# Teach hand drafting ?



## SteveB (May 29, 2019)

Inspired by the Teach All LED thread,

Who still teaches drafting by hand ?, talking scenic and lighting.

My premise is don’t. Spend the time instead teaching whichever CAD program you think is appropriate, but spend the time better by letting the students refine their knowledge of CAD.

Is ANY professional theater or facility, or shop doing anything by hand ?. I’d seriously doubt it.


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## Colin (May 29, 2019)

For lighting it's a no-brainer to go right to Vectorworks. For scenery, if the student wants to draft and build things for their career then get them to CAD right away too, but for anyone who fancies design that's not so simple.

My colleague still teaches hand drafting in his intro and intermediate scene design courses, and I teach them CAD in my stagecraft and lighting design courses. Before I start that, I show samples of my colleague's beautiful hand drafting and talk about handcraft as a practical and conceptual foundation to design. There's developmental value in learning hand drafting in concert with drawing (i.e. drafting as the confluence of technical and artistic creativity) and that's what we like to do before moving on to the no-brainer advantages of CAD. A really robust drawing practice is still (and dare I say "will always be!") foundational to design thinking, process, success. This way of thinking is probably rooted in my training as a painter, and there are a lot of really interesting stage designers out there who came to their medium through visual art training. There's perhaps a rift between that camp and those who have followed a more tech heavy track leading into design.

I'm concerned with building relevant industry skills, but let's be real about managing expectations in this area. The level of CAD chops (or _anything_ chops) a student builds is basic to intermediate until they're exposed to a professional pace post-grad, at which point it should be a pretty straightforward experiential and case-specific process to learn to use the software more efficiently and according to whatever graphic standards their employer imposes. Students who make it through my courses successfully are ready for that next step, and they'll struggle and stress through it, and those growing pains are a normal part of being a pro at anything. I don't believe it's realistic to expect to graduate a fully formed CAD user. Work experience is required, and work experience is _efficient_ at building this competency.

What the professional pace is not conducive to is developing the broad visual vocabulary, ease of expression, and rigorous processing of ideas which a strong, sustained engagement with hand drawing produces. We can make space for that work in an academic program. CAD skills without hand skills makes for boring design. Keep hand skills in the mix as a foundational and sustained practice that parallels and intersects with CAD and then students are better equipped to take advantage of the tremendous creative potential of the software.

So to answer the question about whether any pros are doing things by hand, the followup question is, which things? Of course drafting is done in CAD overwhelmingly, but lots of really good preliminary ideas are still hand made, and that background whether used daily or not is relevant always.


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## Colin (May 29, 2019)

Another critical issue here, which I wasn't explicit about before, is that the technology presents a huge roadblock to creativity at first. It takes a whole semester, sometimes two, for my students to be comfortable enough in Vectorworks that they can get back to being creative, and then a little longer still before they realize how the software can actually enhance their creativity. So, a question for educators to answer is, what's your goal? Teach how to think about design, or teach how to execute the paperwork? I'd like both at the same time, please. But that's really hard, and not very approachable for a lot of the students I see. One thing at a time.


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## MNicolai (May 30, 2019)

Hand drafting for my BFA program was a semester in and of itself anyway outside of the other units of design classes. Came after Intro to Design (here's a light, that's a light board, these are period costumes, you owe us 40 hours practicum in the scene shop) but before Adv. Design (here's 3 shows you have to design, 1 of them is real, one of them is a 5 min dance piece, and the last one is dealer's choice). Waste of a semester that should've been spent on Sketchup and VW. Designers need to learn how to draw by hand, but they should learn that from an art class, not from a technical never-draw-against-your-scale-thats-what-a-straight-edge-is-for class.

IMO, a designer is of questionable value if they can't think in 3D. Whether that's AutoCAD, VW, Sketchup, or something else, 3D design is a critical skill. Now if you want to go simple, something like Drafty or 2D AutoCAD blocks are a really easy way to bypass a lot of the learning curve for drafting until students have a better comprehension of design but if you want to speed up the learning process make a catalog of screen recordings of different VW tasks and your students can learn comfortably through imitation.

My biggest beef with hand drafting is that it's something you need to go somewhere and do. You need a big table in a decently lit room and have to carry around a bunch of supplies. There's no CTRL-Z so you have to be methodical and if you don't like the corner you've designed yourself into you need to futz with eraser bits. Want to work on your design or make tweaks while you're in a production meeting? Can't do it -- no table space. Want to work from your dorm room? No table space and I don't have my stencils because I left them over in the design lab. If you're a scenic designer and the director asks what something would look like moved over on stage or a little shorter, you can show the director immediately. Sketchup's probably faster conceptually than CAD or VW, but whatever skins the cat.

I think the hardest thing for beginners is that they're introduced to these complex drafting programs and nobody stops to tell them "No, don't start experimenting with the Pre-Viz" and "We're at a conceptual design level here -- whatever you do don't start extruding the geometry for all of your 1x framing and how you're going to build your platforms because it's all going to change in the first production meeting." Over-drafting is a real problem that causes projects to take 500% longer or don't get completed on time because someone doesn't understand certain levels of detail come later and even higher levels of detail often _never_ come.


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## RonHebbard (May 30, 2019)

MNicolai said:


> Hand drafting for my BFA program was a semester in and of itself anyway outside of the other units of design classes. Came after Intro to Design (here's a light, that's a light board, these are period costumes, you owe us 40 hours practicum in the scene shop) but before Adv. Design (here's 3 shows you have to design, 1 of them is real, one of them is a 5 min dance piece, and the last one is dealer's choice). Waste of a semester that should've been spent on Sketchup and VW. Designers need to learn how to draw by hand, but they should learn that from an art class, not from a technical never-draw-against-your-scale-thats-what-a-straight-edge-is-for class.
> 
> IMO, a designer is of questionable value if they can't think in 3D. Whether that's AutoCAD, VW, Sketchup, or something else, 3D design is a critical skill. Now if you want to go simple, something like Drafty or 2D AutoCAD blocks are a really easy way to bypass a lot of the learning curve for drafting until students have a better comprehension of design but if you want to speed up the learning process make a catalog of screen recordings of different VW tasks and your students can learn comfortably through imitation.
> 
> ...


 *@MNicolai* and *@Colin* Colin made a couple of good points in a PM; If / when you're walking through the shop and a carp', welder, fabricator asks a question and / or you notice something going wrong, you can grab an off-cut or the back of a CAD print and hand-sketch a free-hand 'hasty sketch' quickly further clarifying / explaining / illustrating your concept face to face in moments in situ Vs. going back to your office, being disturbed by people knocking on your door, sending URGENT e-mails, yada, yada, etcetera then finding the printer or plotter are out of toner . . . . . Meanwhile you've either got minions standing idly waiting for _YOU_ or they're continuing welding / cutting / gluing & screwing something that's going to need to be taken apart, potentially wasting materials, DEFINITELY wasting time, and done over. 
If I'm understanding you correctly, you're both saying the ability to quickly hand-sketch / draft on the nearest off-cut, napkin, rear of a business card is or ought to be with us for the foreseeable future. 
In our PM, I made the additional point that most folks view an E size plot with the reverence accorded to God's commandments carved in stone because it looks so neat, precise and flawlessly drawn. Most of the same folks would spend a few extra minutes staring at a free-hand hasty sketch because, at first glance, it just doesn't look as flawless as the plotted / printer drawing; in actuality, there could be errors in the print / plot while the hasty sketch could conceivably be the more accurate / correct / instantly understandable of the two. I suggested *@Colin* should edit and include his points in his OP. 
Thanks *@MNicolai* for your post. 
Toodleoo! 
Ron Hebbard


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## Harrison Hohnholt (May 30, 2019)

My view is going to be very different since I am on the manufacturing side of things now. 

As someone that was taught hand drafting in a TD aspect and a lighting aspect, I find the TD stuff to be most useful where I am in my career. We do a lot of custom work with engineers that are not from the theatrical world so if I can quickly hand sketch an accessory for them to get the customers point across it saves valuable time. 

Now, could I still do this without being taught hand drafting? Maybe, but I believe they wouldn't be as clear of an explanation for engineering.


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## EdSavoie (May 30, 2019)

We had a split class that was half a credit of hand drafting (in imperial, i hated every second of scale drawing) with half a credit of CAD. We then proceeded to have a second class dedicated to CAD, and a third class which was half CAD and half 3D modeling.

It's a interesting decision...


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## cbrandt (May 30, 2019)

I think the value in hand drafting isn't in the skill itself, but in the care that you learn about drafting when you learn it. I see dozens of student or young designer plots (and frequently my own plots) that have lots of small errors because they or I were breezing through it as quickly as possible to get the end product working right, without caring about an inch or two here or there. The steps and process of how and why you're putting that plot together can be greatly informed and streamlined by the same processes you used in hand drafting to make sure you didn't have to go back and redraw that one line 40 times.

I'm not concerned about the loss of the hand skill. I don't think the fact that I learned hand drafting in college makes me better at hand amending a plot in a scene shop or on site. I'd wager that even if you never drew a plot in pencil, someone who has experience in cad will be able to communicate effectively on the fly/by hand in those circumstances.

I think @MNicolai makes an excellent point in that new drafters often get caught in the weeds with tools and options. Learning why and when to use these tools is as or more important than how to use them. As an undergrad I once stayed up all night making a perfect 3d light plot for a design competition, when I really should have just spent 2 hours putting together a really good design intent document. There are a hundred tools in any drafting program, and 75% of them you're not going to use on most of your plots, or possibly ever.


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## rsmentele (May 30, 2019)

Another roadblock to Vectorworks is the cost. Hand drafting is cheaper, I know Sketchup is free in some iterations, but Vectorworks is a big pill to swallow for most folks. 

Definitely good to learn both. Basic techniques span both methods. The only real thing you're training them on is how to use this or that computer program. Hand drafting gives you a good foundation to grow. You can easily learn software. Techniques and methods are better served.


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## MNicolai (May 30, 2019)

cbrandt said:


> As an undergrad I once stayed up all night making a perfect 3d light plot for a design competition, when I really should have just spent 2 hours putting together a really good design intent document.



I know several people who did that exactly once and never again, myself included. Results were generally good but the time could've been better spent elsewhere. It's also highly dependent on accounting for factors outside of your control. I made that mistake a lot in college -- "I can't start designing until I have a 3D model of the theater" turns into a downward spiral of trying to get the rake of the seating in the theater correct instead of just drawing a big box with a proscenium wall and calling it a day. Meanwhile, I haven't started designing for the actual production.

Relevant citations from Akin's Law's of Spacecraft Design:

2. To design a spacecraft right takes an infinite amount of effort. This is why it's a good idea to design them to operate when some things are wrong.

3. Design is an iterative process. The necessary number of iterations is one more than the number you have currently done. This is true at any point in time.

4. Your best design efforts will inevitably wind up being useless in the final design. Learn to live with the disappointment.

12. There is never a single right solution. There are always multiple wrong ones, though.

14. (Edison's Law) "Better" is the enemy of "good".

20. A bad design with a good presentation is doomed eventually. A good design with a bad presentation is doomed immediately.

30. (von Tiesenhausen's Law of Engineering Design) If you want to have a maximum effect on the design of a new engineering system, learn to draw. Engineers always wind up designing the vehicle to look like the initial artist's concept.

33. (Patton's Law of Program Planning) A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan next week.

34. (Roosevelt's Law of Task Planning) Do what you can, where you are, with what you have.

39. Any exploration program which "just happens" to include a new launch vehicle is, de facto, a launch vehicle program.

39. (alternate formulation) The three keys to keeping a new human space program affordable and on schedule:
1) No new launch vehicles.
2) No new launch vehicles.
3) Whatever you do, don't develop any new launch vehicles.​


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## Colin (May 30, 2019)

https://www.archdaily.com/627654/th...chitectural-drawing-archdaily-readers-respond


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## egilson1 (May 30, 2019)

I think hand drafting isometrics helps people learn to think in 3D space and how objects relate to each other in that 3D space. Now I also think that can be done in a 2D plane in cad using simple lines. I think it teaches good fundamentals.


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## EdSavoie (May 30, 2019)

The biggest hurdle is convenience and cost. There's a good chance a college already has a drafting lab, AutoCAD licenses, Sketchup with a raytracing license or some other 3D modeller. It's a much easier sell to slot you into existing programming than to buy a massive multiseat license.


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## Matt Rightmire (Jun 5, 2019)

I am thankful for the full semester of hand drafting I was required to take in graduate school (2012). I thought I was a good draftsman until that class. I became an adequate draftsman by the end of that class. More importantly, I took that base knowledge of line weights, arrow types, dimensioning standards, textures/hatching, etc into my CAD class the next semester and slayed it. Having a working knowledge of how hand drafting is created and why things are manually drawn a certain way, IMO, is imperative to making clear, organized, efficient, and useful CAD plates.

Flip-side example: The most recent TD I worked with made CAD plates for everything (all in AutoCAD even though everyone else used VW, but that's for a different thread). In theory, this is fine. But the draftings were rudimentary. The whole plate was done in one line weight. Dimensions were often missing. Any delineation of layers or separate parts was done by changing the color of the part (often using impossible-to-read yellow, or using blue, cyan, and/or green in the same plate [sometimes without a color key]). "Oh I never hand draft anything. I've only hand drafted in class in college." Guess what? It shows.
It may have been drafted faster, but any of the CAD plates from that TD could have been drafted by hand with one pencil on a piece of notebook paper.

Drafting is a language. There are many intricate parts...vocabulary, grammar, and dialect. But it starts with an alphabet. We learn to write by hand and understand why each letter is shaped the way it is. Then we learn to type.

We may not have room in the curriculum for a full semester of hand drafting (even the class I took is no longer offered), but you can bet your scale rule that my students will leave school knowing a good drafting when they see one, regardless of medium.


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## mattq6166 (Jun 5, 2019)

I started Drafting LONG ago, isometrics in shop in JR High, then got into theatre, and the best advice i got from my TD was take art classes. And it inevitably improved my design, drafting, and thinking spatially in 3 dimensions. I have worked as a propmaker, art director, lighting designer, TD, and Set Designer. The fundamentals of thinking and putting hand to paper to convey and idea is timeless. I have used CAD, but i always fall back on hand drafting, but i do use SketchUp for modelling, but the design begins by hand. I was back in LA 2 weeks ago to meet up with some friends working on building a movie, and looking at the floorplans which were in CAD, beautiful to look at, and i said so, but their complaint is that the design department generally cranks out drawings so fast in CAD that the computer is doing all the thinking, and so there are a myriad of mistakes which don't get caught until the building process has begun. Can be an expensive problem. So what's my point, they are all tools to be used, use them well. Oh and measure twice, cut once. Wood is good, but steel is real!
M D Egan
Tech Director and Resident Designer
Spokane Civic Theatre


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## BillConnerFASTC (Jun 5, 2019)

mattq6166 said:


> but their complaint is that the design department generally cranks out drawings so fast in CAD that the computer is doing all the thinking, and so there are a myriad of mistakes which don't get caught until the building process has begun



Amen. I've seen the quality of drawings for buildings in terms of coordination downward steadily with the advent of cad, faster with Revit. Too often the people with design and construction experience are not proficient at Revit, and the Revit aces have no experience. Use to be people thought before drawing. Now they just throw stuff in because its fast and easy, and it looks final. Everyone trusts the "model" and don't understand the design or different disciplines. If it fits, it must be OK. And gosh I hate it when the do a section and a beamis solid with no indication its a beam with flanges and such.

Glad I'm almost done putting up with the crap.


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## gafftapegreenia (Jun 5, 2019)

Heres the thing, if you know CAD, is opens up an entire world of opportunities outside the entertainment industry. Don't get me wrong, I love our world, but not everyone who spends tens of thousands of dollars on a theatre degree is going to make a career in this industry. Knowing what I know now, a program that teaches CAD has a greater value than one that teaches only hand drafting. Our skills and experiences are marketable outside of our industry, but that also demands skills beyond collaboration and design.

In the years since I graduated, my high school built an entire new wing dedicate to STEM, with a machine shop, small engines lab, and a CAD drafting studio. I truly feel that had I been exposed to CAD in high school, I might have chosen other career paths. Its clearly a cross-industry skill.


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## cbrandt (Jun 6, 2019)

@gafftapegreenia I think that's a really important point, access. When I was in high school, they did still offer a hand drafting class, but pretty much the only way to get in was if you were involved in shop and the trades/secondary classes. If you were taking a full academic load, there was no way to fit it in your schedule. Do you think switching to offering CAD classes would make those classes more accessible? Could a school offer more classes, more seats, more time, etc? My gut says that it would, but I'm not familiar with how much a HS has to pay for extra software licences, and I know it must be hell for them to upkeep hardware powerful enough to make it worth it. But if you go into college/tradeschool/whatever already having experience with CAD, you'll be miles ahead of everyone else.


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## Dacheeseman1928 (Jun 6, 2019)

Lot's of good points above but there is one point that I haven't heard yet. Hand drafting gives you a basis in geometry that can be applied to more than just design. As a TD and carpenter I use techniques I learned in my hand drafting course frequently. It has helped me when building particularly complicated units to find problems like out of square or subtle warp in long boards. When you can't just pull diagonals to check square on a unit it's nice to have other methods for checking.

I also use hand drafting techniques when I'm laying out floor. My theater has a severely raked house so our designs always pay special attention to the floor; we joke that our fourth wall this the floor. As you can imagine our floors can get pretty crazy sometimes (i.e. spirals that taper, circles in forced perspective). Without the basis I had from hand drafting I would have been at a loss as to how or even if I could draw those shapes mechanically. 

I believe that more carpenters/TDs should learn these tricks. It's knowledge that will never become obsolete for builders. Perhaps a hand drafting course isn't the most efficient way to teach those things but I would love to see if someone could design a "geometry for the shop" course. Have I inspired any professors out there?


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## bobgaggle (Jun 6, 2019)

The most important hand drawing that happens these days is on the shop floor on the back of a printed plan or on a scrap of wood. My grandmother recently gave me an old college textbook of hers called "Technical Drawing". In in, there's a whole chapter dedicated to "technical sketching". Literally the idea of doodling on a napkin and generating drawings without drawing aids like squares and compasses. It taught named techniques on how to accurately freehand a circle as an ellipse in an iso view, how to visually gauge lines being parallel. Useful skills to have when you're on the jobsite, trying to communicate with a fabricator and avoid the thing being build backwards. I think this is what should be taught in conjunction with CAD. The computer is going to do the math and keep the lines straight and plot out an accurate drawing, but when you don't have the computer and the guy building the thing doesn't understand the drawing, you need to have the skills to whip out a doodle on the spot that clearly shows what's going on.


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## macsound (Jun 11, 2019)

My first and only architectural class first taught hand drafting for 2 reasons. 1: Conceptualize what you're going to draw and be able to get it down on paper 2: Not be afraid to draw something

There were tons of people who knew how to use autocad before they even took the class, but they had a major flaw. They couldn't conceptualize what they were drawing before they started and didn't know how to sketch, so they'd take 4 times longer creating and re-creating their design in AutoCad than if they had just made a 1 minute sketch first. 

I always loved sketching theatres and I think part of that came from looking at professional hand sketches and using a lighting template. Then I could quickly give someone a freehand, easily recognizable lighting plot while sitting in rehearsal to show them why that SL torm would be great to only extend 3' downstage as to not overlap my lighting position.


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