THE DESIGN SKETCHBOOK

At the site titled The Design Sketchbook, the author has provided Tip 172. And it it titled “How to draw 3D volumes. It’s all about seeing things in transparency.”

The Design Sketchbook looks like a very nice resource for folks who are looking for a tutorial on analogue sketching. The author, Chou-Tac, provides pages and pages of ideas to help with confidence building while drawing. They also comment on how everyone can make analogue drawings, which of course is one of our principals here.

The author provides the following thought,

“We draw what we see and it’s obvious that there is something wrong. But we can figure out how to solve it.”

In Tip 172, they then go on to provide transparent sketches of basic three dimensional volumes.  We see transparent drawings of cones, cylinders, etc.  In previous pages, we have covered similar transparent drawing construction methods as espoused by others in, for example, Ching.  Or, as another example, Drawn to Design.

While many, many how to drawing sources talk about how crucial it is to set up your volumes on your paper via transparency, no one ever says, hey, it’s ok to draw only transparently.  All previous references offer transparency as a way to set up your drawing so you can then move on to representational illustration.

Still, it is nice to see analogue drawing given such great treatment as is offered at The Design Sketchbook.  It is great that analogue drawing is proffered in a very supportive environment.  These web bastions of analogue drawing seem to be few and far between.