Trouble with received artwork from an artist (loads of sections, unable to adjust line thickness etc

All of the line work in the drawing is "expanded" into raw paths. Most of them are compound paths, so if you apply a fill to one of those selected paths it's only going to change the black line into another color and not affect any of the empty space the black line is surrounding. The compounds have to be released, which turns the lines into two objects that can be filled separately. Doing that opens a can of worms because the object stacking order may be all over the place. You'll probably need to drag groups of objects onto new layers in order to make the artwork more organized.

It looks like the drawing was either live-traced from a scanned image (such as a hand drawing on paper) and cleaned up a bit. Or it was perhaps drawn in Adobe Illustrator using tools like the blob brush.

The line widths are not "live" in the manner of a line stroke with an art brush applied to it or an effect from the width tool. To alter the thickness of the lines you'll either have to edit the anchor points on the paths directly or draw a new path over the top of the existing path and replace it.

Hi @Chief_Tellie,

I would personally stick with the .ai file.

Instead of colouring in each small section, select the main area on the outside of all the little sections, and make a new layer in behind. That way all the black line work will show up on top, and your colouring will be behind. When I say "layer," you can use the layers palette if you find that easier. I tend to just place an object in behind, while still using the same layer...but the layers palette will keep things much more organized.

If the drawing is using brush strokes (which it appears to be), you may need to make the strokes into outlines and manually adjust the thickness where you'd like. To do this, use the expand option. Try this out and see if it's what you're looking for. Make sure you save a copy or duplicate your artboard to keep the original image just in case. Once expanded, to adjust the thickness, you'll need to use the pen tool with the white arrow/direct selection tool. The white arrow will allow you to select nodes and drag handles for curve adjustments.

If the gradient line isn't working for you, you can play around with the gradient mesh tool in your toolbar on the left.

Hopefully this helps...? 🙂

I would use the AI file.

As for applying gradients and stuff, you will first need to draw shapes that you can then fill with gradients and color. The drawing currently is just open paths.

Perhaps it's a communication issue between you and the artist. You might have needed to brief them accordingly.