Looks cool! I remember being excited about these when I was a kid.
Could you share some details on how you make those drawings which aren’t just cross-sections? I do some basic construction but I don’t have any training in it and my drawing skills suck but I’m not sure where to start.
Thanks! I have used SketchUp for a few larger projects, but sometimes I’m outside with the circular saw ready and realise I need to make a change, and it would be useful to be able to make reasonable sketches just with pen(cil) and paper.
Rough sketch freehand with a pencil to get a sense of how the things fit together.
With that as a reference I make something with a pencil and a ruler. In this step I draw every line, even for ones that should be included, and I’m careful not to press too hard.
Pen and ruler, inking the lines that should be on top.
After the ink has dried, I lightly go over it with an eraser to remove any stray pencil lines.
Thanks! That’s useful to know, but I was asking more about the ability to draw a ‘3d’ perspective sketch. Whenever I try to do this it just ends up looking a mess and things aren’t the right relative size.
Did you ever take a technical drawing class or anything? Or is this a thing some people can just do?
It’s probably not very sensitive to getting the angles exact, if you don’t need exact lengths either. But when I was taught to draw like that in school (some time between ages 11 and 14) we used paper with a dotted triangular grid, I think something like this, to get them without measuring.
One way what I’m doing here is a bit easier is that I’m not actually doing a perspective sketch. This is a parallel projection, where parallel lines in reality remain parallel in the drawing. That means it doesn’t look exactly like anything you might actually see, but it’s close and much easier to draw.
The style of the second drawing is a bit easier than the first. You start by sketching everything that’s in one plane, with vertical lines vertical and horizontal lines that are perpendicular to you horizontal. To make things the right size you can use a ruler and pick some a scale: 1 inch to the foot or something. Then when you need to draw a horizontal lines that are “coming out of the page” instead make them at an angle. Exactly which angle you choose doesn’t matter that much, but once you’ve picked that angle you should make sure anything else parallel uses exactly the same angle.
I haven’t taken a class, but this also isn’t something I was born able to do. Just lots of doing it until I have results I like.
Looks cool! I remember being excited about these when I was a kid.
Could you share some details on how you make those drawings which aren’t just cross-sections? I do some basic construction but I don’t have any training in it and my drawing skills suck but I’m not sure where to start.
SketchUp makes it where creating these sort of drawings is pretty easy! It’s a great tool for ideation.
Thanks! I have used SketchUp for a few larger projects, but sometimes I’m outside with the circular saw ready and realise I need to make a change, and it would be useful to be able to make reasonable sketches just with pen(cil) and paper.
Rough sketch freehand with a pencil to get a sense of how the things fit together.
With that as a reference I make something with a pencil and a ruler. In this step I draw every line, even for ones that should be included, and I’m careful not to press too hard.
Pen and ruler, inking the lines that should be on top.
After the ink has dried, I lightly go over it with an eraser to remove any stray pencil lines.
Thanks! That’s useful to know, but I was asking more about the ability to draw a ‘3d’ perspective sketch. Whenever I try to do this it just ends up looking a mess and things aren’t the right relative size.
Did you ever take a technical drawing class or anything? Or is this a thing some people can just do?
If having a name helps: the first one looks like isometric projection.
It’s probably not very sensitive to getting the angles exact, if you don’t need exact lengths either. But when I was taught to draw like that in school (some time between ages 11 and 14) we used paper with a dotted triangular grid, I think something like this, to get them without measuring.
One way what I’m doing here is a bit easier is that I’m not actually doing a perspective sketch. This is a parallel projection, where parallel lines in reality remain parallel in the drawing. That means it doesn’t look exactly like anything you might actually see, but it’s close and much easier to draw.
The style of the second drawing is a bit easier than the first. You start by sketching everything that’s in one plane, with vertical lines vertical and horizontal lines that are perpendicular to you horizontal. To make things the right size you can use a ruler and pick some a scale: 1 inch to the foot or something. Then when you need to draw a horizontal lines that are “coming out of the page” instead make them at an angle. Exactly which angle you choose doesn’t matter that much, but once you’ve picked that angle you should make sure anything else parallel uses exactly the same angle.
I haven’t taken a class, but this also isn’t something I was born able to do. Just lots of doing it until I have results I like.
Follow up: https://www.jefftk.com/p/how-i-make-diagrams