Next to the paintings and prints there exists a voluminous oeuvre of drawings, which is almost completely unknown to the public. It extends over a period almost forty years, begining in the thirties and running on into the seventies. Also here, the most characteristic works came about in the fifties.
A broad and soft graphite line is characteristic of Koernig´s works in the thirties, during which time he made wanderings in Dresden and its surrounding countryside. Village regions and the curiously cocky faces of farming children in Goppeln can be found in his sketch books as well as town landscapes from an as yet undestroyed Dresden, of its historic centre within the so-called 26 ring, but along the Elbe as well, ranging from the escarpments of Loschwitz, through the area of the forest palaces, up to the harbour complexes around the Pieschen river bend.

Koernig also extensively turned his attention to the details in the interiors of his patroness, the pianist Elise Schwabhaeuser, and to his own studio in Wallgaesschen alley. Countless portraits of this patroness and of Olga, his girlfriend of the time, in all possible emotional states, bear witness to his earlier fable for the human face as representative of individual sensibilities.
Following on from Matisse and Picasso a line drawn in ink came to dominate his drawing after the five year caesura of the second world war. In these simultaneously generous as well as precise works colours are sometimes rolled in using a small printers roller, which lend a spatial depth to the representations, painterly softness and supplementary rhythmification.

Most significantly in these years pen drawings on larger sized sheets came about, in which Koernig depicts the life of his family. Everyday, domestic scenes, but also journeys: during a Sunday outing to Moritzburg waiting and dreaming at the bus stop, jammed into a narrow train compartment on the way to the Baltic Sea and then finally relaxing on the beach at Usedom or Rue gen enjoying the holiday at last.

In the space of but a few years, Koernig dedicated more than one hundred images to the growth and development of his daughter Margarethe born in 1951. A small fraction of them first appeared in 1958 in a thin booklet, the ‚Chronicle of a Childhood', together with mit an empathetic introduction by the journalist Helmut Ullrich, who Koernig had previously portrayed in one of his best aquatints a few years earlier in 1955.

Following his unbroken interest for the portrait, next to his own family Koernig also drew many of his neighbours, chance acquaintances, the schoolfriends of his own daughter and befriended artists and intellectuals, who were connoisseuers of his own work and knew how to value it themselves. Uusally he invited those to be portrayed into his studio, placed them in a more or less comfortable armchair between the blue roof beams and the gold framed, life-sized mirror and so it began. Contrary to all habits he began with the feet and worked up towards the head. Sometimes the piece of paper was insufficient and something was "stuck on" at the top.

It is above all in the drawings of the fifties that we may find the key to understanding the printed and the painted works of Koernig . They are in their directness of the experience they bring to paper, most free and individualised works, which were not originally merely intended to serve as preparations for his paintings and prints. This we can gauge form the dating on these sheets. Between the drawing and its repetition as a painting or as an aquatint there often lie many years in between.

In the collection of the Galerie Albstadt, which has built up an extensive collection from Dresden artists exemplifying brilliant draftsmanship, incepted at its foundation in 1976, can be found the largest body of Hans Koernig 's drawings in a museum, numbering almost fifty.