House drawings are a work of art. For Centuries artists and architects have done house drawings to show people what the home will look like when it is done.

People often confuse house drawings with architectural blue prints or working drawings. These are quite different things. Working drawings are on site construction prints that builders and construction workers use while on the job to build the house that they are working on. These working drawings are usually in the size of 2′ x 3′ in size, large enough so that the construction workers can read and see all the fine details and notes.

Many famous architects have used working drawings for displays at meetings and Appearance Review Commissions to get approval for their project. Usually these drawing are accompanied with Architectural Renderings to give the viewers a more “realistic” view of the proposed new construction. The difficulty with working drawings and blue prints is that they are flat and offer no perspective whereas Architectural Rendering make use of perspective vanishing points to place the image on an angle so the it has more of a “3D” look to it.

However, my focus here is on house drawings as a work of art. What make a house drawing a work of art rather than an architectural rendering is the concept of interpretation. When the artist does a house drawing he or she is looking at the house (or image of it) and doing an artist’s interpretation, thus creating a real work of art. Architectural Renderings on the other hand are more “mechanical” in approach. The committees and Appearance Review Commissions that request these drawing do not want an interpretation of the new house under construction, they want to know what it will “really” look like. The problem with this as you can imagine is that the artist that creates the rendering is restricted by views of the committees. The artist has to work with rulers, angles, T-Squares, and mechanical pencils to do the job. It is more like a doctor doing surgery than an artist creating a work of art.

Giving the artist freedom (“artistic license”) to make the drawing yields the most rewarding results. For when you look at a beautiful house drawing done with no restrictions you can see the flow of colors and the fresh free lines that are all over the background of the drawing. In fact the pencil drawing that is the beginning outline of the house drawing makes the drawing more valuable and ads an aesthetic touch to the drawing.

Stephen F. Condren – Artist