Keep away from those who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you believe that you too can become great. Drawing: You can do a drawing on almost any smooth flat surface. Be sure the surface is clean. Any debris under the paper will cause your pencil to leave dirty marks. Yuk. Drafting: For drafting, you're going to want a surface that has a straight edge along one side. If your right handed, you'll want the straight edge to be on the left. If you're left handed, you’ll want the straight edge on the right. I know, duh.
Positioning the paper:
You’ll want to position your paper a little closer to the straight edge side of the board. If you have a straight edge on both sides, well, for righties, place the paper towards the left. For lefties; well, you get where we’re going. Place the paper at about mid height on the board.
Using masking tape or drafting tape to tape the paper down in each corner. You only need pieces of tape about two inches long. If you’re using a very large piece of paper, you may wish to add tape to the top, bottom, left & right of the paper as well. Be careful not to use too much tape. You don’t want to rip the paper when you’re done. And you never want to leave the tape on the paper for storage. It just sticks to everything; except the board the next time you try to draw. Always use a new piece of tape.
The next time you want to lay out your drawing, you’ll need to do an extra step. Take your T-Square, or other straight edge, and use a line you have already drawn to align the paper on the board. To keep your work accurate, you need to tape the paper down so new lines will be parallel to the old lines.
Technical Drawings – sometimes also called “working drawings” – are a significant part of a set or lighting design. The process of making technical drawings is called “drafting.”
Precise graphic information about size, proportion, and structure is essential in architecture and engineering, and the art and science of technical drawing was developed over many centuries. Representational drawing and sketching is concerned with “drawing what you see,” or “drawing that which you imagine as if you actually saw it “. Technical drawing is concerned with representing objects according to conventions that allow size, proportions, and structure – as well as appearance – to be precisely specified. The most fundamental concept involved is the geometry of “projection.”
There are a number of other systems of projection: orthographic, central (or perspective) projection, oblique projection, etc. In Scenery and Lighting Design, the expected technical drawings normally use the conventions of orthographic projection in order to specify the size, proportions, position, and spatial relationships of the objects designed.
In the practice of Theatre Design, technical drawings must be made, in order to clearly communicate the exact size and proportions of the items to be fabricated or arranged. Most technical drawings for stage scenery and lighting employ the conventions of orthographic projection.
In this system of drawing, an object is visualized as oriented relative to viewing planes that are perpendicular in 3 dimensions, its surfaces are projected onto these planes, and the resulting “imaginary glass box” of views is “unwrapped” and flattened to make a 2 dimensional scaled representation of the object. When a viewing plane passes through an object it is called a section plane and the resulting view is a section view, which is normally oriented parallel to one of the standard views.
