Guidelines for Biological Drawings

 

1. Use plain unlined paper and a sharp pencil for all drawings, labels and titles.

Never use coloured pencils or ink.

 

2. If you are drawing to scale, use a circle to represent the field of view. Draw the cells proportionately to take up the same amount of space as they do in your field of view. You do not need to draw the entire field of view.

 

If you are not drawing to scale, do not draw a circle to represent the filed of view. Drawings should be large and include several complete cells of each type present.

 

3. Keep the drawing to the left of centre to leave room for labeling on the right hand side. Try to leave about a 2 cm margin all around the completed diagram.

 

4. The drawing should be as large as possible; 2/3 to the full page. Leave space at the top for the title, right side for labels and bottom right for drawing information.

 

5. All lines should be solid and complete. Do not shade or sketch. Use stippling rather than shading.

 

6. The drawing should be an outline of what you see, including great detail. However, do not include additional structures just because your think they should be there.

 

7. Label lines must be in pencil and should point to the middle of the object. A ruler must be used. Lines should be horizontal whenever possible and never cross each other. Arrows are not appropriate.

 

8. Labels should line up vertically (ie – in a straight line underneath each other) on the right hand side of the diagram. Labels must be printed horizontally in pencil and must be spelled correctly.

 

9. Do not write the plurals for single objects. Eg. mitochondrion, not mitochondria.

 

10. The title of the drawing is underlined at the top of the page. The title of the drawing is simply the object you are looking at.

 

11. Your name and the date appear in the top right hand corner of the page.

 

12. At the bottom of the page, on the right hand side, include the name of the organism, type of cell, any stain that has been used, and the total magnification of the cells.

For scale drawings, magnification is ocular x objective.

 

Eg. Human cheek cells stained in methylene blue viewed at 100x magnification.

 

For non-scale drawings, calculate the total magnification using the formula:

 

Magnification = size of drawing___

Actual size of specimen^*

^* If you know the size of the field of view of your microscope on the power you are currently using, you can estimate the actual size of the specimen. Be sure to use the same units for both measurements.