TDJ2O

Drawing and Sketching

Fawlty Towers

Spaghetti Challenge #1

The importance of sketching can be illustrated in our first challenge.

You are to building a skyscraper out of 25 sticks of dry spaghetti.

Situation: You are to build a structure that reaches as high as possible without collapsing. You are to use only the dry spaghetti given, and a 2"x2" cube of plasticine.

Research: All truss-style structures would be worth of research

Materials:

25 sticks of dry spaghetti,
a 1"x1" cube of plasticine.
2 human brains

Evaluation: Simple, the highest one wins. 40cm+ gets you a level 3

A) Sketching

We sketch to convey ideas quickly. Sketches can be quick and lack detail, or be elaborate and show a lot of detail - often in what are called 'callouts' - or annotations designed to bring attention to an area of your sketch and explain/show it in more detail. Some sketches are quick, others require rulers and are more technical (if you're using strict terminology, even "regular drawings" are quite neat, drafted ones are done with specialty equipment and are immaculate). Often sketches involve perspective and shading to imply such.

What Makes a Sketch, a Sketch?

Eleven attributes that make sketching valuable and important. Sketches are:

Quick - We don't need to spend a lot of time mulling over our ideas.

Timely - Its super easy to whip up a sketch in the middle of a meeting to help describe an idea.

Inexpensive - All you need is something to write on and a pen.

Disposable - If the idea doesn't last, it doesn't hurt to recycle some paper.

Plentiful - It only takes a couple hours to jam through 40 or more sketches.

Have a clear vocabulary - When someone sees a sketch, they intuitively know its just an idea or a "what if'."

A distinct gesture - Sketches are loose and invite conversation and collaboration.

Have minimal detail - Don't sweat the details, just get your idea on paper to spark something with your team.

Have the appropriate level of refinement - The rough feeling of a sketch helps keep the conversations broad.

They suggest and explore rather than confirm - We can ask questions and start a conversation about the problems at hand. We decide on details later.

They are ambiguous - Sketches leave ideas open for misinterpretation and give people the chance to read into them further. This often leads to even better ideas and make people feel invested.

Even if you aren't good at art, there are tricks to sketching:

sketch from the elbow
strike light, adding emphasis afterwards.
move your paper

techniques:

squares
circles
arcs
tricks to lettering

Exercise:

grab paper, try 5 squares, circles, ellipses, stars DON'T USE A RULER
Use bounding boxes that are all the same size. Come up with your own font by making the rectangles different sizes and fit the letters of your first name in each box. Determine if you want to have solid or empty letters.

Tips to Sketching

from: DesignSojourn.com

One of the greatly misunderstood concepts of design is that a good designer must be a good sketcher. Sketching can be self-taught and doesn't need to be perfected in order to succeed. There have been famous designers who have created terrible sketches but end up with great designs, and great sketchers that are hopeless designers.

Essentially you would only need to draw or sketch well enough to communicate your concept on paper without you having to explain what it is. You don’t have to win the beauty contest, but you WILL have to do well enough so that a fellow designer (or if you want it to be tougher on yourself, a non-designer) can understand what you are attempting to communicate. Notice the key word here? It’s not drawing, draw, design, or sketch, it’s communicate. A good sketch communicates an idea clearly and succinctly.

Sketching is also one part of the design process that makes up a successful design. Strong understanding in proportions, colors, and manufacturing processes are other important elements that can make or break a design. So don’t despair if your sketching ability, at this time, is not up to par, as you will have a chance to refine it in the downstream design process.

Before we go on lets take a look at the different kinds of sketches so as to not confuse yourself when you go crazy over somebody’s apparently great work.

Thumbnail or Napkin sketch

Source: Core77

A thumbnail sketch

is a very basic sketch that has an almost child like quality to it. This type of sketch is mainly about getting your ideas down on paper as quickly as possible without too much care about proportions and beauty. Its often pretty rough focusing only on the key“big” idea. Thumbnails sketches are often the most frequently used sketch technique used to communicate ideas.

Emotion Sketch

Source: Mikedesign

These are the sketches people go ga-ga over and a main source of a designer’s spine tingling sensation as well as frustration. Also called Inspirational sketches, such sketches are often use to set the tone of a design, brand language or product range.

Source:Toyfon

Emotional sketches are also very difficult to do. Simply because an emotional sketch is extremely form orientated, and used as a means to communicate emotion. Hence the designers who create emotional or inspirational sketches are often called “form monsters” and have the uncanny ability to turn an emotion or expression keyword into a line, form or silhouette.

However one if you look closely into such sketching style you would realize such sketches don’t actually communicate a lot of information. If you look at the example above, can you ask yourself how does the door open? Where is the door handle? The side mirrors?

Its because such sketches are meant to convey just the look or feel of a product and nothing more. It intentionally or unintentionally leaves out things like mechanical fixtures, part lines, or assembly information etc. The best emotional sketch designers are actually able to convert their sketches into great products, but unfortunately you be also surprised to know most cannot and remain in just form or concept development.

Information Sketch

The information sketch is perhaps the level at which what most designers, whom are worried about their sketching ability, should aspire to. It’s the minimum type of sketch level that would allow other designers to understand what you are trying to draw.

There are a lot of tangent lines, exploded views, transparent layering, a little color here and there, but all in all you can easily tell almost right away what is going on. Right now so how do we do it? How to we get to the level we are satisfied with? Or how do we just improve our sketching ability?

Practical Exercise:

Sketch your house from memory - have it assessed for technique once done

Fawlty Brydges

Spaghetti Challenge #2

You are to building a bridge out of 25 sticks of dry spaghetti.

Situation: You are to build a structure that reaches across a gap without collapsing. You are to use only the dry spaghetti given, and a 2"x2" cube of plasticine.

Research: All truss-style structures would be worth of research

Materials:

25 sticks of dry spaghetti,
a 2"x2" cube of plasticine.
2 human brains

Evaluation: Simple, the team that gets the longest span (increased in 10cm increments) wins.

B) Perspective

When considering perspective we consider 2 possible vanishing points in this course. A vanishing point is one of possibly several points in a 2D image where lines that are parallel in the 3D source converge. We typically only examine 1 and 2 point perspective in high school (1 vanishing point or 2).

1-Point Perspective

One point perspective drawing is used to showcase a feature. Architecturally this is often a room in a house, or an outdoor feature. While its easiest to make the single vanishing point at the center of the page (see the grid below left), it doesn't necessarily have to be at center.

Steps to draw 1-point perspective are:

a) draw your horizon (red line in image below)

b) make a vanishing point (often achieved by making an X on the page and where the lines intersect is the vanishing point - alternatively, the VP can be anywhere on the horizon line)

c) find the "edges" of your view and draw all of your Z axis lines going back to that single point

d) all vertical lines and horizontal lines (X/Y) remain vertical and horizontal

Try this!

Step 1:

Set up your canvass. Make sure you know the MAXIMUM EXTENT that your drawings will occupy (e.g. make sure your objects fit in the overall box). After this make sure that you draw your vanishing point lines. Not all 1-point perspective drawings have vanishing points in the dead center of the drawing, but if they do, you can simply make a large 'X' and the crossing point is the vanishing point.

Setting up your canvass by determining scale, and overall dimensions

Step 2:

Place your faced objects at the appropriate coordinates (sometimes it helps to further subdivide your page into halves or even quarters to ensure placement of the objects is correct. All X and Y coordinates are face-on to the viewer with NO perspective. All Z axis (i.e. going into the distance) lines disappear towards the vanishing point. Ensure all lines are light so that when you erase eclipsing lines you don't have heavy traces over your page.

Setting up your objects of interest

Step 3: Carefully erase all lines that are eclipsed.

2-Point Perspective

Two point perspective is used quite often in drawings since it is the method by which most people can easily identify the object being drawn (often architectural in design). To make a 2 point perspective drawing you follow a couple quick steps.

1) draw a horizon (the horizontal red line in the image below left)

2) create the two vanishing points (usually on the paper, but sometimes off the paper)

All horizontal lines will either disappear to the left VP or the right VP. All vertical lines remain vertical.

For more information check this out.

2-Point Perspective Setup

Assignment #1 - Draw the following pictures

Choose either the 1 point or 2 point drawing and do a good sketch

A) 1-Point Drawing

While this isn't to be drafted it should be a good drawing so use light lines until you're confident of your drawing

B) 2-point drawing

TAKE A PICTURE OF YOUR OWN HOUSE FROM THE CORNER. TRY TO GET THE WHOLE HOUSE IN THE PICTURE.

If you don't have a house picture you'll have to use the building below (click picture for bigger version):

C) Non-Perspective

The other view that we examine in this course is that of NO perspective which can be useful in attending to either measurements or detail. Non-perspective drawings we will consider are **orthographic drawings** (simple 2D of the face of an object with absolutely no perspective) and **isometric drawings** (which show 3 dimensions, but with no perspective and thus no changes in scale).

Orthographic projections from isometric source

As we said earlier, one of the benefits of working on an orthographic drawing is that there is an unchanging scale as long as you continue to work in the same units. To that end, you need to understand measurements and scale.

Rulers and SCALE

Imperial system vs. Metric system

The metric system is a very straightforward system where units of measurement for length/distance simply operate on factors of 10. E.g. 1000 m = 1 km and 1000 mm = 1m. Your whole life you've been taught metric - however, there are industries around the world which use the IMPERIAL system of measurement.

For example:

the LUMBER industry uses FEET and INCHES instead of cm and m!
the AVIATION industry uses miles instead of km!
many people know their WEIGHT in POUNDS, not their MASS in kg!

Here is a look at the IMPERIAL SYSTEM, as it is used to measure LENGTH (or distance):

1 MILE = 1760 YARDS (= 5280 feet = 63360 inches)
1 YARD = 3 FEET (=36 inches)
1 FOOT = 12 INCHES
1 INCH can be broken into 1/2ths, 1/4ths, 1/8ths, 16ths, 32nds etc...

Some common examples of these units include…

1 YARD: slightly shorter than 1m: the width of your classroom door or the height of your kitchen counters off of the ground

1 FOOT: about 30cm: the size of a (size 12) shoe or roughly the height of a piece of paper

1 INCH: about 2.5cm: the length of a small paper-clip or the diameter (width) of a quarter

The division of ONE inch (and thus any inch) is broken down into whatever divisions you want. Mostly commonly we break down into halves, quarters, eights and sometimes in this course sixteenths.

Scale

Sometimes when we draw, if we were to draw everything in the real world on paper we'd have to use a GIANT sheet of paper (for example, a FRONT ELEVATION - see below). Because the scale of such drawings are often smaller than life-size, an architect's scale features multiple units of length and proportional length increments.

Common scales in architecture are (note: the two columns do NOT show equivalence in measure):

This house is probably drawn at 1:50 or 1:100 (SI) or 1:48 (Imperial)

Orthographic projections and Elevations

An orthographic drawing is one where there is no perspective and you are only showing the face of an object. Often labeled as the elevation (e.g. front/top/side/back) orthographic drawings usually come in a 3-pack Front/Top/Side which together form what is called the orthographic projection. These are used quite frequently in manufacturing of objects since each face can be shown in some detail without the distraction of perspective.

An elevation simply looks like this:

The Front/Top/Side of an object together form the orthographic projection

We often make these orthographic projections from either the oblique or the isometric view

Oblique view

One face is flat, the angle of the Z axis is then 45 degrees off of this. We won't be completing these drawings in this course.

Isometric View

The front and Z axis are both 30 degrees to the horizon

EXERCISE

The scale is 1:1 and is in centimetres
Convert the following orthographic projection to an isometric and drawing it on a standard 8.5"x11" paper. The units are in cm. The gap between blocks is 3 cm. Pick the front right corner, make 30-degree guidelines and count off on your scale the appropriate distance.

what it looks like in the end

Assignment #2:

Complete Isometric to orthographic sheet - excersises 2->7 Draw this on standard 8.5"x11" paper. The units are in cm.

You will be evaluated as follows:

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