When I was at college we did some water colour renderings of some of the designs. Some done on dyeline prints on a heavy paper others on HP watercolour paper The teacher was an old boy architect and had some nicely done examples of his work. There were certainly specific colours for the various building materials.

Andrew has previously posted some nicely coloured elevations of an engine that his father (or grandfather) did. About half way down this album

Some good ones here, there used to be a Japanese site with these on that you could zoom right in to but doe snot seem to be working now. Unless Michael wants a challenge http://gazo.dl.itc.u-tokyo.ac.jp/petit/category/cate04.html

Edited By JasonB on 30/10/2022 20:52:37

It was last archived back in 2018, but unfortunately it looks like just the main pages, rather than the details
https://web.archive.org/web/20180102120742/http://gazo.dl.itc.u-tokyo.ac.jp/petit/category/cate04.html

Bill

Michael

Tubal Cain (T D Walshaw) lists nine colours for different metals/materials on P168 of my copy of the Model Engineer's handbook. (seventh impression 1991)

Will try to get an image online.

Cheers

Dave

I have a wonderful old book, A Manual of Machine Drawing and Design, published in 1899, It includes the following (as well as how to make your best best black ink by rubbing a block of Indian Ink powder in water etc.

The authors are one David Allan Low and one Alfred William Bevis, both of whom proudly include Whitworth Scholar after their names on the title page. Apparently old Sir Joseph W set up the scholarship so ex-apprentices could go to university to complete an engineering degree. Proper engineers they were then.

In the front of my copy of the book there is a certjficate glued in saying it was presented on behalf of the G.E.R. Mechanics Institution as a Prize Award to one WH Smith. (No not that WH Smith, he were dead by then) by a Miss Audrey Makins at Town Hall, Stratford, E. on December 5th 1900. No idea who WH was. Possibly an apprentice who topped his exams or some such?

A little bit of history anyway. Nice to feel I am in such good company when reading it. It contains all you needed to know in 1900 about designing and drawing steam engines and boilers. I bought it for the lovely drawings in the back of a triple expansion engine, with dreams of building one. But decided I would need another lifetime to get all these projects done. Have enquired with the authorities upstairs about such a proposition, but so far no reply!

It was drawn by my grandfather in indian ink and watercolour wash, dated March 1908. He was chief draughtsman at Westland Aircraft in Yeovil from 1925 to 1939, when he moved to Airspeed, also as chief draughtsman. At Airspeed he knew Neville Shute Norway very well.

Andrew

A chart showing what the base colours look like and their hex values, but beware! They won't be visually correct unless the viewer's display device is colour calibrated.

The colour chart above presents slightly differently on the two screens I use for CAD.

Another misleading factor is the colours are all fully saturated, which is rarely the case on drawings I've seen. Seems more usual for drawings to be coloured with a light wash rather than blocked out garishly.

Colour coding is frowned upon in my Technical Drawing Books.

• Not a good way of identifying materials . From the mid-19th century materials came in ever increasing variety so, apart from in Arrangement Drawings, it was necessary to specify which one by writing it down.
• The human eye is not good at identifying shades of colour, and shades vary with lighting, age, and type of paper. The method is unreliable.
• It's expensive!!!
• Early copy processes, like Blueprints, were saturated monochome and demanded starkly contrasted drawings, typically black ink on white paper. They could do hatching, but not fields of colour.

Always dangerous to generalise, but the main use of colour is Arrangement Drawings and for Public Relations. In arrangements, colour is as likely to identify features as materials – ship plans are often tinted to highlight things like machinery spaces.

I'm against colour as a way of identifying materials in drawings. Mostly…

Dave

Maybe the coloured GA drawings, used for sales and promotion purposes, were the early equivalent of the PowerPoint presentation?

Slightly different subject I guess, but I did a course at work on engineering drawings to BS8888 a few years back. The person running the course has been involved in compiling and updating the relevant standards. He’d asked for examples of our drawings to critique, and a couple of mine were sent.

In CAD I always drew my outlines in green or cyan, and the dimension lines etc. in red. Sometimes these were printed in black with different line weights, but sometimes I printed them in colour. I just found them far easier to read when I knew at a glance that the green was the part. Might sound obvious, but with a complex drawing with lots of leader lines, hatching and centrelines, the part outline or section often doesn’t jump out at you; it sometimes takes some looking at.

The person running the course said he’d not come across drawings in colour before, and as far as he could remember there was nothing in the standard stating it wasn’t recommended, nor that there were standard colours if you chose to print them.