Pictorial drawings show several faces of an object at once. Such drawings are used by any industry that designs, sells, manufactures, repairs, installs, or maintains a product. Axonometric and oblique pictorial drawings use a parallel projection technique and are frequently used in technical documents, sales literature, maintenance manuals, and documentation supplements in technical drawings. Perspective pictorial drawings use a converging projection technique and are more commonly found in architectural drawings.

Pictorial drawings do not have the limitation of multiview drawings, which show only two dimensions of the object in each view and must be mentally combined to form a 3-D image of the object. This chapter explains the projection theory and standard practices used to create axonometric and oblique drawings.