The production of technical representations (in print, exhibitions and the factory) by jobbing designers and factory draughtsmen in nineteenth century Britain is an under-researched area hard to place in any academic category. Draughtsmen have become invisible because their status was disputed and problematic, squeezed by issues about creative control and autonomy in the workplace. As ‘visual technicians’ both elite engineers and factory draughtsmen trained themselves to draw for the mechanical arts through copying from a wide range of artistic, artisanal and architectural precedents and were thus constantly negotiating how different kinds of visual display related to professional status. Within engineering, draughtsmen were an intermediate sub-group whose role was even more compromised and ambiguous. My paper will consider first, the ways in which drawings produced for the elite shipbuilding company of Robert Napier and Sons, Glasgow orchestrated different visual languages from art, industry, and practical science in order to make a persuasive effect, and second, how the process of making these drawings either aided or frustrated the cultural ambitions of the draughtsmen who produced them. Moving inside this artworld of technical drawing gives a textured account of the ways in which practitioners sought to gain authority by visual means. In a period when drawing was widely touted as a civic accomplishment like the ability to read or to reason, the development of art and design discourses cannot be understood without considering the development of technical drawing styles too.