With 6H you get lighter line, but only in colour. It can be actually harder to erase, because you naturally tend to push the pencil harder to see it, thus denting the paper and leaving the graphite at the bottom of a groove where the eraser cannot lift it. Those harder leads have great amounts of clay that very easily scratch the paper.
I go on the opposite direction, being my favorite lead a 4B: you need very low pressure to leave visible marks, that you can erase very easily with a kneaded eraser.
You are right that a 6H will hold the tip for way longer. Only if I don't need to remove the marks I would use the harder leads.
I took woodshop too. The shop teacher seemed to enjoy scaring us with stories of the students that goofed off in shop to horrific consequences. That's also where I learned to be careful with air compressors around open wounds.
That sounds like you may have learned the same way I learned that 1: when a USGS topo map indicates an unimproved road, it may be out of date, 2: don't take your father's four-wheel-drive truck down a late-winter, corn-snow-covered dirt road when the temperature is starting to drop in the late afternoon 3: Don't go down a dirt road on a hill covered in corn snow without walking the path first to make sure you can get out or get back up. 4: When looking for a winter campsite for your Boy Scout troop, tell your parents where you're going.
Make your web sites obvious, people!
https://www.homedepot.com/b/Tools-Hand-Tools-Marking-Tools-L...
An eraser shield is a good addition to the tools list - that came in handy often.
Love the tracing paper tip - that’d be helpful to remove the digital aspect of taking a picture a digitally sketching on top.
I like the basic Pentel P205/207/209 pencils, but the basically disposable plastic Bics would probably be well suited to the short, brutal life they'd lead in the shop.
Loved the article and the joy of the process. The outcome is spectacular and shows the care that went into it.
I should try that. I got the exact opposite advice in university, and I have terrible line thicknesses.
Love hand-drawn viz, recently I’ve been looking at the French National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (INSEE) and they have a great collection of all their reports, from pre-1900s to now. I especially appreciate this beautiful one about people with mental illness in the Seine department… from 1889. The typography is chef’s kiss https://www.bnsp.insee.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b52510983q/f49.item...
(After years of reading Hacker News this post motivated me to finally make an account and upvote. Data viz is so fun)
An amateur of old hand drawn maps (Michelin road, and older).
[0]: https://books.google.com/books/about/Semiology_of_Graphics.h...
I am willing to suck it but the kerning is still killing me. (I love everything about this btw)
In the mid-2010s, I was interning at the German federal statistical office. Some of the team assistants were there since the 1980s/90s and had still learnt to use those tools as part of their vocational training. They also showed me the tools and the instructions for drawing exactly aligned tables by hand and the resulting bound sets of tables with hundreds of pages. Completely mind-boggling how much time they must have spent on a single project, now all automated away.
This may me wonder that. Why people like things to be done so quick? Because life is short. You can do limit of things in your life. So just do as many as possible.
Why? Why we can't just slow it down. Why we just enjoy the life. Is that we slow down we can't survive? Is we slow down that we will left behind? So be it! Just change a life, maybe is difficault, maybe is hard. But you slow down. you can concentrate to do one thing. You can enjoy the prccess. May be meet some beautiful thing.
I envy you can focus on one thing for 50 hours straight. This is what we can't do in this noisy, rush, busy plase in this very downtown.
A comment from who live in a city and cage here can't getaway.
I love it.
The peak irony is that most of us work in a field that exists so that people don't need to do that stuff for 50 hours.
I'd also wish more graphs would come with this level of detail as this image from the article [0]. It would be so useful to see precisely where the data points are and how the line and interpolation are constructed.
[0] https://www.dougmacdowell.com/images/hand-drawn-data-outline...
Unfortunately I do not see specific discussion of how to make the lines a consistent thickness. It does have notes on how to sharpen your pencil and how to use a carpenters spline to draw smooth curves though.
If you're inking your drawings, you probably don't need to worry all that much about the exact line width and consistency of your pencil work.
N.b. I don't ink my drawings. I've used drafting pens a couple times to experiment, but it's not part of my regular workflow.
https://www.jetpens.com/blog/The-Best-Technical-Drawing-Pens
Set the mood for today.
Unfortunately can't upvote.. your karma says 6666. May return when the spell is broken.
A "ruling pen" would help. It's like a fountain pen where you can adjust the width of the ink.
[0]: https://www.bethmathews.com/shop/partslistdraftpaperfontbund...
What if for digital fonts, there was a way to write the same letter 2 or more different ways? Adding slight variations to the same letter would mimic the effect of using hand tools.
Love the article, this is why I browse HN.
My book suggestion is more illustration than technical drawing but still has a 1940s/50s vibe: Thinking with a Pencil by Henning Helms. Covers illustrations, tracing, tables, maps and diagrams as well as 3d sketches.
I gather that Tufte was influenced by John Tukey's 1977 book Exploratory Data Analysis which introduces the box and whisker plot, dot plot and so on.
As to software, another poster has mentioned Tikz (usually used with LaTeX) and yes it is amazingly flexible and can produce just about any kind of plot (or diagram) you want. But there are older tools such as the groff (GNU Troff) system's pic and a pre-processor for pic called grap which is much more barebones. The latter was also influenced by Tukey's book. The groff/pic/tbl/eqn/grap install is something like 30Mb and it is available in most Linux distribution package repositories.
https://www.lunabase.org/~faber/Vault/software/grap/example/
Oh and remember star charts for astronomers! Many hand plotted before the photographic surveys were produced. Norton's Star Atlas is a famous one (prior to the 2000.0 epoch edition) that was hand drawn.
Even if they aren't always as nice, a kid can have graphs for weekly homework that would have been hours of work by a professional back then.
50 hours to draw a line graph vs. a few minutes trying various styles in PowerPoint.
Stop letting machines make graphs, pay a draftsman like we used to do!
(I'm fairly dense though, so I probably completely missed that the author was instead simply espousing the joys of learning a new handicraft.)
Being a young man then, I was our offices champion of new technology, but years of legacy projects still being tied off meant I had no choice but to learn and practice many of the manual skills.
So my job was a weird mix of pushing everybody into the cutting edge of tech, then having to go and do some 50-100+ year old processes using special pens and papers and even chemicals.
For example, the look up the 'diazo machine' -style of copier. Then imagine going into a small room with an armful of 30 x A1-sized engineering plans, and standing next to this machine for 2 hours slowly feeding in each page while surrounded by ammonia fumes. These days, the Wikipedia page says : "When making multiple copies of an original no more than four or five copies can typically be made at a time, due to the build-up of ammonia fumes, even with ventilation fans in the duplication room", but back then the working reality was more like "Junior staff member! I need four copies of these! <hands over armful of A1>".
Much cooler was the Houston Instruments pen plotter. A machine whose vacuum bed (think of air hockey) held the paper down while rollers ratcheted it back and forth at high speed, and a robotic pen arm 'printed' out a plan by physically drawing it with pens. It automatically changes to different pens when it needs different line thicknesses (or even colours). All done at such a whirlwind of organised precision, it was a joy to watch.
Another aspect of the manual age was the notion of Originals, or Master Copies. That is, for important documents, there'd be a master copy printed out on high grade stock - often archival grade, multi-layered Mylar or similar, for stability and durability. It could be hard work when a project made a late change, because at worst you might find yourself having to (e.g.) manually remove and extremely-carefully redraw an entire table of figures on a master plan. Sometimes just because row 1 of that table had changed such that the rest had to be moved down. The removal involved caaarrrefully buffing the ink off the page using a rotating electric eraser. If you put a hole in the plan by rubbing too hard on one spot, god help you. Doing that, then having to get 5 different signatures from high people in various offices redone on a new master copy, while a large project could be held up for weeks while delays and interest and costs accrue, would be considered a fairly notable faux pas.
The pen plotter sounds phenomenal. I've used some modern budget friendly ones - but don't think they compare to what you describe here.
(But the temperatures should have been recorded on the Réaumur scale.)
Since I usually cannot spend 50 hours on a chart, I wonder why it is so hard to make decent graphs with the usual Office packages. They make it easy to create something and for others to contribute, but have really bad defaults. Even when you make the effort to adjust, you can still tell the program. And templating does not really work either.
What do you use?
[0] https://www.dougmacdowell.com/hand-drawn-data-visualizations...
While not as authentic as a hand-drawn chart, I find Decker can produce HyperCard-like graphs nicely.
It's ok, I can wait...
One super helpful tip I got from an actual trained draftsman is to use harder pencil lead for your layout and construction lines. Like 6H to 9H. You'll get a much lighter line to erase later. It'll also hold a finer point for longer.
I prefer lead holders to wooden pencils. They take 2mm lead, and you sharpen them with a lead pointer. K&E pointers are readily available on eBay, as are the abrasive cups that do the actual sharpening. The plastic trash can ones will get the job done, but are unsatisfying from a tactile standpoint.
A decent lead holder is a trick to find. The Alvin one I bought is too loose and the lead slips up into it. The Staedtler one doesn't close tightly at the tip and support the lead well enough to prevent breaking. The Prismacolor one is satisfactory, and I inherited a vintage one that I love from the aforementioned draftsman.
I recommend an erasing shield to make revising your pencil work without erasing too much. Another person I know with an art background tipped me off to putting tracing paper over your main drawing to iterate on details before committing them to paper to reduce erasing.
Drafting vellum is pretty forgiving of erasing, but it has a toothier surface that can get a little dingy if you're working on a drawing for a while. I've never tried Bristol board; I don't need immaculate drawings for reproduction, just good enough ones to build from.
Happy drawing. It's an immensely satisfying process for me. If you're detail oriented, you'll likely find it enjoyable too.