Colors vs Hatching

We all produce drawings the way we were taught. But drafting methods and the language of lines comes to us from centuries of drawing with pencil and ink on paper. Today we have the ability to do things in drawings that would have been unthinkable even ten years ago, so you won't find any of this in a drafting text book, but you certainly will in the future.

Given the abilities we now have, how do you produce drawings that are more readable? Here are a couple of examples.

Think about it. Then think for yourself and try something different. If it's a good idea, it will be in somebody's textbook one day.

Today, I'm doing my drawings for the Falco using a combination of gray colors and sometimes hatching. I think it makes the drawing much easier to read, and you don't need as much training to read a drawing to understand what it being shown.

In each drawing, I have a layer called "Color Masks". When the drawing is finished, I copy the entire drawing to Color Masks, then turn off all other layers, and start deleting extraneous lines. I use rectangles, circles, polygons and Béziers as my fill objects. In the example shown above, I use Béziers where there are radiused corners. I use the WildTools Join tool to connect these, and it's a bit tedious at times.

I assign a gray fill color to the objects, then give them a line pattern of none. I used circles with a white pen pattern to cover up the gray fill when there is a hole drilled all the way through the part.

If I had a color printer and a good eye for the use of colors, I would definitely use different colors for steel, aluminum and bronze.

Alfred Scott

Here's an example of the drawing style that Matt Arnold is using. He calls it 'entity drafting', or perhaps 'drafting with entities'.

I'm with ya!

On residential work I am using this simple system to make details read more clearly:

rough carpentry - golden yellow
finish carpentry - tan
pressure treated - you guessed it green
conc - boring grey

etc - make it up as you go along

you get the gist - trying to keep it simple and clear