Over the years, there have been a number of products that I struggled to find locally. Before online shopping became popular, I looked everywhere for isometric graph paper, at least all the office supply and art stores I happened upon, and it took me a while to find some.
Now, digital 3D modeling software has largely replaced manual sketching and visualization processes, but I still like to draw things out by hand occasionally, and isometric paper helps with 3D visualizations.
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Perhaps I still like using isometric paper in part because I worked so hard to find it years ago. It also touches upon my fondness for technical drawing, but without the hassle of having to find a suitable drawing surface for a t-square and drafting triangle.
Basically, isometric paper has vertical lines and diagonal lines drawn at 30° angles. Instead of the small square boxes that you get with traditional graph paper, isometric paper has small equilateral triangles with 60 degree angles.
Isometric drawings let you visualize the top, front, and side views of an object. Sure, you could do the same sketches free-hand or with some drafting tools, but not quite as easily. My project sketches and plans are still very informal, but isometric paper makes them much easier to visualize, and with hardly more effort than a napkin sketch. A ruler or straightedge helps, but it’s not absolutely necessary.
Lee Valley has some inexpensive isometric drawing pads, with solid lines 1/2″ apart and dotted lines 1/4″ apart with 1/16″ dot spacing. You can get a 50-sheet pad of 8-1/2″ x 11″ paper for just under $4.
Pro Art (via Amazon) has a 50-sheet pad of 8-1/2″ x 11″ isometric paper for $7.
Alvin (via Amazon) has a pack of 100 sheets sized 8-1/2″ x 11″ for ~$14.50.
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There are other brands on Amazon as well. I’ve used Staedtler in the past, but at the moment I can’t find it at a good price online.
P.S. The Rotring 600 mechanical pencil is still on sale, just in case you wanted to pick up some new paper and a (figuratively) shiny new pencil to use it with. If you need a straightedge, I just bought an Alumicolor 12″ 3230-series scale and it seems well-made and versatile, and at a lower price than my solid one. Or pick up an acrylic ruler for cheap – lots of stores are having school supply sales right now.
Jared
I never would have considered it but for finding it here, but that does strike me as a great idea for drawing quick project sketches. I’m going to zip down to Lee Valley and get some to try.
Wayne R.
I’ve got a pad/book of Isometric paper in my list that I haven’t pulled the trigger on just yet; its “author” is Isometric Paper Print:
https://www.amazon.com/s?i=stripbooks&rh=p_27%3AIsometric+Paper+Print&s=relevancerank&text=Isometric+Paper+Print&ref=dp_byline_sr_book_1
I haven’t bought it yet since the listing doesn’t say exactly how it’s bound (it says “book” in its title) – I really prefer a steno style notebook for field/portability. They’re the right size to stash in a bag, stiff enough to not need a table and flips open & flat. It’s $7, so ultimately not a big deal and will get it soon enough.
GREGORY NEWLAND
Any sources on a Field Notes size book with isometric grid?
PETE
Might have to get this for my friend who is a welder/fabricator. He’s terrible at isometric drawings lol. TERRIBLE.
Wayne R.
That sounds like a crippling mismatch of skills.
PETE
Hahaha he’s not the designer/engineer! He just has a hard time of translating a 4d item via pen & paper to a flat plane. Great welder & fabricator though.
James Madara
Or you can print your own at: http://www.printfreegraphpaper.com/
Koko The Talking Ape
I haven’t priced it out in a few years, but some laser printers were substantially cheaper per page than ink jets, sometimes by 75%.
And it probably does cost more to print it yourself, but you never run out, and if you need just a few pages now and then, printing your own is more convenient than waiting for a pad to be shipped to you.
Also, you can reduce printing costs by just printing the dots where the lines join, instead of the entire lines. It also makes for a brighter, more open-looking page. I’m sure there’s a template or file you can download out there. Or make your own (you’d need something like Adobe Instyle.)
Koko The Talking Ape
Oops, replied to the wrong comment. I meant this to go under Josh’s comment about printing cost below.
Koko The Talking Ape
My comment above was meant to go here, but I won’t repeat it, except to say that lo, there is indeed a downloadable isometric dot page. That will save ink and expense. I also like it better; the page is brighter, so ordinary pencil stands out better on it. It will also be quicker to print, if that matters.
Here’s the pdf.
https://www.waterproofpaper.com/graph-paper/isometric-dot-paper.pdf
Koko The Talking Ape
Hm, some weirdness going on with text in this comment block being carried over to a new comment.
Anyway, I was just going to point out that http://www.printfreegraphpaper.com/ just has ordinary graph paper (what they call “Cartesian”), not isometric.
Wayne R.
It’s got eight choices available, one of which is Isometric. And RC, I don’t know why it’d be risky, it’s just some PDF downloads, worked fine.
RC Ward
That comes up as a “Risky” website. Just saying
John
Print for free as much as you want: https://www.waterproofpaper.com/graph-paper/isometric-paper.shtml
This is just not something where commerce is needed, other than plain paper and a printer. You can print as little or as much as needed. Less waste.
Josh
Believe it or not, using an inkjet printer at home costs between 9 and 20 cents per page. May not seem like much, but on the pricy end of that scale 50 sheets of graph paper costs you $10 to print.
Personally I just like the feel of a nice pad or book of graph paper.
Koko The Talking Ape
My comment above was meant to go here, but I won’t repeat it, except to say that lo, there is indeed a downloadable isometric dot page. That will save ink and expense. I also like it better; the page is brighter, so ordinary pencil stands out better on it. It will also be quicker to print, if that matters.
Here’s the pdf.
https://www.waterproofpaper.com/graph-paper/isometric-dot-paper.pdf
John
Your numbers are accurate. I build wood and steel projects for commercial clients, restaurants, clothing store, yoga studio, etc, I have a laser printer which chugs along at approximately $0.15 per page total for cost of printer and a penny per sheet of paper (4 years so far for the printer). That cost will continue to decline over the life of the printer. Anyone is welcome to buy whatever they want, but I have paper, I have a printer, and I can make a few sheets of grid or isometric lines whenever I need from free sources online. Seems pretty simple to me. I don’t need a pad of 50, I might just need a few sheets per project. Honestly I can draw just fine with plain white paper and a ruler. Looks better anyway to a client.
Koko The Talking Ape
So you are amortizing the cost of the printer in the cost per page? How do you do that? How does the amortized cost for an ink jet printer compare?
When I ran an IT department back in the day, the printers we were looking at cost about $1,200. The cost of consumables per page was about 1/4 cent per page. The printers lasted more than twelve years, and must have printed many tens of thousands of pages each, maybe hundreds of thousands. What would the amortized printer cost per page be?
JoeM
Y’know, I think I’m with you on this Koko. Back when I worked in a computer store, we tried to figure out the overhead cost of printing with our inkjet, versus trying an old laser, versus a dot matrix printer. We had to factor in ink/toner cartridge costs, as well as paper costs, as well as the speed of the printer.
We ultimately decided, for business purposes, we figured out that the cost of the actual PRINTER couldn’t make us any money off printing things, if we wanted to do any signage or desktop printing/scanning for people. All we could do was write off the cost of the printer, then calculate how many pages it would take to have that printer pay for itself in desktop printing jobs. We could never get the Inkjet, Laser, and Dot Matrix to pay for themselves with any equation we tried.
What we COULD do, was calculate per Page and Ink/Toner Cartridge/Ribbon costs, and see when a Cartridge paid for itself as a dedicated Printing Service printer, and not just our invoice printer.
I have to say… Printing off your own Graph Paper to use on projects seems like a good idea, until you break down the costs. Even if you use OEM/Recycled cartridges, the Math ends up being better to buy a pad of graph paper.
$40/Case of paper=10 Reams=5000 sheets.
1 Sheet=(($40/10)/5000)=$0.0008
Recycled Ink Cartridges getting 150 pages per load @$20 per set:
(5000/150)*$20=$666.66 per case.
Total cost of printing 5000 sheets of graph paper: (Cartridges+Paper)/5000 sheets: $0.13 per page base cost to print.
Taking the Lee Valley 50 sheet pad: $4/50 sheets… It’s $0.08 per sheet to buy.
So… You save a nickel per sheet to buy the pre-made pads. Funny enough, that’s a SAVINGS of $4 over printing it… Enough to buy a SECOND pad of 50 sheets. So it STILL pays to buy them, not print them yourself. If Lee Valley goes on one of its “Free Shipping over $40” offers again, you can get 10 pads, 1500 sheets total, and only the TAXES to add to the expense.
Honestly, I think it’s worth buying the packages over printing them. The math doesn’t really lie here. I wish it did. Especially considering I used the cost of Recycled ink, not factory-direct ink, which is often 60% more expensive. We’re talking $80 instead of $20 for the set. Sometimes a little more, or a little less. And that would send the cost per page through the roof.
So, I think I question the practice for cost, and I think Koko does too. Unless I misread that…
Stuart
Respectfully, I think you guys are missing the point.
What he’s saying is that for someone who might only need a few sheets of specialty graph paper, there is also the option to print or a few patterns.
It’s like needing a small or large socket size. In a pinch, you can use a 3/8″ ratchet and step up or down adapter. For regular use, then you can get additional ratchet sizes. Or, printing a few photos at home and sending several dozen to a photo print service.
He’s not advocating the printing of isometric paper by the ream.
Grady
When i started in engineering a very long time ago we used Tops Engineering computation pads. It was a light green notebook pad 8.5 x 11 that had a 5×5 square graph on the frount and a darker iso grid on the back that lined up with the square grid on frount. It was to easy to prodyce a 3 view and a iso view of a part. Ive probably produced thousands of drawings on these pads. Quick and easy except for holes all you need was a straight edge, if that. These pads are no longer in print, and its a shame. It was a great product.
TonyT
You mean like these https://www.amazon.com/TOPS-Engineering-Computation-Punched-35502/dp/B001E6BXM8 ?
Wayne R.
Doesn’t mention an Iso setup on the back…that’s probably key to what Grady’s writing about.
TonyT
No, I’m pretty sure it’s the right one, because it says “Cross-section ruling printed on back to faintly show through to front. ”
Entire list of Tops specialty pads is here:
https://www.tops-products.com/paper-notebooks/specialty.html
Wayne R.
At that Amazon link, if you select the 50-sheet pack and look at the fourth image down, it shows a normal grid on the back. Dunno if that applies to all of them. And at the Tops link, a search for Isometric comes back empty.
Oh, well.
JoeM
I object to the idea that 3D Modelling would ever replace a good pad of Graph Paper.
You don’t whip out a 3D Modelling suite in the field, when you just want to get an idea of the dimensions you need to limit yourself to for a project. Or mark out where the studs are on the fly. Graph Paper, especially if you like the ease of an Isometric design, will always be useful. Maybe one day it’ll be “Printed” on some sort of polymer sheets that you re-use a thousand times, like a white board of sorts, but it will still be Graph Paper.
Stuart
Depends on the context.
Let’s say you’re designing a bookcase. You start off with dimensions 36″ width x 40″ height x 12″ depth.
But WAIT. Now you want it to be 32″ wide. Changing something like that in a 3D model is relatively easy, and can be quick depending on the software. Changing it on a piece of paper is going to require a little more effort and time, or you have to start from scratch.
Now model the color so you can visualize what it’ll look like with a maple finish. Oh no, you or the client want to visualize a cherry wood finish. Cheery and black? Maple and white?
Hand sketches and computer models are sometimes interchangeable, but not always.
Most of the time, there’s no “right” way.
John
I created a .dwg file in AutoCAD for standard graph and isometric graph paper that I can print at 8 1/2″x11″ or 11″x17″. 1/4″ grids don’t always work so I have 1/8″ grids in both types as well. Other grid spacings wouldn’t be too hard to create. Print a handful of sheets in the size, grid size, and type as needed.
Mark Welker
I still use isometric paper in the classroom for a few lessons, takes a while for the students to understand sketching isometric views but seems to give them a head start on the CAD drafting concepts they get later in the semester. I’ll print off iso paper from templates when I have to, but I (and the students that get it) much prefer the preprinted pads and any remains of an Anvil pad I leave laying around in plain sight usually disappears pretty quickly. That said I might have to try the lee valley stuff, the combined 1/2 and 1/4 scales reminds me of doane grid+lines graph paper ( https://www.doanepaper.com/ ) than I love using on my own
Steven
I may actually start using isometric grid. I do alot of plumbing and hydronic layouts on lined note pads…convenience of angles may bring me back to school days……that and I, unlike my peers enjoy/appreciate a good iso.
John
To JoeM from above,
Your math is off. You unnecessarily divided by an additional 10 in figuring out the paper cost per sheet. Suffice to say, a simple price per sheet of white paper is a penny. Reams of 500 run about $5 at office supply stores.
Next your assumption of 150 pages printed on a cartridge for inkjet sounds terrible. Printing a sheet of words uses about 5% of the sheet for actual ink or toner. You should be able to get far more sheets than 150 pages even on an inkjet.
For a laser printer a toner cartridge cost rounded to $100, an average user can usually get about 5000 pages. so for laser toner that’s 2 pennies per page plus a penny for the paper sheet itself.
I do consider the cost of the printer to factor in. My current laser printer cost $280 4 years ago (that included a starter toner cartridge as most do and not a full run cartridge at more capacity). I’ve run 2006 pages through it so far (from its onboard statistics), so for a total of $300 printer+paper, my current per page cost is $0.15. But that will continue to decrease over the life of the printer because laser toner will yield a huge number of pages printed. My last laser printer lasted a decade and I’m sure did up to 8000 pages since I printed more during that time.
Most any home in the U.S. already has some form of printer. Printing a few pages of anything is cheaper than buying a whole lot of what they may not use or need.
To each his own.
JoeM
I was going for easy math, in ideal situations. Also… Older printers. I started off with explaining when we were doing this math back at a computer store. Which haven’t been popular since around 2000.
Also… I was breaking a Case into a Ream with that 10. Because the cost of a case is often less than per-ream, it makes the base cost lower. Again, for ideal numbers, not for exact ones.
If you only need a few? In a PERSONAL situation? The math does work okay. You’re “In the Ballpark” at that point. But for BUSINESS use, then that $4 savings ends up getting you a spare pad of the stuff, and by the case it saves even more.
My point wasn’t to totally disprove your method. My point was to introduce a condition or two where it’s ideal. And I THINK I was going there to confirm a point Koko was asking you as well.
When we tested that theory back in 2000, at the shop I worked at, we found we couldn’t make the printers pay for themselves within a fiscal period we could afford. Though, we were talking about printing signs, doing people’s resumes, and general invoicing by printing them, including store letterhead. Printing in general, not specifically graph paper. When I apply what we did to your graph paper, the natural cheapest pre-made option becomes the standard to hold it up against, rather than the goal of the printer paying for itself. Hence the Lee Valley pad beating your method out in my example.
As Stuart pointed out, and I haven’t bothered to agree with him because I’m doing so here, it’s about the condition that you’re not going into business printing pads of these things yourself, because the cost is too high to do that. There are times when it is more cost effective, at a certain scale, to buy the pre-fab ones.
There’s a few people in this article’s comments that have admitted to doing their own printing when needed. I think it’s pretty innovative and clever to have your own graph paper template just-in-case. But, for those reading our many conversations about this here, it’s good to have someone point out that this is not a cheat to get free graph paper, just a method to save time. There are some pretty cheap, crazy people out there on the Internet. It’s best not to give them the idea that any of us is giving them a way OUT of something.
I think it’s pretty genius how far you’ve figured it out! I just think, also, that we should be pretty clear about when it’s more advantageous to just buy the pads.
I probably should’ve been more polite. I think my Canadian origin isn’t coming through too well. I’m trying for polite, and coming off rude or confrontational. I do apologise for that!
Bob
I took drafting in high school and it was a required course in my engineering degree (30 some years ago). I can sketch iso’s pretty good freehand. The place I have problems sketching is on a tablet (I have a MS Surface). Stylus to screen isn’t the same as pencil to paper. Since you can zoom in and out, it can be tricky maintaining the scale. Something about digital makes the errors/distortions that would be acceptable in a pencil sketch more obvious and annoying.
I made the digital equivalent of those isometric graph paper sheets in Powerpoint. I saved the page as a PDF. I use Drawboard PDF to sketch on the isometric grid. I also made square grid pages and hybrids with half iso, half square.
I have decades worth of ideas and notes on paper. They’re on random pages, Post-Its, scraps of paper, and only a little in notebooks. It isn’t organized or readily searchable. I’m trying to do more digital, to make it easier to sort/search/store/backup. I’ve gotten a Rocketbook (with erasable pens and a scanning app) for freehand ink on plastic-y “paper” sketches/notes. It works pretty well.
Nate B
Have a look at the Incompetech graph paper generators, too: https://incompetech.com/graphpaper/
I’ve used this numerous times to produce giant printable A1 and A0 sheets (back when I had a salvaged large-format printer) for use as photo backdrops, et al.