How the grid maps to 3D
An isometric drawing shows three faces of an object at once, with its three main axes 120° apart. On this sheet each axis has its own family of lines: the vertical lines carry heights, the lines rising 30° to the right carry widths, and the lines rising 30° to the left carry depths. Every triangle side is one unit in whichever direction you draw, so a box 4 wide, 3 deep and 2 tall is 4, 3 and 2 triangle sides long. Parallel edges stay parallel; there are no vanishing points to set up.
Drawing a box in five steps
- Pick a point where lines cross, low on the page: this is the front corner of the box.
- Draw the front vertical edge up one line, counting the height in triangle sides.
- From the bottom and top of that edge, draw the width along the right-rising slope and the depth along the left-rising slope.
- Add the back verticals at the ends of those lines, then close the top face with lines parallel to the ones below.
- Rub out any hidden edges, or leave them dashed for a technical drawing.
Edges that don’t follow one of the three axes, such as a sloping roof or a chamfered corner, are called non-isometric lines. Find both of their ends on the grid first and join them; you can’t measure them by counting, because they aren’t drawn to scale.
Who uses it
Design and technology students sketch products in isometric before drawing them in CAD, engineers use it for pipe runs and quick assembly views, and game artists plan isometric levels and pixel art. For maths exercises with solids built from cubes, many worksheets use isometric dot paper instead, where the dots don’t compete with the lines you draw. For floor layouts seen from above, a square grid works better: see graph paper for floor plans.
How this page sets up the sheet
- Isometric, vertical columns, the way round for isometric drawing.
- In inches: 1/4 in (6.35 mm) triangle sides, 4 per inch.
- In millimetres: 5 mm (0.197 in) triangle sides, 2 per cm.
It opens in inches in the US and other countries that use Letter paper, and in millimetres everywhere else (or in whichever unit you last used on this site). The paper size follows your browser too: Letter in the US, A4 elsewhere. Everything stays editable. Your own page settings, such as margins, are remembered for next time; the grid itself always opens as set up here. To start from a blank setup, use the graph paper generator.