“You just do the pretty drawings, right?”

If one more person says this to me, I’m going to quit my job as a drafting teacher at this community college and start making meth out of my garage.

Where did this idea come from? I swear I’ve heard this dozens of times from clients and prospective clients. Do they advertise this in the back of home and garden magazines?

“Don’t slave over those drawings for hours and hours to make them shine. Hire an architect.”

I must have missed that issue.

It isn’t the idea that “I’m the one who draws” that bothers me. It’s the implication that this is something less than “real” that I’m hearing in the tone of the phrase. “I just draw it?”. Like, it’s not the real thing, It’s not the “important” thing. It’s just an image. The real thing is much more involved, and clearly I don’t understand that because I’m wasting my time with those silly “pretty” drawings. Besides, we just need those drawings to get past the building department, or maybe we’ll show them to the bank. Or, we can put one of those really pretty drawings on the cover of our marketing brochure so we can raise so money to fund the “real” thing.

When did the process of visualizing something that never existed before the pencil scratched across a piece of paper become a trivial thing? When did that happen? Because I don’t think I’ve ever “just” done a “pretty drawing”. I draw as a way to figure this thing out. Because it has more moving parts than I can see at once, and it has move inter-relationships and intricate inter-dependencies than I can keep track off. And if I don’t draw it? If I don’t study it from every angle? I’m never going to understand it. And, if I don’t understand it to the point where I can see it in my sleep, then I’m not going to be able to show it to you. I’m not going to be able to illustrate it in a way that you can imagine as a possible reality. So yeah,

“I’m the one who draws.”