In order to give one of the design review committees a better sense of what the house would look like on the site, I made a quick sketch in Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator.

Here it is. (As with most photos on Baubilt, click to see a larger version.)

To do this, you need some facility in a photo editing tool and an illustration tool. Here’s what I did. First, I found a photo of the site that was oriented such that the front elevation of the house would be in the plane of the image. I then pasted the photo into Illustrator. As a separate layer, I pasted into Illustrator a line drawing of the front elevation from the architects. I then drew rectangles for the windows and filled them in with a color picked from windows in a photo of a neighboring house. I inserted boards for siding (rectangles filled with colors picked from siding photos). I drew the roof in and filled it with colors picked from neighboring rusted metal roofs. Then, I copied the trees and car from the photo in Photoshop and pasted them in front of the house. Finally, I drew in a driveway freehand in Illustrator. I pasted some rocks and trees in for landscaping. All of this took about 2-3 hours. I’m fairly good with these tools, but I was not fussy about the sketch. I’m pretty happy with the resulting image, which has been useful in communicating how the house is likely to look on the site.