question from a student

I hardly ever inked drawings--only the ones that I did ink were the ones I knew were going to be copied a lot, or that I needed to fill in large areas with black. But you can achieve the very same and long lasting effect with soft pencil (B or softer) and it lasts forever. For extra protection, you can also spray the drawing after it is complete with erasable fixitif. You can get it in artists supply stores. Krylon makes a good one, called "workable fixitif." Another designer I know uses plastic lead on vellum and achieves a perfect effect, every bit as good as ink.

The trouble with ink, particularly on vellum, is that once you draw the line, it is really messy to change. Not so bad with ink on Mylar, it erases OK, but it is still much more messy than soft pencil in the long run.

One of the reasons for using ink over pencil is to make sure that the lines reproduce nice and dark in photocopies or blueprint copies. But with soft pencil, you can achieve every bit as good darkness and boldness as with a pen, and with a lot let trouble and mess.

Eric (with a fondness for soft pencil)

 

From David Gerr on the Westlawn Forum:

Please do not draw in ink. You can't erase it and making neat connections between lines takes years of practice. Drawing in ink is not allows for Westlawn work. Refer to the Student Guide 2nd Edition, page 33.

Dave Gerr

 

"Don't do it because it takes years of practice?????" what sort of attitude is that? If it's hard, practice like hell until you can do it.

If you don't do things because they're too hard you'll never get to the top. Of course, once you're at the top, then you've got to answer the questions no-one has thought of, which is, by definition, hard.

Life is a learning curve. At least as a student you can make mistakes and it doesn't matter too much. It's far better to learn now than later.

Tim B.

 

Tim - you have to remember that the kind of drawings we are talking about here are not what you would describe as 'finished documents'. By the time Cleetus is doing things that require separate revisions etc, he will be onto CAD. In that sense, it makes more sense to leave everything in pencil so it can be altered.
Having said that, I agree that it instills a good process if you are taught from the start to document things in an appropriate way. There again, I suspect this would vary from office to office...

 

I don't think I'd submit something that I didn't think was finished

Would you send a half-written proposal to a client?

Tim B.

 

Sorry - didn't articulate that too well (though on occaision you would send unfinished things in for clarification or preliminary approval). What I meant was that we are not talking about full working drawings... lesson 2, for instance (if my memory serves me correctly) was to draw the profile and plan views of a hull. They may not have even been to scale, it's too long ago for me to remember!. In other words, much of this is sketching rather than drawing. Beyond that these days (for better or worse) much of it's CAD.

IMHO the use of ink is a personal thing - as with so many things in yacht design, which is at least to some extent, part art, part science.