Drawing Airfield Layouts

olympusman, the pencil is a 19th Century instrument, you need to get into the modern age. Your mission is to download Paint.net, this evening. You know it makes sense.

Computer drawn plans look computer drawn and my first attempts had blocky straight lines. Scanned pencil or Rotring pen drawn ones look smoother somehow, though less prefessional. My next question is what canvas size do you start with in Paint.net as it must be large to avoid the blocking?
My interest is in the phases of airfield (rather like norwichpaul's excellent drawing of Northolt above). My drawings were all on tracing paper (to allow overlays) and pre-computer and pre ATB plans and are sometimes grid enlargements of photos in books - i.e. inaccurate!

Peter

PNK, I just scan an original plan (at A4) at the lowest res poss, then open it in Paint.Net at what ever the appropitate canvas size is (the programme sets this to the scanned image). If later I want to increase the canvas to add a title or key etc then that is v easy to do. The runway lines are not really jaggid that much you would never know at A4 or even A3 (they look like straight lines). I printed the above plan in glossy colour at A3 (photographic quality) and it was superb. It looks a mess as a reduced JPeg in the above post. I use these drawings in my reports and they do look good, especially in colour where I can illustrate the period in which a building (or runway) was built, even extensions to buildings. Or show which buildings were surveyed to what level, or colour code building types etc. The list is endless and limitless. Once you have a basic plan drawn, its so easy to use it again and again to highlight different things. To do this all by hand would take up too much time. Like I said before the programme has saved my life. I dont agree about your comment that plans drawn look as if they were done on the Computer, CAD yes they are awful, I get CAD maps for my work and thy are terrible a complete mess and nothing like old fashioned OS maps. My avatar was drawn in Paint.Net which is the north sign I now use in my drawings.

Having got my scanner working again I have no excuse but to try again.
Thanks for all the helpful advice. It'll probably take a few weeks to decide which one to draw!

Peter