Drafting/Introduction
Two sources of beauty are commonly recognized—nature and art. Natural beauties exist like the rainbow, mountains, lakes, plants, human beings, birds, and other animals. Nature is considered the Mother of all arts.
Art, on the other hand, is made by persons. Collins and Riley say that "Art is anything made or done by man that affects or moves us so that we see or feel beauty in it." Art is anything created by persons for their comfort and enjoyment, using materials, sounds, or body movements for its expression.
Two classifications of art are generally made—the fine arts and the practical arts. The fine arts, purposely created by persons for their own pleasure and appreciation, include music, painting, sculpture, architecture, literature, drama, and dance. The practical arts are also called useful, functional or manual arts since those arts were created by people for use in their daily lives. Architecture is not only functional but aesthetic as well.
The Practical Arts
The practical arts are of six general types: industrial arts, agricultural arts, business or commercial arts, home economic or homemaking arts, fishery arts and distributive arts. Industrial arts refer to activities by which a person creates or produces objects in industrial plants or home shops, such as general metal work, general automotive, drafting and graphic arts, general woodworking, general electricity, ceramics and home industries.
In the Philippines, the trade or vocational courses offered in the trade or technical schools are commonly called industrial education or trade courses and not industrial arts. These courses prepare the students for entrance into the occupations or trades.
The industrial or manual arts in the elementary schools are simpler and their main goal is not to prepare the pupils for employment but rather to explore their interests and aptitudes and to train them in good citizenship. Some of the industrial arts in the grades are bamboo craft, toy craft, shell craft, coir and fiber craft, leather craft, wire and sheet-metal craft, elementary electricity, elementary woodworking, and bookbinding.
The manual arts offered in the secondary schools are generally called practical arts. The main objective of offering practical arts in the first and second years is the same as the objective of industrial arts in the elementary schools. In the third and fourth years, however, the practical arts are chiefly offered to prepare the students for "initial gainful employment" in these arts.
Agricultural arts include farming, vegetable gardening, horticulture, swine and poultry raising, dairy farming and planting of ornamental plants.
Business arts refer to retail merchandising, lunchcounter work, typewriting, stenography, and bookkeeping.
Homemaking arts include dressmaking, crocheting, food preparation and preservation, interior decoration, nutrition, child care, hair science, and embroidery work.
In the high schools, the term home economics refers to advanced homemaking arts. Fishery arts are offered in schools located near rivers and seas. They include net weaving, shallow-water fishing, deep-sea fishing, and fish preservation. The distributive arts involve packaging, marketing, warehousing, advertising and shipping of manufactured goods.
Drafting Areas
Drafting is the process of representing an object or idea by means of lines having various thicknesses and makeups. Drafting is an industrial art because it helps in the production of economically useful articles. Practically all modern home appliances, automobiles, buildings, radio and television sets, space satellites, rockets, etc., start on the drawing or drafting board. They are first designed and laid out on paper before being made in the factories.
The major kinds of drafting are furniture drafting, architectural drafting, mechanical or machine drafting, electrical and electronics drafting, topographical drafting, airplane drafting, ship or naval drafting, structural drafting and sheet-metal drafting. Furniture drafting includes not only the making of working drawings of the various types of furniture but also the designing of them. Architectural drafting pertains to the making of working plans for buildings for residential, business, manufacturing, religious, recreational and storage purposes. Machine drafting is the preparation of detail and assembly working drawings of machines and their parts. Electrical and electronics drafting produces schematic wiring diagrams for either house wiring connections and radio and television receivers and transmitters or the installation of electrically-operated machines. Topographical drafting is the making of plots or maps for various purposes. Airplane drafting concerns the preparation of working drawings of aircraft, including helicopters, planes, rockets and spaceships. Ship drafting is the making of working plans for all types of ship and for either commercial or naval purposes. Structural drafting refers to the making of working drawings of steel buildings, bridges, towers, dams and so forth. Sheet-metal drafting is the development of surfaces of various objects made of galvanized iron, steel aluminum or copper sheets. It includes pattern development for chimneys, downspouts, water tanks and air-conditioning ducts, among many others.
Drafting Occupations
The occupations which a drafting student can apply for after graduation depend on the type of drafting area he specialized in at school. He can be a mechanical or machine draftsman, furniture designer, architectural draftsman, topographical draftsman, structural draftsman, electrical draftsman, or naval draftsman. A new drafting graduate is usually first employed either as an assistant draftsman, tracer, blueprinter, checker, or computer before becoming a full-fledged draftsman.
Allied Drafting Trades
Drafting work is also needed by craftsman in other occupations like the commercial artist, layout-stripper, and lithographic artist in printing establishments, textile designer and silk-screen printer.
A commercial artist manufactures signs, commercial posters and advertisements for the newspapers and magazines and on billboards. He also makes promotion pictures for theaters and car cards. A commercial artist can also be a lithographic artist, one whose job is to make pictures and pages of text from engraved zinc or aluminum plates because of the similarity in the nature of his work to that of the latter.
A layout-stripper is a skilled worker who prepares layouts and strips negatives or positives on goldenrod paper or vinyl sheet, respectively, preparatory to the making of the lithographic printing plate for offset printing. A textile designer designs motifs and all-over patterns appropriate for printing on textiles.
A silk-screen printer draws and prepares stencils out of lacquer-coated paper(called Nu-film or Blu-film in the market), which is made to adhere to a silk-screen frame for printing purposes.