Monday, May 24, 2010

How Boring is Drawing


You can not get too bored with drawing...

Just visualise this, when we scribble on a piece of paper, the years of foundation training of flying the crayon on the wall during our childhood days kicks in subconsciously & we are free to draw any lines on the piece of paper & hopefully these lines will mean something to anyone other than ourselves...
When we wish to draw stright lines & constructing meaningful shapes on a piece of paper, the hands will grab a ruler or a protractor & our secondary training during primary & secondary school takes over & there we have nice orderly lines on a piece of paper which actually mean something to most people...
For those who took up some form of institutional engineering training or education will learn to draw & read engineering drawings properly & again subconsciously pack in the necessary information onto the piece of papers with lines which we call engineering drawings...
In my early stage of drawing with CAD, life was really frustrating... A simple task of drawing a straight line can turn into disaster... it really happened! I deleted an entire file because I click on something accidently.... dividing a line into a few equal section can take more than half an hour until I learnt that there is a command that I can use to do so with a few clicks on the mouse & all can be accomplished within a second... to draw a line on tangent of 2 circles turn into a full-blown construction drawings taking nearly an hours when a simple typing tan on the keyboard then right-click the circle can do the job...
Once you get more "fluent" conversing in the correct "language", things can get really interesting & fun filling... eg, we can use "offset" command to construct lines & check size of your design on drawing, make complex contours using "polylines" & play with its sub-commands such as L (for Line) & A ( for arc) on the keyboard, then drag the line to accommodate your desired shapes... copying object is a god sent when identical object are needed; Rotating parts in the drawing takes a bit of practice but they are extremely precise; Moving object to desired location/position is a breeze; Resize the drawing can save hundreds of hours of drawing; drawing chamber & fillers are just 2 clicks away;
Best of all, you can redo the drawing till the cow comes home & nothing is loss... I still recall the amount of eraser scrap covered desk after a drawing session during my school days... not forgetting drawings with holes made by excessive erasing with a laser knife on PP paper...

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