Legend Block — Sheet 4 of 4

Don't lean on the sheet. Elbow off — mylar takes a skin print and the ink beads right off it, and I am not scrubbing your forearm oil out of a symbol box on a Saturday. Sit on my left where you're not in the window light. There. I'm inking this one at 1:240, so everything you see here is drawn the size it will actually sit on the sheet, which is the whole point of a legend and the part people get lazy about.

Line weight is the rule I don't bend. If breakdown is 0.35 on the plan, breakdown is 0.35 in this box. Draw the key at some pleasant medium weight and you've made a liar out of the entire sheet — somebody in the passage compares the box to the line and can't match them, and now they don't trust the wall either. Match it or don't bother.

Hold the pen upright. Ninety degrees, straight down the barrel. The second you cant it, the 0.13 skips and you've got a hairline gap in the middle of a wall, and a gap in a wall means lead to whoever's reading it in a Ziploc bag with wet gloves on. Number keys pick the nib. Try them on the proof strip at the bottom before you put one on the sheet — that's what it's there for, that's the only reason it exists.

Tuesday's fine. Where were we — the pit. You put the number on the downslope side of the hachures, every time, because the hachures already tell you which way is down and the number then reads in the same direction your eye is already traveling. Put it on the upslope side and somebody standing at the lip reads twenty-two feet as belonging to the ledge above them. That is a real way to get hurt, and it takes me two seconds to place it right.

Now go make a mess on the proof strip. Hold still on it a second and watch it pool — that's what a real dwell looks like, and it's why I don't stop mid-line to talk to you. Click any box in the key and it stamps that symbol down at whatever nib you've got selected, correctly sized. Clean pen, clean line, and I'll be done by three.