Isometric Drawings – Making Sense of the Physical World

Length, Depth, Width – X Axis Y Axis Z Axis - I first learned of isometric drawing when I was in technical high school learning technical drawing. We did a few isometric drawings, as I recall. I loved the simplicity and how I could just flip around my thirty degree/ sixty degree triangle with the t-square tight against the tool and simply measure the distance with a scale. How much easier than perspective drawings. Honestly, at that point all I could do of perspective was artistic imitations and approximations.

With isometric I could be as accurate as Frank Loyd Wright. Everyone’s drawing should follow the same rule. A square is a square. An isometric cube should be the same for everyone. What a system. Isometric Basis

Of course, in reality when one looks down a railroad track or at telephone poles along a highway stretching towards the horizon – things should get smaller and closer together. That’s the visual reality. Of course the railroad tracks follow the isometric rule and stay the same width apart, that’s why the trains work. So, being confined to an isometric understanding of the world gives one a mechanical advantage even if it is visually false.

When I was in my late twenties I got a chance to teach technical drawing at the same high school I had been a student at. I had taken technical drawing for four years in high school. I enjoyed the drawing time four classes a week. But, I had not taken any classes after that, so I was not prepared when I got a substitute teacher position teaching technical drawing. The teachers in the technical drawing department told me that it was set up to be all freshman classes as someone retired in the middle of the year.

“Just stay a chapter ahead of the kids,” I was admonished. So, I did.

I began taking technical drawing classes at night at Boston State College on Mass Ave near the Museum of Fine Art. I took other classes to get an additional certification as an Industrial Arts teacher. There was a shortage of technical drawing teachers, and I loved teaching the high interest subject to the students.

One of the things I bumped into quickly was the chapter on isometric drawings. I was taking over for someone who retired in the after the year had begun. A lot of the basic board drawing routines and paper layout exercises with pencil and t-square had been taught..... cont. https://xenagoguevicene.wordpress.com/2019/06/12/isometric-drawings-making-sense-of-the-physical-world-length-depth-width-x-axis-y-axis-z-axis/