Canary Islands PAU Technical Drawing Applied to Plastic Arts & Design II

It is a PAU (university access) subject exam for students in the arts Bachillerato in the Canary Islands. The mark is used, together with your other PAU results, to compute the admission score for degrees such as Fine Arts, Design or Architecture, where the subject may carry a weighting.

No. This is instrument-based technical drawing: accuracy, construction logic and correct notation matter far more than expressive line quality. Neat, well-labelled work with visible auxiliary lines scores better than a beautiful but unexplained sketch, though clean presentation still helps the examiner follow your reasoning.

Those figures change and are set by the official body, so check the current call published by the Canary Islands education authority and your school's exam guidelines. Do not rely on numbers from older past papers or from other regions, since structure and timing can differ between years and territories.

Most candidates find the constructions learnable but the time pressure real. The hard part is executing familiar procedures quickly and accurately under exam conditions, and remembering to label, dimension and keep auxiliary lines. Students who practise full problems against the clock usually gain several marks over those who only study theory.

PAU rules on resits and calls are set by the competent authority and can change, so confirm the current policy on the official site. In general, access exams are offered in more than one sitting per year, but eligibility conditions and how the best mark is used should be verified rather than assumed.

Start with plane geometry: perpendiculars, parallels, angles, tangencies and loci, because every later topic reuses them. Then move to conics, followed by dihedral geometry and solids, and finish with perspective and normalisation. Design and visual communication content is easier to revise late because it is more conceptual.

Common losses: missing construction lines that prove the method, wrong or absent labelling of points and planes, imprecise tangency points, incorrect scale or dimension notation, and unfinished figures caused by poor time allocation. Another frequent error is drawing directly in ink, leaving no room to correct a construction.

Typically a ruler, a 45° and a 30/60° set square, a compass with a sharp needle, a hard pencil for construction lines and a softer one for final lines, an eraser and a sharpener. Confirm the permitted materials in the current exam instructions, as some centres restrict certain aids.

Pass and grading thresholds are set officially and are not something to take from hearsay. Aim well above the minimum anyway: because admission scores are competitive, a strong grade in this subject can matter more than simply passing it. Check the official site for current scoring rules.

Do them timed and on the same paper size as the exam, then compare your construction with the published solution line by line. Keep an error log: which construction you forgot, where you lost precision, how long each block took. Repeat the weak blocks a week later until they are routine.