For lighting it's a no-brainer to go right to
Vectorworks. For scenery, if the student wants to draft and
build things for their career then get them to
CAD right away too, but for anyone who fancies design that's not so simple.
My colleague still teaches
hand drafting in his
intro and intermediate scene design courses, and I teach them
CAD in my stagecraft and lighting design courses. Before I start that, I show samples of my colleague's beautiful
hand drafting and talk about handcraft as a
practical and conceptual
foundation to design. There's developmental value in learning
hand drafting in concert with drawing (i.e. drafting as the confluence of technical and artistic creativity) and that's what we like to do before moving on to the no-brainer advantages of
CAD. A really robust drawing practice is still (and dare I say "will always be!") foundational to design thinking, process, success. This way of thinking is probably rooted in my training as a painter, and there are a lot of really interesting
stage designers out there who came to their medium through visual art training. There's perhaps a rift between that camp and those who have followed a more tech heavy
track leading into design.
I'm concerned with building relevant industry skills, but let's be real about managing expectations in this area. The
level of
CAD chops (or
anything chops) a student builds is basic to intermediate until they're exposed to a professional pace post-grad, at which
point it should be a pretty straightforward experiential and case-specific process to learn to use the software more efficiently and according to whatever graphic standards their employer imposes. Students who make it through my courses successfully are ready for that next step, and they'll struggle and stress through it, and those growing pains are a normal part of being a pro at anything. I don't believe it's realistic to expect to graduate a fully formed
CAD user. Work experience is required, and work experience is
efficient at building this competency.
What the professional pace is not conducive to is developing the
broad visual vocabulary,
ease of expression, and rigorous processing of ideas which a strong, sustained engagement with
hand drawing produces. We can make space for that work in an academic program.
CAD skills without
hand skills makes for boring design. Keep
hand skills in the mix as a foundational and sustained practice that parallels and intersects with
CAD and then students are better equipped to take advantage of the tremendous creative potential of the software.
So to answer the question about whether any pros are doing things by
hand, the followup question is, which things? Of course drafting is done in
CAD overwhelmingly, but lots of really good preliminary ideas are still
hand made, and that background whether used daily or not is relevant always.