Director Peter Greenaway, a former art student, created the sketches that feature in the film. In fact the close-up shots of the draughtsman drawing are of his hands.
The movie was originally inspired by Peter Greenaway's attempts to draw a house he'd rented for a vacation and finding that the sun rising/falling changed the shadows and appearance too rapidly for a drawing to be completed in one sitting. He thus spent a specific period each day drawing the house from a specific angle (like the draughtsman in the movie).
The camera moves only a few times during tracking shots; otherwise, every shot is still.
Director Peter Greenaway has said: "I consider that 90% of my films one way or another refers to paintings. "Contract" [The Draughtsman's Contract (1982)] quite openly refers to Caravaggio, Georges de La Tour and other French and Italian artists" as well as Vermeer, Rembrandt, and other Baroque artists.