Lost professions and skills - Technical Drawing
My son is in year 9 of secondary school at the moment and has been doing perspective drawing and some other types of technical drawing. But just on a sketchpad with a ruler. He's quite good at art and drawing, which he gets from us as we are both artists (but he isn't that interested).
This got me thinking about Technical Drawing. In the 1980s when I was at school it was a separate subject. We had rooms full of proper technical drawing boards with parallel motion bars for use with drawing tools. This was my favourite subject at school and I continued this on to A-Level Graphical Communication.
I have forgotten a lot of the techniques we were taught at the higher level, especially the architectural drawing ones such as calculating the load on a roof and things like that, but still like to do Orthographic drawings, Orthographic projection and 3D 2 point perspective drawing. I still have an A9 drawing board with parallel motion and also used to use an airbrush a lot, but not recently. I should get back into that.
I was talking to my son about this and he said they don't have drawing tables like that in school any more. This got me thinking about the core skills you learn doing technical drawing that lead into a lot of professions. It's really useful for 3D programs as the skills you get from orthographic drawing translate directly to 3D modelling, Architects and engineers also use such drawing skills (mostly computer bases these days).
So is the skill of manual technical drawing dead professionally now for those at school? Is it becoming a lost profession?
What other skills and subjects are lost or no longer taught in schools?