The Growing Need for Recreated Illustrations
What seems to be happening is that for some of these illustrations that were done two or three decades ago, the original artwork has been lost. One possibility is related to storage devices. As storage devices and computers become obsolete and are replaced with newer equipment, the original artwork files are not recoverable later on and only the commercially printed documents or web images have been retained. As display resolutions have become higher, the old web images are now too small.
Certainly the original artist should have first crack at redoing an illustration, but many times that original illustrator is no longer available. If my client is a design firm or agency, I make sure that they have the rights to recreate the illustration. This is usually the case for illustrations of products, especially industrial products, because the subject matter is proprietary. Often it is more likely that instead of recreating, a new illustration is built using the the old one as technical reference.
Nuclear Reactor Cutaway
ILLUSTRATION
This illustration was redrawn as vector art from a small web image. The original size of the reference image was 300px X 416px @96ppi (pixels per inch). The 96ppi resolution was sometimes used for PC displays back in the 1990s, possibly early 2000s, which tells me the artwork was created a fairly long time ago.
For this illustration, I did play around with the sizing on the reference image to make it easier to see everything, and for color sampling. No changes were requested though. In a case like this, I deliver vector art with everything on one layer in Illustrator, and also rasterized at 350ppi (pixels per inch) on a transparent background as CMYK PSD and RGB PNG, and as a FLATTENED JPEG. (PNG does not support CMYK, and JPEG does not support layers/transparency.) The vector art can be resized with no loss of quality, so it is easy to create raster files virtually at any size and resolution.
This vector illustration contains no raster-based material whatsoever. The rasterized (converted to pixels) files are provided as a courtesy. I will gladly honor requests for specific sizes and/or resolutions.
It should be noted that some illustrators (and photographers) charge a fee for each instance of use, even for this type of work. I do not.
The second image shows the amount of layering necessary for this type of illustration. In addition to using mechanical drawing methods for perspective, all planes and their locations must be taken into consideration to achieve the desired effect. Every level, what is in front of or behind what, has to be correct, and sometimes that means breaking assemblies into layers that are not in close proximity to one another in the layer stack. Problems are solved as I go. Using layers makes a cleaner, more precise illustration, and makes sure everything lines up properly. This is exactly why I generally do not deliver layered files unless this is discussed thoroughly. Some requests are just not possible because the illustration would not be kept intact.
SEE ALSO Nuclear Reactor Building
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