Hi there
Have you ever wondered why your elevations feel flat or a little stiff? Sometimes it feels almost impossible to make technical drawings feel alive. And honestly, it’s not very intuitive, especially when you approach them only as technical documents. But if instead of treating them like a drafting exercise (which, hey, there’s nothing wrong with that! but we’re here to talk about drawing!) you start seeing them more like a painting, creativity flows much more naturally.
One of the things that has the biggest impact on the richness of an elevation is depth. A good sense of depth helps us immediately understand what feels close and what feels further away, something that is often difficult to achieve in purely line-based drawings. And this is not only about aesthetics, it also makes the drawing much easier to read and understand.
Sometimes the difference between a flat elevation and a rich one is surprisingly small: a shadow slightly darkened, a texture simplified, or a foreground element pushed just a little more.
For this post, we created 8 explanatory images showing how we approach this at Himera, step by step, to make our elevations feel deeper and more alive. If this sounds interesting to you, keep reading. We hope it helps you in your next projects!
Because technical drawings do not have to feel cold. They can communicate atmosphere, materiality, and even emotion long before a space is built:
