Technical Illustration

This is a captioned technical illustration of a camera, the M6 TTL, a small professional rangefinder camera built by Leica. I chose this as a model because it was simple and fairly geometrical in appearance.

The illustration was prepared using Adobe Illustrator, a vector-based illustration program. The image was built in several layers; in particular, the lens on the front of the camera and the camera body are completely separate (although they are shown together here, by removing the lens layer it is possible to see the lens mount and interior of the camera). I kept the drawing pretty simple, with the most complex parts being a few blends and gradient mesh objects (for reflections and shading). The text on the camera is vectorized from different weights of VAG Rounded, a very clean sans serif font developed originally for Volkswagen AG, with the exception of the Leica logo and the text “LEICA M6,” both of which were custom-drawn by yours truly. The captions are vectorized from Farfell ICG, one of the “cool” fonts from Image Club Graphics that I thought had a nice mechanical-drawing look to it. I took care to make the drawing exactly match the actual object; the original drawing is prepared actual size.

I’d estimate that this drawing represents about $700 worth of work (if I had been doing it for a client).