as a ring -
Most of our keys are for doors, whereas in earlier times they might well have been for chests and boxes. And the locks were items of engineering and wonder. This one is from the 17th century -
Ah for the days of being able to wander into the Ironwork gallery at the V&A and choose a key or two ....
But not all keys are to do with locks - consider typewriter keys! Our alphabet makes it easy, but Chinese and Japanese are a bit more difficult - have a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/
Maps and diagrams have keys ...
Music has keys ...
And a thing can be "key" to something else, a bigger concept or a scheme - ie, crucial.
There's a geographical use (island - Key West, Florida, for instance) and wharves (quays), and also a botanical use "a dry fruit with a thin membranous wing, usualy growing in bunches, as in the ash and sycamore 1523". And the way that plaster is caused to key to lath, and adhesion through the roughness of a surface.
From Sue S - Here’s my set of colourful ‘keys‘ - found on a Suffolk walk in August. I did sketch then & decided to add a silhouette version just to enjoy the whole shape. lt seems to hover?! Is it a plane, or a ghostly drone?
From Janet B - My car and house keys and a spare set on a Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery penguin key ring.
From Judith - Front door key knitted in silver coated copper wire.
From Gill - Used this opportunity to compare different metallic media for my bunch of house keys.
From Mags - I'm rather out of practice 'keying out' problematic plants when doing botanical surveys ( and 'Stace', the go -to essential guide has very few illustrations). So I was delighted to find amongst the volumes this Field Studies Council leaflet ' The Cloud Name Trail'. Trying to summarise it on a couple of pages was hard , should have stuck to drawing some ' proper' keys'
From Richard - Rather lazy pen sketch from me, but all good practice.
From Ann - large key on A3 paper. ..no idea which door it opens! One key and observed shadows around it.
From Joyce - our camper van keys, the blue and yellow (scooby doo?) was made by my daughter 35 years ago! And the small roundish thing is to attach them to my rucksack, oh happy days!
From Janet K - Our house keys.
From Jackie - Adding my attempt…
From Carol - my keys proved problem some to draw as kept getting interruptions and having to use them in-between drawing. Such small things but so important to us.
From Najlaa - My keys with lots of key rings and I chose two, one from the British Museum and other one from Barcelona.
From Jo - experimenting with my new bottle of Indian ink, using a pen and then a brush. It was meant to be a try-out for a proper drawing, but then I didn't do one!
From me - a deadline for a complex woodblock print stopped me drawing physical keys, but did provide a "key" to what's going on in the layers of the reduction print. The "xray" version is a juxtaposition of two prints of the same photo, manipulated to make one brighter than the other; one is inverted (yes it's complex...) -
And another angle - from Julia T, an archeology volunteer, a key drawn in a workshop about drawing archeological artefacts - to scale, and with stippling -
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