Young, linguistically diverse learners often leverage multimodality to more fully express their ideas in writing. To better support and assess English writing development, it is vital to understand multimodality as part of their emerging writing skills. In this study, we examine how drawings and written language are used jointly in multimodal ensembles by emerging multilingual writers to convey meaning. Specifically, we look at English language writing produced on a screener administered to assess the language proficiency of multilingual learners when they enter school. Students (n = 1,597, aged 5-6) across 25 U.S. states were administered the writing assessment. Our exploratory study examines student responses to a narrative writing task from a subset of 300 students, with 100 students each from high, mid, and low English language proficiency levels, as indicated by their performance on the writing task. Drawing from a social semiotic understanding of multimodality, we developed a coding scheme and used it to code each writing sample for multimodal features. Although students were not asked to draw in addition to writing, emerging writers often used drawings and layout features to convey meaning. Lower proficiency writers were more likely to use drawings, and their drawings were often the most salient mode used to convey meaning in their responses. Higher proficiency writers were more likely to use more complex layout features like text wrapping. Results further show that drawings and layout features functioned to increase the complexity and cohesion in all samples.