left handed hand drafting

Can anyone give my lefty son some tips for overcoming  problems he is having in his drafting class.
He is smearing stuff and just becoming very frustrated with it in  general.  He blames all of his problems in the class on being left handed.
He is 16 and a very good student .
I am a righty so what do I know about it?

I'm a little suprised that they still teach hand drafting.  Glad that they do - better to learn basics by.

I'm left handed and drafting was one of my favorite classes in HS.  It does present some issues when lettering, but for linework, no problem.  For linework, just draw the lines from right to left.  No big deal.

For lettering, I learned to support my hand on just a small part of my little finger and kind of turn my hand so that it tracks above the line of text I was working on.  It's a little awkward, and if you are doing several lines of text, you need to give the line above a few seconds to dry (if using ink).  The other option is to support with the heel of the hand on the table well below the text.  This creates a larger potential smudge spot, but more likely to be out of the way of the lettering your working on.  Of course, it's best if you can learn to letter with your hand completely off the page, as you would (should) do when drawing a line, but it's more difficult.

The only issue that left handers have that right handers don't is dragging the hand through freshly lettered text.  Figure that out and you are at no disadvantage.

Edit:  Just remembered this one:  If you are having trouble lettering acceptable text by keeping your hand up, place a triangle under the portion of your hand that you are putting on the sheet.  The triangle material, being smooth, is far less likely to smudge.  If you are using lead, this will work pretty well.  If using ink, you still need to let the last line dry before starting the next.

thanks Rusty Chain!

Fortunately, never had a problem & later started was using lettering guides &Leroy lettering. Felt sorry for the guy who had to teacn me ( he works for me today & never forgets to whine about teaching his boss how to letter.) Seems the only thing they made for us was the urinal.

Also, tell your son to keep at it. A friend of mine was a drafting supervisor for many years at American Car & Foundary & he told me the best draftsmen he saw over all of his career was left handed.

I certainly will tell him that.
I hate for him to hit a snag.
He was party chief for me this summer,wore the cell phone out but he got it done!

one word-  LEROY

I once met a radiologist who was a lefty and learned to read by sitting across the kitchen table from his older brother, while reading the comics. He could read as well upside down as right side up. If your son could manage that, he could just draw the drawing upside down.

A long time ago, a left handed drafter showed me how to put a piece of scratch paper under my hand, to keep from smearing pencil lead all over what I was doing.

Now, most of the time, whenever I am keeping notes and such, I fold up a piece of paper and hold it on my hand with a rubber band. Put the rubber band inside the folds, that way it won't drag on your paper.

Have a great day, I know I will.
Radar

Also a lefty and old enough to remember Koh-i-noor Rapidograph Pens and even learned on "ruling pens". Good advice above. All I can add is that humidity can alter the apparent hardness of the lead degree, i.e., 2H, 3H, 4H. For instance 3H lead will be like a 4H in higher humidity and behave like "F" lead in drier conditions with lots of smearing.

Leonardo DaVinci was left-handed. He seemed to do quite well with pen and brush. The problem is not with your son. Right handed people dominate the population, therefore, "systems" are geared for "righties". Trying to emulate right-handed behaviors causes the frustrations. Once he grasps the concepts, he will find his own way and develop his own techniques. It jusy takes a little more time.
MLB

Sorry, double post. Still S L O W, I see.

I worked for a while with a left-handed draftsman who turned the page 90 degrees clockwise to letter (top of the page to the right, left side of the page at the top, etc.) and lettered from top to bottom. He had taught himself to write all the letters and numbers sideways and it eliminated the potential for smudging. He was just as efficient and skilled as anybody else in the office.

The good thing is that when he needs to draft for work I will bet that 90% would be in CAD. So it does not matter whether you are a lefty.
Are there still companies doing manual drafting? I ask because the price for a Leroy set now is quite expensive. Here in the Philippines you could buy a complete Rotring set for $400 a set. With that price you could also get a license for Intellicad at $100 a license.

Move to Israel and letter all maps in Hebrew.....it reads from right to left.

No problem.

Being a lefty, I know that it is not that different than being a righty. Once I wrote with both until a teacher made me choose.

Inking properly is all in the way you hold the writing instrument and how accustomed to the techniques you are.

Learing to work with ink takes time to learn to apply a thin application of ink and not to leave a puddle that takes longer to dry.

It is correct that a person may have to adjust their way of holding the instrument apart from that of a pencil or monitored aplicator like a sharpie or roller ball.

The PILOT PRECISE brand pens are very good to learn with before moving on to a "crowfoot" or "blade" pen.

PRACTICE, PRACTICE AND THEN PRACTICE SOME MORE is the best advice I ever was given on learning how to letter property and for inking.

I hope more people than me had to write at least 10 pages of each letter of the to learn their alphabet and not just the ABC jingle.

The best lefthanded drafters I have seen letter much the same way I do.   Except for the 3 fingers actually holding the pen or pencil, the entire hand is below the line that you are lettering.  The "over the top" method that quite a few lefthanded people adopt is a very good way to mess up a drawing and not good for anything else.

BTW, I was born lefthanded and converted by the time I could walk.  Today I am about 90% ambidexterous.  Often makes life easier.

SJ

Let me preface my remarks by saying that I was never able to produce a "pretty" drawing.  My coordination or my fine motor control or something is insufficient to make a pretty drawing.  I learned to strive for legibility and uniformity.  I never did a lot of drafting but I did do some when I began work in the surveying profession.

I hesitate to mention this, but because no one else has, I'll ask.  Is your son being shown to use eraser dust as a means to allow the drafting tools to roll over the sheet instead of sliding?  I also would mask areas that I would have otherwise smudged.  I have always held my hand above the line.  If I hold it as most right-handed people do, my text tends to lean backward, something that I do not like to see in hand-lettered text.

I didn't know anyone was teaching hand drafting any more.  Perhaps he can take solace in the fact that left-handed people have to be smarter just to survive in a right-handed world...

While it is great to learn hand drafting the reality in today's world is that we have the CAD programs to do the tedious work. His class should be recognising that it is far  more important to develop the skills appropriate for today , not yesterday!

While Learning CAD is not an option,

Hand drafting is an art that requires time to develop the patients and style.  Whether left or right handed many coordinated skills must be learnt . I hated drafting at uni as I never had the temperament. later when I started business I had to learn . Marvelous what a more patient attitude does .

In reality I have to day that CAD is the only way to go !


RADU

I have pretty much the same story as you, Mike. Except it was 1964 when I was in the first grade

If I can't type it, you don't want to read it.


Cheers,
Dugger

Mike, Radar,

You 2 are just pups.  I started in 1959.

Try doing it right handed when you weren't wired that way.  It took a LOT of practice for my lettering to be good.  I actually had to learn to draw the letters.

SJ

Steven,
Like you, my dad started out left handed and ended up right handed. The teachers in Portland Oregon in 1923 would rap his knuckles real hard like every time he tried to write with his left hand. Funny thing is he ended up being 100% right handed... shooting, throwing etc. Like most left handers I'm all over the boards. I throw a ball left handed and I bat left handed, shoot guns and bows right handed, kick right footed. I guess my old man anticipated getting thumped on a lot if he pursued left handed behaviors so he converted 100%.

I'm right-handed but as hard as I tried, never was able to hand letter as well as I'd like.  When I pull an old plat out of a file from the 70's or 80's, I can spot one of mine right away because it looks like a third-grader lettered it.  My dad (and boss) told us to write everything as though we were lettering a plat.  That helped, but not enough.  I'm just happy that I took that typing class in junior high.  Who knew in the late 60's that typing would be such a handy skill 40 years later?  I feel sorry for two-finger hunt-and-peck people nowadays.

Like Steve, I made a lucky decision to take typing in high school, thinking I might want to type reports in college.  Before I got out of college I was typing stuff into an early computer (DEC PDP-11).

Then there was the guy I worked briefly with whose handwriting was so bad he had the only non-secretarial typewriter in the large company.  The trouble was you just about couldn't read his typing either.