Drafting tips

If you have had a tough time making your drawings as neat as you would like, here are some excellent drafting tips a former student provided us. ("Drafting" is the general term for the precise drawing that uses rules and other drafting aids such as ellipses template. And yes, this class really is, partly, a drafting class.)

JH

Drafting Tips

Here are some tips to help you draw more accurately, and avoid frustration.  Most of them I gleaned from my architect-brother.

• Keep your drafting tools clean.  Graphite dust can be removed with soap and water from plastic tools.  While you can use a cloth to get the graphite dust off your newly-sharpened lead, if you poke the tip of the lead into a kneaded eraser it will keep everything cleaner.
• Use a hard lead (at least 4H) for drawing construction lines, perspective grids, etc.  It keeps a point longer and thus is more controllable.  Be sure to re-sharpen the lead often.
• Another tip for keeping a sharp point is to rotate the pencil or lead-holder when you draw to use a different side of the lead.  This will extend the sharpness of the point and keep the line width constant, but it takes some practice.
• When drawing a line, keep the angle of the pencil or lead-holder constant to ensure a straight line, Angle the pencil a bit in the direction of the stroke.
• Keep checking the alignment of the straightedge or triangle before you draw the line.  Put the pencil tip on the point you wish to start (or end) on and bring the straight edge up to it (you will notice it is a bit to the side of the point due to the taper of the lead).  Now put the point of the pencil on the other end of the line you wish to draw and carefully bring the straight edge to it.  Go back to the first point to ensure that the straight edge has not moved when you adjusted it for the second point. 
• One trick I found is to use the parallel rule (much better than a t-square!) to support a corner of the triangle (the corner which is not on the line) when you are lining it up to draw the line as discussed above.  It helps keep it in position so it won't move when you check the second point.
• Never, never, never brush eraser crumbs or graphite dust off your drawing with your hand!  It will leave oil which will make it difficult to draw a line.  Instead ALWAYS use a horse-hair drafting brush.  It will clean the surface better
• You can purchase a cleaner-bag which has some kind of granules in it to clean off graphite dust from your drawing (it might work on your tools also).  A good investment, and not expensive at all.
• While tool choice is personal, drafting lead holders ("clutch pencils") were developed, and are used, for a reason.  Their leads are thinner and so as they wear down they do not change the distance between the point and the edge of the straight edge as much.  If you haven't tried them I highly recommend you do.  They also are faster to sharpen.
• Some people prefer to use one of the micro-lead pencils instead of a lead holder.  (For example the 0.03" click-advance pencils every pencil manufacturer has.  They also come in a variety of lead diameters.) A big advantage they have is they do not need to be sharpened, and the super-thin leads have almost no offset to the straight edge when drawing lines.
• If you are inking your drawing, make sure your t-square or parallel rule and all straight edges and triangles or curves you use have an "inking edge" which is an edge which does not contact the paper and draw ink under the instrument by capillary action.  If you cannot get the instrument you want with an inking edge, you can tape  pennies or other thin coins along the edges, back a little bit from the edges to raise it up off the paper.  Be careful when drawing lines with these, they can be a bit more difficult to use.

I hope these tips help you make your drawing more precise and with greater speed.  Feel free to add your own ideas and share.

Local Light Plotting Exercise

Promised you guys I'd post these...

JH

The Basics of Local Light

And here are a couple I did up today. These again are all adapted from the book Creative Layout by Joko, Leandro Ng, Thomas Denmark, et al.

In this last example, you would need to use the left VP to make the left Elevation of Light, and the right VP to make the other. In other words, you'd be taking the height of the light source (the central vertical dotted line) and pushing it toward each respective VP. It would automatically shorten a bit by being moved farther away in both cases. (That is not the case in this drawing, because it is isometric, like our recent in-class shadow plotting exercise, and lives in a world without VPs.)

Note that the shadow of the leftmost red stick (or baton rouge in French) obeys the Law of Parallels when it falls on the floor.

JH

How to Do Assignment #4--and how not to.

Look what I found to help you guys! A step-by-step animated GIF to demo this assignment. I did it two years ago, and naturally forgot all about it, naturally. Check it out. The first move you'll see is with the sideways red line in the upper right: it's used to find the Elevation of Light. Which will drive the one edge of the shadow of the counter that falls onto the right wall. A more recent post above also shows how the Elevation of Light is found and how it's used.

Click on it to see it animate. I think if you watch this through a few times, you'll get the sense of it, without having to do a lot of reading or remembering terminology.

After you watch it a few times, take a look at the next his one and see if you can see what's wrong with it. Answers are below in small print. Come on, really do this! Please! Don't outsmart yourself. A little non-laziness right now can save a lot of struggling later.

JH

Errors: 
1) Shadow of table top is seen passing through air and never landing, because the student thought that a-lines could form the edges of shadows.  D-lines were not used.
2) Shadows of chair backs (on tabletop) are likewise delineated by a-lines. D-lines were again not used. 
3) Shadow of lower right corner of picture frame connects to the forward corner of the frame, rather than its contact point with the wall, creating yet another incidence of a shadow being at least partly outlined by a-lines.  
4) Comically, the lamp's shadow is based on the assumption --conscious or not-- that the lamp is a flat object. Here the Find-the-Plan Method could save the day: Using a slightly greater quantity of reference points around the top and bottom of the lamp shade, and finding their plans on the floor, would show how the shadow of the circular structure of the shade really behaves. 

5) Uprights in shelf unit don't cast their shadows to the right.  They should.

6) Shadow of top edge of shelf unit ignores the Law of Parallels and creates a fourth instance of an a-line being mistaken for the edge of the shadow.  
7) The flower pots at the lower right are casting shadows that not only have a-lines defining their top edges, but exhibit shapes totally unrelated to flower pots. It's like having a cinder block cast the shadow of a Irish Setter. To compound the idiocy, the left pot casts a shadow on the wall that we can somehow see through the right pot, as if the pot were either not there, or painted flat on wall and floor. Yet here the student's questing young mind, perhaps justifiably unsure whether his methodology had served him well to this point, introduces a startling innovation: d-lines. Yes, the very same lines his sage instructor had told him were always needed, now sheepishly make their tardy appearance, adding--if not correctness--variety.
8) No overlay.

Measuring Points

Here again is that step-by-step presentation of the trick I teach you guys in Week 3.
JH

More Help with Shadow Plotting

Here are some excepts from the book Creative Layout, by AAU's de-facto Dean of Perspective, Joko Budiono, et al. The black and white ones are from a book by Gwen White called Perspective: A Guide for Artists, Architects and Designers


JH

Special Note to my Friday Class

You guys,
I forgot to tell you why I gave you all an extra copy of that handout. PLEASE, PLEASE, ASAP, before you forget what we did in class today, plot the shadows on that last handout as it's set up: Sunlight from Behind. Use the SVP and STP that exist on that handout, over toward the right. Same set-up as the first one we did in class today.

Doing this pronto will make a huge difference in your ability to complete the homework. The older post below may help too.

JH