Today I'm going to draw a precis sketch.
First I need a photograph. I have a photograph of Lake Taupo
that are took from a lookout from the slopes of Mount Pihanga.
Notice the oblique view of the photograph.
I will use the acronym F.D TONKS to help draw the sketch.
F.D. TONKS stands for Frame
Divisions
Title
Outline
North Point
Key
and scale.
Now my photograph of Lake Taupo was
taken from an oblique angle. So therefore I need to give it a trapezium shaped frame.
So I'll draw trapezium and the reason we need to do this is to compensate for the
fact that some features are further away or other features are going to be a lot closer.
So doing this will also require you to divide your photo up into your
foreground,
we'll have our mid ground
and we'll have our background or our horizon.
That way we can draw out precis sketch in perspective.
I will give my sketch a title. I'll call it a precis sketch of Lake Taupo.
Now I want to select the main cultural the natural features that are shown in the photograph.
I will put them in the key and include the lake
native bush
roads
a bridge
the river
buildings
wetlands
oxidation ponds
and some of the mountains in the horizon.
Now you've got to use appropriate colors for the features.
Where possible I will use the same colors that are used in many topographic maps.
For example, water is blue so in my key I will draw a box,
color it in blue. That's going to be the lake.
Forests, any kind of native forest, well that's green.
So again ... we'll make that forests ... and so on.
Now you can see here my completed key. Now we're ready to go.
Now we'll start drawing the outline on the horizon of the mountains behind the lake.
We've got Mount Tauhara here which I'm drawing and that is a rhyolitic volcano
which is behind the Taupo township.
So we've got that there sorted ...
and also there's kind of like this headland that you can see in the middle of the lake.
We'll draw that ...
and now we'll start drawing the outline of the lake itself
so I'll get this blue here. Comes around here.
Here you go that our outline.
And we want our map to be accurate, so sometimes you got
to make a correction. So I'm going back to draw peninsula over here on the lake
because we want the end of it to line up with Mount Tauhara.
So we'll come out like this and now we'll draw our cliffs and put this bump here ...
and the island is going to be over here more. So that's much better.
Now we'll add the outline for some of our other features. So what I'll do is I will
put in my oxidation ponds and I will also just get a pencil and I'll just
lightly sort of demarcate the area where the wetlands are going to be separated
from the farmland. So I'll sort of roughly go around here. I'll sort that part out later.
We also have the river. There's a river that comes around here.
Like some of it you can't see in the photo and we're going to have a road,
which is actually state highway 41 and there's actually going to be a bridge
that's going to come over the river and our road is sort of gonna ...
go around here like that. There's also a bit of scrub land nearby. So well, that's
going to fill in that gap there. We've got some exotic forest
I think planted on this side of the road and there's a patch of native forest just
up here on that side of the river. Okay, so we'll just divide that off.
Now we're ready to start coloring in our different features.
So first let's start coloring in our lake ...
OK now we're coloring in our forests.
Now to finish up coloring in. We're ready to get a light green and start shading in our farmland.
Now when I compare my sketch to topographic map I can see that
the mountain was actually northeast from where I was standing.
So therefore North must be in this direction so I'll draw my North Point
and then finally now we want to annotate some of the main features.
So we'll go Mount Tauhara, Lake Taupo,
Highway 41 .... and so on.
and here is my completed sketch.
Now if you're drawing from a bird's eye view you want to draw a frame that is the
same shape as the photograph that you're drawing from. Now in this case the
photograph I'm drawing from is 1800 by 1200 pixels.
So therefore I will use a ratio to convert to my drawing and I'll do mine by 18 centimeters by 12 centimeters.
Then also for more accuracy, what you want to do is you want to draw some
sort of grid on your photograph. So I'll divide my photograph into four.
Four quarters. And then I'll do the same on my sketch that I'm drawing here.
So I'll likely draw that like this.
So you can see I've divided it into four quarters
and from here you can go on to draw your sketch.