How to Improve Technical Drawing Skills

Civil Engineering Drawing is all about Plans, Elevations and Sections

So being a civil engineering student, I’d like to highlight the roles that technical drawings play in in the field of Civil Engineering, the necessity of improving Technical drawing skills, the process of improving it, and how it can be beneficiary to the career of future aspirants.

How to Improve this skill?

Just talking from personal experience, when I first entered the civil engineering course, I knew very little of it. Though my parents had told me that Civil Engineering is all about Drawings, I mostly was unaware of what I might encounter in this course.

After the beginning of the course, for a few days, I really faced many troubles understanding the drawings, different views, unlike some of my friends, who were really exceptional with it. But I tried, I gave my complete concentration on improving my understanding, and after pursuing this three years of course, I’m very much confident that I’ll deal with all the drawings, that our course curriculum contains. So I’ll try to share a few tips and tricks which I’ve followed in order to improve my Technical drawings skills.

First of all, there are few points or objectives, that I’ve noticed and to which, I’ve directed my hints. If the reader can achieve these objectives, then I’d say that they are walking in the right path.

• Visualize the Drawings. See the object that’s going to be made by combining different views.
• Observe every detail of the Drawings.
• Create some other views, by having the existing views in front. This also can only be done by visualization.

I’ve divided this part of the article into two, the first part is for the students who are already aware of the drawing in Civil Engineering, and the second part is directed to the students who don’t know about Civil Engineering drawings, and also for the ones who wish to pursue studies in this field.

If you are aware of the Civil Engineering Drawings

The students who already aware of the Civil Engineering drawings, and already dealt with it, might have already known about planning. Here I’ve described the process using a building plan.

• Bring the plan of the house you live in, and put it right in front of you.
• Mark the position where you’re standing or sitting approximately on the plan using a pencil.
• Close your eyes, think you’re standing over the marked position in the plan, while the whole plan is just beneath your feet.
• Then try to build the house from scratch. Build the wall, create door openings, wall openings, create a roof, all other rooms.
• After done building, your house in imagination, notice the details you can see in front of you, while you’re thinking.
• Open your eyes, look in front of you, then see how much your thinking meets the actual house.
• Do this as many times as you’re getting a single difference. After you’ve perfected it, draw a different plan and then try out the same.

Most of the times students face trouble while drawing the sections. If anyone follows these above steps, I hope they can get a little help with it as I’ve obtained good results by following it.

If you are not aware of the Civil Engineering Drawings

For the students who wish to pursue their studies in this stream, and still not aware of what civil engineering drawing are about, they can try the following steps to improve their drawings skills, which might be very beneficial to them after they’ve entered the course:

• Took any object. Look from the top of that object. Draw what you can see.
• Now look front of the object, draw it.
• Take 4-5 view of that object(LHS, RHS), and repeat the steps.
• Now by looking at your drawings, try to combine your views you’ve drawn, until it forms a single object.
• Then open your eyes, notice how much your thinking meets the actual object.
• Repeat these steps until you’re not getting any single difference.
• After perfecting that, try to think of an object of your own, and draw the views according to that.

By following these steps, one can learn to visualize things. If one can see the drawing, and visualize how will it turn out in reality, I’m sure then they have improved their skills.

The Necessity of Technical Drawing skills

In the field of Civil Engineering, the necessity of Technical drawing skill is vast. Interpreting the drawings and implementation the same into reality, is two parts of the job, that every civil engineer needs to do, regardless of the oat they’re in.

• In the earliest phase of construction, which is planning and design phase, the planner and the design engineer needs to prepare a preliminary sketch, follows with the detail design of the structure, that will be built. So they are capable of excellent planning and visualizing things on a very short time, resulting in the creation of economical, time saving, as well as efficient plan.
• Then this drawings and designs are passed down to the construction manager which will again go down to the end of the Technical chain, which is site engineer. A fresher is most likely to be recruited within this part of the chain, so there isn’t a job profile exists in Civil Engineering, which will not be going to be dealt with Technical drawings.

So the need for the understanding and interpreting the drawings is an irreplaceable part of the Civil Engineering, which will drive the career and future of any civil engineering student, to their desired goal, which is yet to come.