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Construction lines in lesson 6

12:45 PM, Tuesday September 8th 2020

So, I've been working on lesson 6 and I noticed that the many constructions lines make the drawing very messy, very quickly. So, I was wondering if we could "omit" some lines. By that I mean not draw the actually line, just mark it's end points. I was mainly considering this to reflect a line with respect to the center of a plane; the picture I included bellow illustrate that.

http://imgur.com/gallery/sg0miA9

So, to reflect line AB, we should in principle draw lines AA' and BB'. Or, we could use a straight edge to make sure AA' goes throughout the center of the plane, mark the point A' and never actually draw AA', as that line would just cluster the figure. Same goes for B'.

This method could also work when we need two points aligned with a VP, but don't actually need the line joining these points.

Anyway, is that okay? I like to avoid unnecessary lines, but I wouldn't like to have to re-do the homework because of that.

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6:08 AM, Thursday September 10th 2020

There's nothing functionally wrong with that, but I will say that I prefer the lines to be drawn for two reasons:

  • First off, it shows me precisely how the student is working through the problems, and allows me to clearly identify the steps they're taking. There's no jumps of logic or assumptions required on my part to assess whether you're using the techniques correctly or if you're eyeballing things.

  • Secondly, being able to work with a forest of lines like this is just another skill we develop. It's hard at first, but gradually it does become easier, so by avoiding it you're missing out on a skill (albeit not a super critical one when it comes to drawing as an overall skill, but still one that may be useful in some ways throughout this course).

At the very least, I certainly wouldn't ask you to redo your homework if you did things this way. You can ultimately make the call for yourself, but if you do end up avoiding the additional lines, make sure you state as much clearly in the submission in the case that it's not as obvious in your work how you jumped from one point to another.

1:09 PM, Thursday September 10th 2020

Okay, thank you!

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