Student Tips - Architectural Drawing

Most schools, if not all, will start their students with manual architectural drawings before moving on to computer based applications.

According to many experienced architects, free hand sketching is vital at any stage of an architects career. Since I have been drawing since I was in my teens, I found it quite enjoyable to start sketching again and I know most students in my classes carry multiple sketchbooks with them and sketch whenever they can. This is a good habit to get into early on....

Another thing that our professors have us practice is to make various drawings of constructs (Models) we make and make analytical drawings. These exercises were not quite enjoyable in the beginning but I have come to appreciate the analytical drawings a lot.

There are various types of architectural drawings. I found this article in Wikipedia that describe each type in detail. The main type of drawings one will do at the very beginning stage of their architectural career as a student are these:

Image from Wikipedia Gallery

One of the other most important type of drawing a student must try to understand and excel at are perspective drawings. Perspective drawings interpret apparent dimensions into a flat surface using a mathematical system.

There are a few types of perspective drawings:

• Single-Point Perspective - Lines extending from all objects in the drawing converge back to one single vanishing point in the horizon.

Single point Perspective drawing - (c) utdallas.edu gallery

• Two-Point Perspective - There are 2 vanishing points at the horizon. Lines originating at these 2 points define the depth and spaces in the drawing.

Two-point Perspective drawing - from utdallas.edu gallery

• There are also multipoint perspectives such as 3 point perspectives. I have not done any drawings with 3 point perspectives yet.

There are a bunch of videos in YouTube on how to draw perspectives. I like this one a lot...