Sketching- Isometrics

Introduction

How do reading the face of a clock and sketching isometric pictorials relate to each other? Picture a cube in your mind. All of the surfaces of the cube form right angles with their adjacent faces. If you were to draw an isometric pictorial of the cube, you would see that the edges point toward 2 and 8 o’clock, 4 and 10 o’clock, and 6 and12 o’clock. This idea helps when sketching isometric pictorials on writing surfaces that do not have isometric grids.

Isometrics are a common pictorial used both for concept sketches and to represent designs in technical drawings.

Equipment

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Pencil

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Isometric grid paper

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Orthographic grid paper, graph paper, or engineering notebook

Procedure

In this activity, you will develop your isometric sketching skills by first drawing isometric views of objects that are already given in an isometric orientation. You will apply your sketching skills in later exercises to sketch orthographic views of objects that are not given in isometric orientation and to represent your ideas and designs.

When referring to the orientation of an isometric view, the isometric view is labeled in the order of first face, second face, then third face.  For example, the image on the left below shows a top, front, right side view isometric. The same object is pictured again on the right but is shown in a top, left side, front view orientation. We will almost exclusively use the top, front, right side view in this course. In fact, the orientation of the isometric will dictate how you label and show the orthographic projections (or side views) of the object in later activities.