Paper
The material itself, in the state that panel shows. Solid, and the heaviest line on the canvas.
Every drawing on an activity page is a few lines of SVG written by hand, in one notation, so a set of them reads as a set. This is that notation, and why each part of it exists.
They are not substitutes, and a page usually wants both.
It can show an action mid-motion, a fold line that does not exist yet, and a part hidden inside another. It omits the table, the hands, the colour of the paper and the light.
What the finished thing actually looks like, what a material feels like, whether the result is worth making. Anything whose point is its appearance.
One sentence governs the whole notation: ink is the material, the accent is something you do to it.
The material itself, in the state that panel shows. Solid, and the heaviest line on the canvas.
A fold, marked but not yet made. Dashed, in the card's accent. Once the fold has happened the crease is geometry, and it is drawn as material.
A cut path, and how far it runs. Solid, in the accent, and never drawn without its arrowhead: in greyscale a solid accent line and a solid ink line are identical, so the head is the only thing telling them apart.
Anything that is not the material: a tool, the work surface, an arrow. Thin and muted, so it never competes with the thing being made.
Material that really is there but is concealed. Dotted and muted. This is the only mark that says through rather than next to, and a dowel spinning inside a straw is the bearing.
fill, no stroke, no hex value. Every line takes its weight and colour from
its class, and the classes read the house variables, so light and dark come free. That is the one
thing a photograph cannot do: a photographed white sheet on a white table stays white in dark mode.A build with an order gets one square drawing per step, never one wide drawing with panels inside it. Three reasons, in order of weight: a step that must later hold a printed page on its own has to be its own drawing; a single wide canvas shrinks the material to a quarter of the scale the rest of the set uses; and a letterbox cannot reflow, where four squares wrap to two by two on a phone and stay in order.
Panel one is always what you need. The step numbers below are generated by the stylesheet and are never typed by whoever writes the drawing, which is what stops three authors producing three numbering styles.
That is the straw air rocket, and it is the same four drawings that appear on the Rockets record.
Drawing a part whole and laying a hidden line over it renders nothing. The part behind must be drawn as two visible pieces with the hidden run between them. This costs everyone time once.
A dowel, a skewer, a lolly stick or a straw is two parallel lines with a capped end. One stroke reads as thread, or as a fold.
Draw the view that shows the mechanism, even where that mixes a face-on wheel with an axle in elevation. It is wrong as projection and right as an instruction.
Set by the container, not by the drawing. A card is wide, a sequence step is square. One coordinate space per container means diagrams beside each other carry the same visual weight.
No two lines closer than about two units. Stroke width is pinned to the screen rather than the canvas, so lines that look separate here merge once the drawing is printed small.
Never any text inside a drawing, and the drawing is hidden from screen readers. The heading and the sentence beneath it are the content; the picture supports them.
None of this was invented. The notation was read off the printed step strips on the Institute of Imagination's own example boards, which already distinguished a dashed fold from an arrowed cut, put the scissors at the point of the cut, and used a curved arrow on the flap that moves. The seven paper techniques on Nature's Engineers were the first set drawn this way.
What changed on 19 August 2026 was that the Nature in Motion builds broke it in three places, and each break added something:
| Cut against fold | The helicopter carries both on one piece of paper, so one mark could not serve. The cut became its own. |
| More than two states | A four step build does not fit a before and after, so sequences became a row of square drawings. |
| Materials that are not paper | Dowel, straw, bottle cap, elastic band and balloon all worked, because the marks describe what a line means to the maker rather than what the thing is made of. |
| A part inside a part | The one genuine gap. Nothing could say a rod runs through a tube, which is the mechanism of nearly every vehicle here. |