Each drawing is a story. The mediums and tools we use to design each tell a different story, and in turn, shape our work. Whether you’re practicing sketching, realistic renders, or technical drawings, each style creates its own narrative. In architecture and design, it’s important to realize the potential of each style and its use in communicating your concepts or a project’s parti. Featuring 10 examples, the following drawing styles showcase how to illustrate new ideas and bring buildings and cities to life.


A sketch is a quick freehand drawing that is not usually intended as a finished work. A sketch may serve a number of purposes: it might record something that you see, be used to develop an idea, or it might be used as a quick way of graphically demonstrating an image, idea or principle. Sketches can be made in any drawing medium. The term is most often applied to graphic work executed in a dry medium such as silverpoint, graphite, pencil, charcoal or pastel.




Instead of striving for photo-realism, post-digital drawings explore and exploit artificiality, and in turn, create a fictional form of representation with its own unique merits. This is in strict opposition to the digital rendering’s desire to make the fiction seem “real.” It incorporates narrative cues, art historical allusions, and software-enabled collage techniques.




Unlike sketching, doodling usually becomes a finished drawing. Doodles are simple drawings that can have concrete representational meaning or may just be composed of random and abstract lines, generally without ever lifting the drawing device from the paper, in which case it is usually called a “scribble”.




A good way to make doodles is by observing some object and drawing it, where you can learn line control, values, and texture. Popular kinds of doodles include made-up landscapes, geometric shapes, patterns, or buildings.

Originally writen by architizer and most pictures collected from pinterest