Baby boomers beware—you will be hooked on Jim Leggitt's Drawing Shortcuts book from his first two sentences: "I took my first drawing lessons when I was five years old, courtesy of TV. There was a television program in the 1950s called Learn to Draw, hosted by Jon Gnagy."

Remember that? It was so much fun! For those of you deprived by youth or age (or lack of a TV set) from taking part, you basically traced televised drawings on paper placed right over the screen. Leggitt points out that Gnagy's program was a cutting edge idea of combining technology with hand drawing. "Forty-five years later, I'm still working with machines to create drawings, and I'm still having just as much fun," writes the architect/urban planner/professional illustrator from RNL Design in Denver.

Leggitt's delight shows, in the enthusiastic text as well as the scads of his architectural drawings—all kinds imaginable—that make up Drawing Shortcuts. It is that ineffable Architect Delight, the confident self-possessed joy of having filled a need creatively and well. Leggitt explains that his techniques arose from the pressures of time management and the need to "produce great work with minimal time and no money," that begins with architecture school and continues straight through professional practice. He points out that hand drawing has suffered with the rise of the computer age, and that he wrote the book to show that "by utilizing technology on your own terms, you can improve your drawing skills and even bring back the magic of drawing in the process!"

The right tools
Computer skills have edged out drawings skills in many architecture curricula, says Leggitt, who teaches a drawing shortcuts course to graduate students at the University of Colorado College of Architecture and Planning. But with the right combination of tools (check out Chapter 4, "Learning Your CCCs" [cameras, copiers, and computers]), even the most diehard computer geeks can ease into the benefits and pleasures of hand drawing. These include overcoming the "unfriendliness" of computer-generated drawings that may not be able to capture the designer's intended feel and spirit of place.

The CCCs chapter, perhaps most all, points out how the right tools and a little architect imagination and ingenuity can create beautiful drawings relatively quickly. For instance, Leggitt presents a series of three easy steps that turn a 4x6 color photo (in this particular case, of an alleyway) which is blown up to 11 x 17 on a standard office copier, overlaid with tracing paper and red penciled up into a small park, then turned into a final drawing via a vellum overlay created with felt-tip pen. The chapter also discusses digital photography, and how to take great photographs for drawing, including composite techniques. And those adept with CAD will greatly appreciate the "drawing from wireframes" section.

The chapter that immediately follows, "Tools of the Trade," discusses pluses and minuses of different pens, pencils, markers, and papers. There are many tips and techniques in this section that had me muttering, "Wish I had known that one in school," and "Geez, why didn't I think of that!"

• "Red [pencil] lines are easy to see beneath a second sheet of vellum as the final black pencil drawing is completed." (Of course they are! Then why did I always use black?)
• "Try tracing a car from brochures and advertisements." (Maybe they wouldn't have all looked like demonic roller skates!)
• "Watch out when sharpening, because some colored pencils have the color name and identification number at one end. Make sure to sharpen the other end of the pencil so you don't grind away the information you'll need to reorder more of that color." (Who would be dumb enough to do that? I was! And I never could find that perfect terra cotta shade again.)

Drawing types
In more general terms, Leggitt also addresses a fundamentally simple, yet crucially important point: how you start your drawing. He runs the gamut from "using your imagination" to using direct observation of what you want to draw to projected images. He even harks back to his first teacher's technique of taping mylar to a TV or computer image and tracing from the screen. And here's one we'll bet most people have thought of: "It's a stretch, but you could even focus a camcorder on a photograph you want to draw, hook the video camera up to your television, and trace the enlarged photo from the screen. You can even patch the camcorder into an LCD projector and draw from the projection. It all depends on what equipment you have available. Experiment!"

One of the best parts of Drawing Shortcuts is the wide variety of drawing types Leggitt presents, from thumbnails to axonometrics to perspectives (one-, two-, and three-point). He offers a clear definition of each type of drawing and when it might be used, and along the way offers a number of ways to make choices for various decisions: Color or black/white? What's the right view? What's the best drawing size? The section on each drawing type ends with a "QuickTips" page that details in bullet points some simple tricks of the trade. These tips alone are worth the price of the book (if you would like to see a sample list, see this week's Best Practices section).

I traded my Prismacolors for a typewriter years ago, and I can't say that was wrong for me. But Drawing Shortcuts is such a good book I'm thinking of messing around with some crayons and canary paper this weekend, just for fun. Everyone should find a thing or two to like in this book, and a thing or two (or three) to learn.

Copyright 2002 The American Institute of Architects. All rights reserved.