Technical Sketching

  This page documents my work through a series of tutorials on technical sketching.  This individual project was intended to give us the tools we'll need to effectively design our Capstone project.  The tutorials started from the basic concepts like lines and planes and moved through a variety of more difficult topics, teaching the proper use of perspective and orthographic sketching as a medium of design — showing that while you put ideas into sketches, they can also help you generate ideas as well.

Attached below are all of my notes and sketches from the tutorials.

Core Concepts

Concepts for sketching are contained in the above notes.

Reflection

While not necessarily a project per-se, the technical sketching process was certainly a useful experience.  I learned a variety of techniques I hadn't encountered before, like hatching and rotated-view projection.  Though I haven't yet had much time to apply these techniques, I have used some of them already, so it's great to see the knowledge being practical.

One thing that I believe I improved greatly with throughout the course of the project was my ability to sketch without the aid of rulers or other draughting tools.  Effectively all of the tutorials were completed specifically without the aid of any external tools, instead focusing on being able to freehand efficiently.  While initially this seemed strange, I understand now that being able to sketch without tools is critical because tools are a barrier which slow down the thought-to-sketch process, hindering the "communication" between you and the sketch.  Now, I feel much more confident sketching freehand, and because of that I believe that I am able to more seamlessly manifest my ideas on paper.

There was one area where I believe I can still improve: darkness of marking.  I seemed to always struggle with making things light enough (for guidelines) or dark enough (for actual sketch lines) without compromising quality.  This is probably something which comes with further practice.

These sketching tutorials were a great introduction to the skill of technical sketching.  I am excited to continue applying the skills I've learned here throughout my engineering work.