Sketching technique, proportion, and line control without instruments — the basic hand movements needed to draw proportional single, multi-view and pictorial drawings on plain paper.
Not every drawing starts with a ruler and compass. Freehand drawing — sketching without instruments — is how engineers and designers quickly explore ideas before committing to an accurate instrument drawing. It's faster, but it still isn't careless: freehand work follows the exact same SANS 0111/0143 line-type conventions as instrument drawing.
All writing on an EGD drawing — titles, dimensions, notes — follows the SANS 0111/0143 single-stroke lettering style: plain, upright (or uniformly sloped) capital letters and numerals, every one the same height, with even spacing between letters and words.
Confident freehand lines come from how you move, not just how carefully you aim:
An accurate freehand circle almost always starts with a guideline, not a single blind stroke:
Blocking-in is the single most important freehand skill CAPS assesses at Grade 10: before you sketch any detail, lightly rough in an overall bounding box (Type C) that captures the object's correct proportions — its width-to-height ratio and the position of its major features. Only once the blocking guidelines are in place do you sketch the real outline over them in a darker Type A line.
A common Grade 10 task is to enlarge a small reference drawing freehand by an exact ratio, e.g. 2:1. The blocking-in method makes this manageable: scale the bounding block itself by the same ratio in both directions (double both width and height for a 2:1 enlargement), subdivide the enlarged block the same way you subdivided the original, and then sketch the enlarged outline using those guides. This keeps every proportion identical to the original — just bigger.
CAPS specifically allows freehand sketching "on plain paper and/or grid sheets" — and a plain square grid is one of the most effective proportion aids there is. Instead of guessing measurements, describe the object in grid squares: "the body is 6 squares wide and 3 squares tall, with a hole 2 squares in from the left." Sketching multi-view (front and side view) drawings on a raster grid is how you'll practise reading and reproducing proportions before moving on to instrument-drawn orthographic projection.
A pictorial (3D-look) freehand sketch is far easier to keep consistent on an isometric grid: a pattern of lines running vertically, and at 30° to the horizontal in both directions. These three directions are the three isometric axes. As long as every edge of your sketch runs along one of these three grid directions, your pictorial sketch will look proportioned and consistent — even freehand, with no instruments at all.
Practise the two core freehand skills below. Draw with your mouse or finger — the app measures how close your stroke came to the target and gives you feedback, just like a teacher checking your line control.
Each exercise below prints as a full-scale A3 sheet — the same format used in EGD practical assessments. These sheets give you guide targets only; the actual sketching happens on paper with a pencil, not a ruler. Use your printer's "Actual Size" setting (not "Fit to Page").