my kind of lines

The main problem being me is I do more than one type of drawing. Yes the years of being a draftsperson has taken it's tole. Free hand drawing is still a challenge especially on the PC. I just can't seem to get enough of a handle on it. I usually wind up drawing on paper and scanning the drawing into the PC. This can be awkward at times.

Drafting is somewhat mechanical even if it's electrical, which is the realm my training has been. Electrical drafting can be unsatisfying, schematics are so symbolic. When you get into physical hardware designing circuit boards and device enclosures, things begin to get more interesting. What I am saying is that drawing things can be as intoxicating as drawing people, if you're into that. But mechanical drawing is not what I had in mind. Now architectural subjects are cool to me. This area is what got me drawing in the first place.

I started sketching houses in pencil, then ball point pen. I was fascinated with perspective views. My drawings were all about lines and using lines to represent textures and shadows. I even managed to use lines to show reflection and transparency. Not just exterior views, also interior views. I think my knack was designing. You know, if I were doing it from scratch, I'd design it like this.

When I made the jump into computer aided design, AutoCad was/is the tool of choice. I got to use it because I worked for some industry. I could not afford to buy my own copy and as the machines to run it well went up in price/quality, so did the price of AutoCad. There have been several drafting programs out there of lesser value, usually with awkward or un-AutoCad like interfaces and features. The kicker is that all have run on the MS PC platform. There are to date a few Linux drafting programs but because I am not into that realm anymore I can not elaborate.

BUT what has turned my head is a program called Sketch UP by Google. Sketch UP does 2D and 3D drawing and shading and............runs on MS machines go figure. I tried running Sketch UP on my Linux machine using WINE a MS Windows virtual machine for Linux. Not being code savvy I couldn't make it behave. Then I got Virtualbox which is a virtual machine hosting system. You can load many different operating systems on it, I installed XP. It runs in a Linux window just as if it were installed by itself on a PC. Then I installed Sketch UP onto XP. It works great, plays nice. I do have pictures of progress...........
 
 
Not too shabby for a guy just puttering around. I use the free version Sketch UP 8. There is a Pro version I am looking at, the price is nice, but for now this is fine. Oh yeah, the first pic was processed through a rendering program to get the more realistic qualities, the second is in a sketch mode. A heck of fun anyway.