Second Day of Classes: Awesome but Humbling

So, we had Architectural Drawing By Hand today. It was really cool. Our instructor, who goes by Molly was really great, especially since none of us had much idea of what we were doing. (The last  time I used a compass and protractor was probably in grade school!) It was kind of neat to hear how Molly came to instruct at Willowbank. She is a retired architect who, she told us, is old enough to actually remember and have been taught how to draw everything by hand and be able to teach it.

Everything these days is done with AutoCAD or Revit or some other modern software based design program. We'll get to learn how to  use AutoCAD later on to assist us in drawing up assessments but in keeping with Willowbank's philosophy we will focus entirely on drawing in 2D this year and we will do it all by hand. Next year we'll move into 3D drawings, but only after we get everything down pat this year.

So anyways, we did all geometric drawing today. It was mostly to familiarize us with our drafting tools and with our pencils and how hard we had to press to create the construction lines vs. the final lines. It was actually a lot of fun. I did feel like a complete dolt when I used the wrong triangle for my hexagon and trying to do simple area and perimeter formulas in my brain without a calculator. It's been a while since I've done anything I've found challenging. It was humbling, in a good way. But it was great to get to the end of the day and feel like I'd learned something that would be useful and fun to do every week.

These are my drawings from our first day of drawing. Look at all those beautiful shapes!

A lot of what we did was just reviewing common geometry but some it was kind of cool, like using the scale method to figure out how many stairs you might need for a given space. It was neat to do math-y type things I could grasp putting to use, especially since that is not how I think at all. This one right here is not math-y.