How to illustrate your own Instructable

Step 8 Use guidelines to get things in the right place

When drawing shapes in perspective or at difficult angles it really helps to draw guides on the drawing so that you know where you should be drawing. Here I want to draw in the legs and I found it hard to get them looking right, so I drew an ellipse where I knew the legs would go to and then just drew the legs up to it. Drawing the guide made things much easier, and the beauty of the computer and a vector package is that you can just delete the line after you have finished with it (in a bit map package you would do this on a separate layer so that you could delete the layer easily when you were finished with it).

Note that when I deleted the ellipse I saw that the blue arrow looked too far in so I moved it out slightly.

Choose some colour coding for actions in your drawings and stick to it. I chose blue for glue and red for actions and I have always tried to use the same code for all my drawings. It seems to work, although I always add a note to say what sort of glue, if I think that it makes the instruction clearer.