In this tutorial I will show you how to adjust and control your lightweights using illustrator. It’s best to use illustrator because you get real-time lineweights, instead of the approximations that CAD produces. This in turn saves on both printing and time.

Step 1:The Lines
This step requires you to have constructed your line drawings in which every program you feel most comfortable. I prefer CAD because of its accuracy, but I know people who do all their drawings in illustrator. If your using CAD, I suggest you color code you line drawings. This will save you time in illustrator. You will be able to select all of a single color instead of each line.

Step 2:Prepare Scale
If you are doing drawings to a certain scale this is key make sure all of your settings are set in CAD, as you will have no way to perfectly gauge distance once in illustrator.

Step 3:PDF
Once you’ve scaled you drawing, set the plotter to Adobe PDF, this will give us the ability to switch between CAD and Illustrator. Note:Make sure that you’ve correctly selected the paper size as that is all that the PDF will save.

Step 4:Using Fill
Let’s by selecting the house, as I want this to be filled with a gray tone. Note:Its important that you make these complete shapes in auto cad as plines. Make sure that they are closed shapes. Otherwise, turn on your smart guides(ctrl+U)create a closed shape. Now, fill that closed shape using the fill color on your toolbar, I also turned the line color to transparent because I don’t want it to wrap around the entire shape.

Step 5:Select
OK, now select any singe color that you want to adjust the lineweight. I started with my darkest, the red line on the outside of the house. Go to SELECT>SAME>STROKE COLOR, this will select everything in red.

Step 6:Weight
As the graphic shows, adjust the weight of your line to accommodate your drawing. The red line needs to be nice and thick so I gonna set it to 1.1 pt.

Step 7:The Posts
This is pretty much a rinse and repeat process, with a few exceptions. I’ve followed steps 5 to select all of my post but I accidentally marked all the posts with the same color in CAD. This is an easy fix just use SHIFT to deselect the posts you don’t want. Then I filled and change the lineweight.

Step 8:Post 2
Now I go back in again with my SHIFT key, and select all the support posts. These posts are underneath the deck so I needed to fill them with a lighter gray.

Step 9:Arrow
While I’m over here I filled in my stairs arrow.

Step 10:Joists
My joists need to be dashed, and as you can see Illustrator provides an option for just such an occasion. Most likely, you will have to play with the setting as it starts at 12pt.

Step 11:Joists
I settled on 2pt.

Step 12:Changing the line color
Select everything and change the line color to black, now its almost ready to plot.

Step 13:Fixing the text
There’s still one problem left, the text. If you did text or dimensions in CAD, changing the line color will have the same effect as making them bold. It’s an easy fix, all you do is select a letter.

Step 14:Text pt.2
After selecting the text go and SELECT>SAME>STROKE WEIGHT. This will select all the text, as long as your text weight doesn’t match other lines. Remove the color from the lines in order to fix this problem.

Step 15:Text Fixed
That’s the difference.

That’s it, all the steps needed to make professional looking line drawings. You can also try using colors other than black for your fills or even opacity masks to add textures.

-Liam Morrow