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mauvehaus 14 minutes ago [-]
I build furniture and while I do my design work digitally for remote clients, I do my shop drawings by hand.
One super helpful tip I got from an actual trained draftsman is to use harder pencil lead for your layout and construction lines. Like 6H to 9H. You'll get a much lighter line to erase later. It'll also hold a finer point for longer.
I prefer lead holders to wooden pencils. They take 2mm lead, and you sharpen them with a lead pointer. K&E pointers are readily available on eBay, as are the abrasive cups that do the actual sharpening. The plastic trash can ones will get the job done, but are unsatisfying from a tactile standpoint.
A decent lead holder is a trick to find. The Alvin one I bought is too loose and the lead slips up into it. The Staedtler one doesn't close tightly at the tip and support the lead well enough to prevent breaking. The Prismacolor one is satisfactory, and I inherited a vintage one that I love from the aforementioned draftsman.
I recommend an erasing shield to make revising your pencil work without erasing too much. Another person I know with an art background tipped me off to putting tracing paper over your main drawing to iterate on details before committing them to paper to reduce erasing.
Drafting vellum is pretty forgiving of erasing, but it has a toothier surface that can get a little dingy if you're working on a drawing for a while. I've never tried Bristol board; I don't need immaculate drawings for reproduction, just good enough ones to build from.
Happy drawing. It's an immensely satisfying process for me. If you're detail oriented, you'll likely find it enjoyable too.
gjm11 6 minutes ago [-]
And your coffee-maker apparently still had all its coffee when it finally got back from from Russia!
(But the temperatures should have been recorded on the Réaumur scale.)
card_zero 3 hours ago [-]
This should be a competitive sport, like gymnastics. He's attempting the bevel! With extra-wide lines! Very ambitious, but unfortunately he often fails to stick the corner alignments, the bevel distances are poorly controlled, and the data is unsuitably spiky for that choice of line joint. 7/10.
matja 3 hours ago [-]
I loved hearing this comment in my mind :)
jansan 2 hours ago [-]
When you say bevel, do you mean the miter limit?
selimthegrim 53 minutes ago [-]
Wait until you hear about compulsory figures in figure skating.
max-ch 3 hours ago [-]
Fantastic read!
In the mid-2010s, I was interning at the German federal statistical office. Some of the team assistants were there since the 1980s/90s and had still learnt to use those tools as part of their vocational training.
They also showed me the tools and the instructions for drawing exactly aligned tables by hand and the resulting bound sets of tables with hundreds of pages. Completely mind-boggling how much time they must have spent on a single project, now all automated away.
jstummbillig 5 hours ago [-]
> A professional draftsman of the 1920's may cringe at the imperfections in my line graph above. They can suck it.
I am willing to suck it but the kerning is still killing me. (I love everything about this btw)
Unfortunately I do not see specific discussion of how to make the lines a consistent thickness. It does have notes on how to sharpen your pencil and how to use a carpenters spline to draw smooth curves though.
jinnyto 2 hours ago [-]
Amazing process (such patience in this day and age!), and special thanks for sharing links to the data viz books! Tufte was my gateway too but I didn’t think to look into books on technical sketching, engineering drawing, and draftsmanship.
Love hand-drawn viz, recently I’ve been looking at the French National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (INSEE) and they have a great collection of all their reports, from pre-1900s to now. I especially appreciate this beautiful one about people with mental illness in the Seine department… from 1889. The typography is chef’s kisshttps://www.bnsp.insee.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b52510983q/f49.item...
(After years of reading Hacker News this post motivated me to finally make an account and upvote. Data viz is so fun)
yvdriess 5 hours ago [-]
And here I thought drawing graphs in TikZ was doing it manually.
Love the article, this is why I browse HN.
pram 4 hours ago [-]
They look really good. I really enjoy looking at midcentury engineering charts/diagrams and stuff like jeppesen charts. NASA has a lot of good ones. The way the text looks, the line economy, the general aesthetic. Well worth the effort imo!
codeduck 3 hours ago [-]
This is my favourite kind of post here
Biganon 2 hours ago [-]
Same. Any kind of hyper fixation is infinitely more interesting than AI bullshit.
malshe 40 minutes ago [-]
Fantastic article! Reminded me of my favorite engineering drawing class from the undergrad days.
georgeburdell 30 minutes ago [-]
I ended up dropping my drawing class because I kept getting docked points for my handwriting no matter how much I practiced. I think I was on track for a B or C.
Daub 2 hours ago [-]
I teach digital art and am also a painter. When I was a student I loved filling sketchbooks with drawings - like a collection of ideas. To a large degree my web bookmarks and screen grab library have taken over this function. That being said, if I want to quickly communicate visual ideas to students or craftsmen I much prefer a paper and pencil. It feels so much more nuanced, comfortable and expressive.
JKCalhoun 2 hours ago [-]
I (perhaps mistakenly) saw the article as metaphor.
50 hours to draw a line graph vs. a few minutes trying various styles in PowerPoint.
Stop letting machines make graphs, pay a draftsman like we used to do!
(I'm fairly dense though, so I probably completely missed that the author was instead simply espousing the joys of learning a new handicraft.)
dougdude3339 3 days ago [-]
What's been more interesting to me lately than using software to design data visualizations is learning to draw data by hand. It's a time consuming process but incredibly rewarding. The feeling of erasing graphite to reveal clean, crisp lines is something that software cannot recreate.
otherme123 5 hours ago [-]
What do you use to erase pencil? The words "Using an eraser and a light touch" suggest a gum or a vynil eraser. I make a ball with the kneaded eraser and roll it with the palm against the paper.
bananaflag 3 hours ago [-]
What I'm curious now is how one could use software (even PowerPoint) to make graphs that replicate that handmade aesthetic.
bluejay2387 42 minutes ago [-]
Great article, enjoyed reading it.
bobek 30 minutes ago [-]
Graph paper FWT :)
satisfice 4 hours ago [-]
It’s nice to see something on HN that isn’t about writing a prompt so that you can pretend to work.
dnnddidiej 3 hours ago [-]
Username checks out
flir 2 hours ago [-]
Heh. Which if y'all borrowed the Tufte book?
It's ok, I can wait...
estetlinus 2 hours ago [-]
Love it. Are any of your viz up for sale?
petesergeant 2 hours ago [-]
Does he explain what the red dots in the titles of his work are meant to be? Possibly I didn’t read carefully enough
mrstorm 4 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
m_m_carvalho 2 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
jdw64 4 hours ago [-]
[dead]
SeattleAntifa 2 hours ago [-]
You wasted 50 hours which would have been more "productive" being divided into 50 individual shits?!
One super helpful tip I got from an actual trained draftsman is to use harder pencil lead for your layout and construction lines. Like 6H to 9H. You'll get a much lighter line to erase later. It'll also hold a finer point for longer.
I prefer lead holders to wooden pencils. They take 2mm lead, and you sharpen them with a lead pointer. K&E pointers are readily available on eBay, as are the abrasive cups that do the actual sharpening. The plastic trash can ones will get the job done, but are unsatisfying from a tactile standpoint.
A decent lead holder is a trick to find. The Alvin one I bought is too loose and the lead slips up into it. The Staedtler one doesn't close tightly at the tip and support the lead well enough to prevent breaking. The Prismacolor one is satisfactory, and I inherited a vintage one that I love from the aforementioned draftsman.
I recommend an erasing shield to make revising your pencil work without erasing too much. Another person I know with an art background tipped me off to putting tracing paper over your main drawing to iterate on details before committing them to paper to reduce erasing.
Drafting vellum is pretty forgiving of erasing, but it has a toothier surface that can get a little dingy if you're working on a drawing for a while. I've never tried Bristol board; I don't need immaculate drawings for reproduction, just good enough ones to build from.
Happy drawing. It's an immensely satisfying process for me. If you're detail oriented, you'll likely find it enjoyable too.
(But the temperatures should have been recorded on the Réaumur scale.)
In the mid-2010s, I was interning at the German federal statistical office. Some of the team assistants were there since the 1980s/90s and had still learnt to use those tools as part of their vocational training. They also showed me the tools and the instructions for drawing exactly aligned tables by hand and the resulting bound sets of tables with hundreds of pages. Completely mind-boggling how much time they must have spent on a single project, now all automated away.
I am willing to suck it but the kerning is still killing me. (I love everything about this btw)
Unfortunately I do not see specific discussion of how to make the lines a consistent thickness. It does have notes on how to sharpen your pencil and how to use a carpenters spline to draw smooth curves though.
Love hand-drawn viz, recently I’ve been looking at the French National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (INSEE) and they have a great collection of all their reports, from pre-1900s to now. I especially appreciate this beautiful one about people with mental illness in the Seine department… from 1889. The typography is chef’s kiss https://www.bnsp.insee.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b52510983q/f49.item...
(After years of reading Hacker News this post motivated me to finally make an account and upvote. Data viz is so fun)
Love the article, this is why I browse HN.
50 hours to draw a line graph vs. a few minutes trying various styles in PowerPoint.
Stop letting machines make graphs, pay a draftsman like we used to do!
(I'm fairly dense though, so I probably completely missed that the author was instead simply espousing the joys of learning a new handicraft.)
It's ok, I can wait...