Clear, concise black and white line art
Black and white line art is just about my favorite style to work in. It goes back to the good old days of Leroy or Rapidograph pens, Higgens Black Magic ink, and vellum. This style of technical drawing is usually seen in instruction manuals, technical bulletins, data sheets, and assembly sheets. They can have callouts describing various parts of the object, or the object can be self-explanatory. As a rule, there's a darker line outline the whole object, and various weights (thicknesses) of line are used to show light and shade while delineating the object's attributes. The examples here were done either in Macromedia FreeHand or Adobe Illustrator. Line art drawings are vector art, so theey can be reduced or enlarged without image degradation. If you decide to change the size of the artwork, you must be sure to be aware of the sosftware command that either maintains stroke weight, or scales it. Reducing a drawing and maintaining stroke weight can give you an ugly surprise. To that end, I try to convert all the lines into outlined shapes to be sure the integrity of the drawing will not be destroyed. I keep an original stroked version archived in case changes must be made at a later date. The final technical illustration is a flattened (single layer) vector file in native Illustrator or EPS format.
