Drawing was an important element in the education of engineering students in the nineteenth century. Fortification drawing prepared students to formulate ideas and give those ideas concrete expression on paper in a precise and easily grasped manner. In being able to give an idea precise expression also had the desirable effect of reinforcing the various principles of fortification and establishing effective defensive relationships among the various elements of fortifications. The imposition of the orderly process required to perform an acceptable drawing tended to prepare students to approach the design and construction of fortifications and other public works in an orderly and practical manner.

In point of method and procedure drawing fortifications was not in any way dissimilar to industrial or mechanical drawing. Basic tools for performing a drawing were the same: compasses (or dividers) were used for taking lengths and marking arcs of circles, straightedge rulers for producing right lines, and a protractor for taking the measure of angles. Other tools such as curved rulers, triangles, and squares could also be employed to increase the accuracy and precision of a drawing. Unlike simple geometric constructions, fortification and other mechanical drawings required the use of proportional scales (scale of equal parts and diagonal scale of equal parts) to impart a clear sense of the dimensions and shape of an object represented by a drawing.

A primary object of fortification drawing was to represent the plan and profile of any particular fortification with sufficient clarity that any experienced tradesman, mechanic, or military officer could almost intuitively grasp its shape and dimensions after a few moments' glance without undue effort or confusion. To accomplish this most fortification drawings utilized projections of the bounding lines of the elements of a fortification onto a horizontal plane to provide a plan view of the fortification and profiles or cross-sections of a fortification projected onto a vertical plane. Multi-plane drawings were generally only employed to show detailed features within a fortification (particularly mechanical elements such as drawbridge mechanisms or unique and uncommon secondary structures) and, occasionally, to provide perspective views as guides to explain the general appearance of a fortification.

Ten exercises in drawing the outlines of lines of field works have been provided below as a means of gaining some familiarity with a simplified adaptation of the orderly procedure required to perform fortification drawings. Each exercise projects the line of the interior crest of a parapet onto a horizontal plane to produce a plan view of the lines of the interior crest. This simplified view that excludes all other features of the parapet and interior arrangements of the fortification tends to give greater clarity to the defensive characteristics inherent to each trace, that is, how one section of a line might defend another with its fire and how thoroughly ground immediately in front of a line was defended by crossing columns of fire. Each exercise may be performed using compass, ruled straightedge, protractor, pencil applied to a large sheet of paper well fixed to a stable flat surface.