During our last class we started to practice the mechanical drawings on 24” by 36” tracing paper. In order to start drawing on such a large piece of paper, there are some steps that we need to do before we start. First thing that we should always do is to clean the desk on which we will be drawing as we should not have anything like under the piece of paper we need to draw on. After we clean the surface, we need to tape the tracing paper to the drawing board. When taping the paper, we should pull it a little, so we create the tension in paper and reduce the air pockets under the paper. When we tape one corner of the paper, we should tape the diagonally opposite corner the second. Last step after we taped the paper is to align the parallel edge to the edge of paper. After the paper is properly set up on the drawing board, we are ready to start the drawings.

 

The first thing that we should always start with is to set up the drawing on the center of the sheet of paper. We can do it by drawings to center lines one horizontal and one vertical. This is very important to place the drawing on the middle of the sheet of paper because if we would begin our drawing in different parts of the paper, then the probability of not fitting the drawing on the paper will increase. Starting the drawing from the center also helps to set up the limits and choose the right scale for the drawing. When beginning drawing the floor plan it is also important to start drawing the largest elements such as dimensions of the entire building, as well as the gridlines for the columns. We should always start with the biggest elements and draw the smallest details at the end, especially for the symmetrical buildings us Federal Hall.