Second Draft

[bcholmes]

Before I ever touched a computer, the clearest idea I had about a future career was architecture. I really enjoyed floorplans, blueprints, house designs. We did a little bit of drafting in Grade 8. In Sarnia, high school starts in Grade 9, and I had to take a stream of "shop" to get a third of a year of drafting. (I also got a third of electronics and a third of auto shop.)

There were no CAD programs in my school. It was all about drafting tables and T-squares. Light boxes. I remember the smell of the machine that would make the blueprints.

I took a number of years of drafting, but at some point I drifted away from that as a career choice. I was doing more with math and with computers. People would give me solemn cautions about how hard it would be to be an architect. But computer programming... that's the road to glory. And I guess I believed that message.

I seldom think about that original career goal. Every once in a while, the real estate section of the newspaper will include interesting floorplans, and I'll rip them out of the paper to keep. I still find floorplans interesting.

But this interests me: this week, two books that I'd ordered arrived. One was Scott McCloud's Making Comics. I have Understanding Comics and Reinventing Comics. And Zot. I'm totally in a comic-making phase and loving it to death.

The other book is a book on pen and ink technique. Apparently "the classic" book on the topic. Rendering in Pen and Ink by Arthur Guptill. Originally printed in the 30s. Seriously.

It's a fascinating book, with lots of diagrams and guidance about how to apply different effects in pen and ink. It has nothing to say about technical pens because technical pens didn't exist, then. But it's also clear that a big part of the book is aimed at architects. There are no floorplans, but there are a lot of renderings of houses. The kind of diagrams that give a family an idea about what a house is gonna look like once it's built.

Before reading the book, I don't think I would have seen the overlap between the things I'm learning in my comics courses and my earlier interest in drafting. It was kind of interesting to be reminded of all that.

Comments

[elainegrey]

My dad's had a degree that joined architecture and engineering: he ended up on the engineering side, and helping owners look at the cost of maintenance of architectural details and evaluating whether those details should stay. Very utilitarian. Not because he doesn't understand the aesthetics, but he understood the schools and hospitals budget issues.... While being an architect was one of my dream jobs as a youngster -- discussing passive solar design with my Dad, looking at the landscape and imagining homes nestled unobtrusively and naturally in the landscape -- the way architecture was presented to me as "it's hard" was seeing that vision to reality was not necessarily in the architect's hands.

I think, subtly, all my siblings and i were steered away from our more creative interests: i was probably steered away from architecture.