Create Vector Art from Photos: All the Tools to Vectorize in Adobe Illustrator

1. Introduction: Let me tell you something, I am a professional graphic designer and I don't draw. [MUSIC] Yes, you heard me, I don't draw, at least not in the traditional art form. I can take a paper and draw an amazing real-life piece of art, which is what to draw means to most people. But what I am really good at is vectorizing. My name is Naila. As a designer, I specialize in editorial and surface design. Back in 2008, I took a humorous drawing class that taught me the skills to turn a sketch into an illustration. Now I look at it and I see so many things that can be improved, and that is exactly what I have been doing for the past 14 years. Since I graduated from my Graphic Design bachelor's degree in 2009, I have worked with vectors in almost every single project I put my hands on. Whether if I'm working with businesses, government agencies, or non-profit organizations, I always end up working with vectors. I can vectorize a photo to use it in a poster design, or vectorize a simple sketch to use it in a book cover design. I have even used these skills to vectorize some elements of a logo and then use them to create a cohesive editorial design for magazines. Or even this artistic nature, to use this as a short film poster headline. The possibilities are endless. If you're someone who would like to learn the skill to transform your photos and drawings into digital art, but are not sure about the right tools to use, this class is for you. For this class, you don't need any previous knowledge, we will go step-by-step with a clear to-do list after each lesson. I will teach you how and when to use the Pen Tool, Pencil tool, Paintbrush tool, and the Blob Brush tool. You will also learn about the image tracing feature inside Adobe Illustrator, all while vectorizing and one photo I took a while ago of [inaudible] Garita, which is the most iconic element of the world historic site of a model here in Puerto Rico. You can download the Garita photo and another photo call Textured, which is actually the sidewalk of my neighborhood in the resources section. Feel free to step outside and take your own photos. Other than that, you will need the program Adobe Illustrator, for which you can find the link to download a free trial in the class description below this video. I will be using a Pen tablet to teach you how it can help you in your vectorization process. But having one is not essential for this class. Learning to vectorize will give you the freedom to create unique designs in your own style. Edit them as many times as you want and make them any size that you need without losing its quality. Not to mention that this skill will also make you a problem solver and consequently a better designer. At the end of this class, you will be able to vectorize anything you want and show your unique artistic voice in the ego art. See you in the first lesson. 2. Class Project: For this class project, you will create your very own digital art. Projects are a great way to learn hands-on, and this class project is a step-by-step that you can follow along with me. I even share with you the same images I will be working with. First, download the free photos to vectorize in the resources section. To find them, go to the tab below this video where it says Projects and Resources. Click on it. Then go to the right side of the page where it says Resources. There will be two images, one called garita and another one called texture. There is a third one called practice sheet. You will also find a PDF with the list of the most useful shortcuts that I will be using throughout the class. I suggest that you have it in hand while taking the class so you can reference it as you need. Go ahead and download all the resources for you to use later. If you prefer, you can use a photo and or hand drawing of your own. You will then create a new document in Adobe Illustrator and place your image. If you have never worked with Adobe Illustrator, don't worry. I will teach you step-by-step so you can follow along. Right after that, you vectorize your photo using the drawing tools that you will learn in this class. You will then export your image and share it on social media, use it as an element in an editorial design or even upload it to an online store to sell. The options are unlimited. Show your project in the project gallery for all of us to enjoy. Just go to the same Projects and Resources tab, then go to the right and click on the green button that says Class Project. There, you can name your project, share your process and images with all of the community. Let's go to the next lesson to begin our class. 3. What Is a Vector: Let's start with the basics. What is a vector after all? It is very easy to visually differentiate a vector from its opposite, a raster image. A raster image is created out of small squares called pixels. The best example is a photograph. A vector image is an artwork that is created using points and lines. These are called paths. Those paths are editable for you to move to wherever you need and create a shape. Adobe Illustrator is a vector-based program, which means that you can create vector images in it. When we convert raster images such as a photo you took to a vector is called to vectorize, which is what we will learn in this class. If you're interested, I have a Skillshare class that explains the differences between a vector and a raster image in depth, and the most common file formats and their uses, it's called file formats, want to use JPEG, PNG, TIFF, PDF, EPS, or SVG. You can find it in the class description or my Skillshare profile. Creating vector images is very useful for three main reasons. First, when you need a high-quality image in a variety of sizes, for example, a logo. A logo is a design that can be placed in a small business card, but also in a big car wrap-up. But it's one of the most important characteristic of a vector that once created, you can increase its size with a loosened image quality. As is often the case with a raster image, such as photos, that if the image is very small, when the large innate you can see blur squares, that means that the photo is pixelated. Vectors use mathematical equations to adjust the size of a shape. This keeps its quality. The second reason why vectors are useful is that you may be designing something that you don't know the final size yet and are afraid that you will need to do it again. For example, you may be an artist who creates artwork for licensing or sale. Let's say that you created an artwork in an 8 by 10 inches size, but then you get the opportunity to use that same artwork in a 24 by 32 inches. You can easily make the adjustment without losing quality. The third reason is that a vector allows you to create an image like no other, from a simple illustration to a very detailed one with sheets, patterns, and texture. You can create anything you may need for your design. Now that you have a clear idea of what a vector is, let's go to the next lesson where I will teach you the programs and tools with which you can vectorize a photo. 4. Vectorizing Programs and Tool: In the past lesson, you learn what is a vector and three main benefits of it. This lesson, you will learn the programs and tools that with which you can factorize. If you do a quick search on the internet by factorizing programs, you will find a few. But in this class we will be focusing on the industry leading vector graphics software, Adobe Illustrator. Adobe Illustrator is a vector-based program which makes it different from Adobe Photoshop, which is the raster based program. Photoshop is a powerful program in which you can create amazing artwork, but illustrator is better suited for illustrations. That is the reason why it exists. If you have never used Adobe Illustrator fear not. In the next lesson, I will open it and set up my document so you can see how to do it yourself. But first, let's talk about tool I have used for years now. My Wacom tablet. Whenever I work from my computer, I always use it even when I'm not designing. Using a computer desktop mouse or track back for too long can cause me pain in my hand. Once I started using the Wacom tablet with a pen, that pain went away. There are many brands out there with a variety of price range. You just need to do a research by pen tablet. My first one was a smaller one, a Wacom bamboo pen and touch many years ago. It doesn't even have Bluetooth. You have to plug it directly to the USB port. They don't produce this line anymore. I updated a Wacom into spro medium a couple of years ago. They also produce it in small and they have a bigger one in large. But I have found that the medium size to be very comfortable. Whenever I'm working outside of my office, I take it with me the smaller one because it is easier to carry. As you can see, there's a variety of sizes, styles, and prices to choose from. You will find that using a Wacom tablet and a pen will help you to take the most out of Adobe Illustrator tools that we will be using this class because you will have more control and it will feel more natural as if you were drawing on the paper. Also, a Wacom tablet gives you access to precious sensitive tools that you can't use with a normal mouse. These days it's becoming more and more popular to use the iPad and the Apple pencil to create artwork and for a good reason. Apps are becoming more powerful and you can create designs from start to finish and send it to production all within the iPad. A great example of that is the Procreate app or the recently launch Illustrator for the iPad app. Still most people first by a computer and then an iPad because let's face it, an iPad is an investment and although you can create amazing work with it, I will still see it as a companion tool, a great companion, but still, I still need my computer to finalize some work and store and manage files. If you would like the experience of drawing by hand and buying an iPad and Apple Pencil is not an option right now, a Wacom tablet may be an option for you. There is a link to the Wacom website in the class description. This is not an affiliate link, it's just to make it easier for you. Let's go into the next lesson to select the image that we will be vectorizing later in the class. 5. Select an Image to Vectorize: In the past lesson, you learned about Adobe Illustrator and pen tablets. Before we create our Adobe Illustrator document to vectorize, first, let's make sure that you have all of your assets ready to go. In the resources section, I have uploaded two photos that I will be using in this class in case you want to follow along with me, but feel free to vectorize anything you want. Personally, I have vectorized many iconic elements from different countries for client work, but also from my own country of Puerto Rico. For example, a couple of years ago, I was designing the poster for a short film festival held in the near town called Rincon. That town has one of the most iconic lighthouses of the island. I had a picture from the lighthouse, so I look for it, place it, trace it, and there it was, a vectorized version of the Rincon lighthouse. You can also create a hand drawing and use it to vectorize it. You can be a very skilled artist in hand drawing or not. I am not. Look at this comic book project I did more than 10 years ago. It was for a humorous drawing class. My hand drawings are very simple, but my vector skills transform this to a completely different outcome. Now I look at it and I see so many things that I can do better, but this was the first time I worked with vectors this way and I was so amazed by it. If you choose to use a drawing, just take a photo of it and transfer it to your computer. Once you're ready and before diving into the next lesson, download or search for the photo, you will vectorize and save it in a new folder. In the next lesson, you will open Adobe Illustrator in your computer, set up the document, and place the image. 6. Set Up Your Document: In the past lesson, we selected and saved in a new folder the image that we will be vectorizing. In this lesson, you will set up your Adobe Illustrator document in your computer. We are now inside Adobe Illustrator, to the left you can see the new file button. You can also open previous illustrator documents. You can go to home where we are at and here you can see some presets if you double-click any of them, a new Illustrator document will open with those specifications. You can also see recent documents that you have been working with. If you go to learn, you can see tutorials to the right of the window. In the file section, you can see any files that you have saved in the Adobe Creative Cloud. If you have any files share with you and any deleted file from the Creative Cloud. Let's go to the new file button and click on it. The new document window will open. At the top, you can see presets that you can choose from and there are also more for mobile, web, print, film and video, art, and illustration. Let's go to web because we're going to be working with an image that is only going to be shared on digital, it's not going to be print for now. Here you can see presets and underneath, there are templates. Again, you can double-click and edit them. Many of them are free so you can take advantage of that. To the right, we have the preset details and we're going to be working with that now. The first thing that you have to do is change the name of your document for whatever you want to name it. I'm going to call it vectorization. Underneath you can see the units that you can be working with. I'm going to choose inches because that's the measurement that I'm most familiar with, but you can choose whatever you like. Now I'm going to to set the width and the height of my document. In this case, I'm going to use 10 by 10 inches. To the right, you can see the orientation of your document. In this case, it doesn't affect our document because it's a square and to the right of the orientation you can see the art boards. For now we're going to work with only one art work. We'll leave that at one. Underneath we have the bleed options and because we're working with a digital document, we don't need a bleed. This is for printing only. Under the advanced options, we have the color mode, which because we're working with a web preset, its RGB, which is the right one, because again, we are working with digital. Underneath we have the resolution of the document. I always like to work with 300 PPI. We can always edit this while exporting to JPEG, you can choose a lower resolution. But I always like to have the highest one when I'm working with the documents. The preview mode just leave it to default. Now we're ready to work with our documents click create. Now here we are. We have our document ready to work with. But first let's go to file, save as, this window will prompt, you can choose, don't show again, or just leave it as that it will always ask you, you can choose to save it in the Creative Cloud or save it in your computer. In this case, I'm going to save it on my computer. I'm going to look for the folder that I'll be working with. You can rename it if you like it and click "Save." Leave this windows as it is, and click "Okay." It is very important to remember to always save your document after you do anything because things happen and the program may crash or something, you can work around it. If for any reason your document looks different than mine, maybe the background color is lighter or things are not in place, maybe you need to go to your preferences in the Mac, that's Illustrator preferences in the window that will be on Edit Preferences. Here you can make a lot of changes, particularly in the interface area. Here you can choose the color, how it will look. I have mine in the medium dark because it's the one that I'm used to, and the one that I like. But you can change that here. You can change the scale of your illustrator document and many other things. If by any reason your document looks different than mine, probably you need to change something here in the preferences. I'm going to click "Okay." Now you have your document ready to start vectorizing. If you aren't familiar with Illustrator, I have a few words for you. Don't get overwhelmed. It may look confusing, but once you begin to use it, everything makes sense. This class we will focus on specific tool so you can create your digital design. Your to do for this lesson, is to create your document, choose your preferences, and save it. In the next lesson, I will teach you how to place your image in the documents so we can begin to vectorize. 7. Place an Image: In the past lesson, we set up our Adobe Illustrator document preferences and saved our document. In this lesson, we will focus on the tools which are located at the left of the program window that are used to create. At the right, there are panels which are used to edit our creations. At the top, we have the Control Panel which changes your options depending on the tools or panels that you are using. Let's begin by placing our photo. We're now inside Adobe Illustrator and there are two ways that you can place your image. First, you can go to File, Place, or use this shortcut and it will open this same window, and you can look for the place that you have your picture, double-click, and open it. But my favorite way is to just drag and drop. I just open my folder, click, drag over Illustrator, and release. Here I have my photo. I'm going to zoom out because the picture is bigger than my artboard. That is command minus or control minus. I'm going to click over it, drag it, and try to centralize it. I'm going to use these small boxes over here that you can see. I'm going to click on them, press "Option" and "Shift" on my keyboard so I can make it smaller, but proportionally, so it doesn't go crazy the image. We're going to do a little bit more. I'm going to centralize it. If you need to for some reason move around the artboard, you can click this "Spacebar" and the Hand Tool will appear. Once you release it, it will go back to the tool that you had selected. This is a very useful tool. If you're learning any shortcut, learn this one. The spacebar is such as helpful shortcut because while vectorizing, moving around is one of the things that you will do the most. Trust me. This will become such a natural workflow for you that you won't even think about it while using it. Now I have my picture placed in Illustrator, I'm going to click on it and I'm going to open my Transparency panel. If you don't see the panel that I'm working with, you can go to window, and here you can see all of the panels that Illustrator offers. Whenever I open a panel and you don't see it, you can go to window and look for it. I'm going to set the transparency of this image to 75 because this will help us to see better when we're tracing. If some pictures may need more transparency than others, so you play around with whatever you feel more comfortable with. Now, because we're tracing an image is just like if we're tracing with a paper, you will want to lock this image because if I don't, and I create something on it and I don't lock the image behind, I can move it and you don't want that because when you're working, again with tracing, you don't want to move the image behind it. I'm going to delete this now. There are two ways that you can lock this image. First, you can select it and go to "Object" "Lock" "Selection," Or you can use Command 2 or Control 2 on windows. I'm going to select it "Command 2", and now it's locked. Now whatever I create, if I try to select the image in the back, it won't move. But this is problematic when you want to export your illustration. Then you have to unlock the image behind it and move it to the side or delete it, and I don't want that because I want to have the control to edit my illustration if I need to go back to it. [NOISE] That's where my preferred way to lock an image is by creating a new layer to make my drawings and leaving my photo in a separate layer locked. Then I just turn the layer visibility off without the need to delete the photo. Let's see how that works. Now, let's unlock this image. I'm going to go to "Object" "Unlock" or "Option" "Command 2" and it will unlock your image. My preferred way to lock an image is to lock it in a separate layer. Let's open our Layers panel. Here you can see they only have one called Layer Number 1. Let's double-click on it and rename it Photo. Click "Enter" then go to the square at the bottom with a plus sign and you are going to create a new layer. A new layer will always be created on top of the one that you already have created. Now go to the photo layer and move to the left between the eye and the photo name and click in that square and you see that a padlock appear. That means that now this layer is locked. If I want to create anything, you see the pencil with a circle with a line? It means I can't create anything here. I need to move to the other layer that is not locked so I can create stuff on it. From now on we will be working with the Layer Number 2 that we're going to rename Vector. [NOISE] Now, whenever I create something on top of my photo and I need to remove the photo, I don't have to delete it. I just go to this eye icon and turn it off and I can see whatever I have created, and I can turn it on to keep on working on it. I know many people don't like to work with layers, but I love them. Layers are a great way to organize your work especially if you're working with a lot of elements. Renaming layers is very useful if you're sharing this file with another designer or printer provider. It is easier for them to find what they need. That's it, now we're ready to begin vectorizing this image. Before you go into the next lesson, make sure to first place your image, lower its opacity, create a new layer, and rename the layers Photo and Vector. Unlock the photo layer. See you in the next lesson where I will be teaching you about the Pen Tool. 8. The Pen Tool: Straight Lines : In the past lesson, we place the photo that we will be working with in the new document in Adobe Illustrator. Let's begin with our first tool of this class, the Pen Tool. In this lesson, I will teach you the technical aspect of it because the Pen Tool is one of those tools that people love or hate. You hate it when you don't understand it, but once you do, you just love it. Without doubt, the Pen Tool is the most famous tool in Illustrator because with it you can create whatever you want. The Pen Tool creates anchor points. When you have two or more anchor points connected by a line, it's called a path. When you create curves with the Pen Tool, they're called Bezier curves. In this lesson, we will focus on the straight paths. Now we're back in Adobe Illustrator and they have created a new document and they have placed my Pen Tool practice sheet and I love this image. In this case, editing created a new layer because we're only working this as a practice and just a simple work is not a complicated illustration. To the left, we can see the toolbox. You can see the many tools have a small triangle to the lower-right corner. That means that you can click and leave the mouse there for a couple of seconds and you can see more functions. Here, you can see, we have the Pen Tool and its functions which is the add anchor point tool, the delete anchor point tool, and the anchor point tool. To the right of them, you can see a parenthesis. This means that this is a shortcut. If you press P on the keyboard, you will get that Pen Tool. The plus sign will get the add anchor point tool. The minus, the Delete Anchor Point tool, and Shift C, the anchor point tool. If you keep moving to the right in this border and you release your mouse, you will get a floating window with all of the Pen Tool and its functions. If by any reason you don't see the same tools that I have here, you can go to the bottom of the toolbox, so these three horizontal dots. That's the Edit toolbar. Here you can access all of the tools inside Adobe Illustrator. The gray ones means that you already have them in your toolbox. The other ones you can just click them and drag them to your toolbox. Or you can drop also from your toolbox to your old tools windows to eliminate them from the toolbox. When working with any drawing tool, like the Pen Tool. The best practice is to set your fill to none and select a color for your stroke. This way it will be easier for you to see what you're doing. If not, the program will auto-fill your shape towards the interior, making it difficult to see where you're tracing. By default, you will have a white fill and a black stroke. You can click on top of any of them to bring them forward. Then you can click the non-fill underneath, which is the white square with a red line over. But for these, I prefer to use the shortcuts. If you press the letter D on your keyboard, you will get back to your default, which is the white fill and the black stroke. You can use the letter X on your keyboard to bring forward whichever you like. You can click the forward-slash to set the one that is in front to none. This arrow over here will swap your fill and stroke, meaning that if I click on it, now my stroke is set to none and my fill is black. You can change that in your keyword with a shortcut Shift X and it will do the same thing. The Adobe programs are all about practice. Once you do something many times, it will come more natural to you. You will do it before you can think about it. Remember that in the resources section of this class, you can find a PDF with the most useful shortcuts that can really speed up your process. Make sure you have selected the Pen Tool if not, go to the Tools and click on there, or press the letter P on your keyboard. The course are meaning the arrow that moves when you moves your mouse will tell you what is ready to do. In this case, we have the icon of the Pen Tool and an asterisk. If you will like a different approach, you can press the Caps Lock on your keyword and you will get an X. Some people prefer this because it's more precise, but I will keep using the traditional one. Now, I'm going to zoom in by using the command plus sign. I'm going to use my space bar to access the hand tool and centralize my image. Once I release it again, I go back to the Pen Tool. That's why the space bar is so useful. Now I want to click and release my mouse and I'm going to move the mouse around. You can see a small box to the right of my cursor. That indicates the distance between the point I just created and the place where my cursor is. Right now that measurement is in inches because that's the unit measure that it shows when creating the document. If you show centimeters or pixels, it will show you the distance in those units. I will continue to move my cursor to the shape of the one that I'm tracing right now in that practice sheet. If you press Shift on your keyboard, you will make sure that you're creating a straight horizontal line. While you keep Shift press, if you move your mouse up, you will create a 45-degree. Or if you keep moving up, you will create a straight vertical line. I am going to create a horizontal one. I'm going to click. I'm going to go up and I can press Shift to make sure that that line is straight. I'm going to click and then I'm going to move to the left. As you can see, a magenta line just appeared. That is a smart guide that Illustrator have. So that means that the point that I'm going to create is perfectly aligned with the point at the bottom. I'm going to click and release. You can see that if I keep moving, I just created the shape that I wanted to trace. But if I keep moving my mouse, the Pen Tool is still selected. If you want to leave the Pen Tool, you can press Escape key on your keyboard. Now I can create another shape separate from the one that I just created because the Pen Tool will be still selected. If I want to stop using the Pen Tool, I can press the V key on my keyboard and it will change to the Selection tool. Now I can select the path that I just created, move it, or do whatever I want with it. You can also press Enter on your keyboard to change your cursor from the Pen Tool to the selection tool. But I always press Escape or V because they are to the left of my keyword, which is the hand that I use for shortcuts. I want to move my right hand away from my pen tablet as few as possible. Little things like this will help you to become more efficient while working. Right now whenever I have my path selected, you can see that the line, and if I change to the direct selection tool, the anchor points are color blue. You may have another color, you can change that. You can go to the Layers panel again, you can double-click on top of the name. Here you can see that you can choose whichever color you like. There's also a drop-down. You can select the one that you prefer and click "Okay". Sometimes depending on the color that your line or shape are, the color of your layer could make it difficult to see the anchor points. So changing the color is helpful. Now I'm going to press the letter P on my keyboard again to access the Pen Tool. You can go to either of the open anchor points and you can see the asterisk change to a line. This means that you can click on that anchor point and keep creating from it, as you can see. Now I'm going to move to the other open anchor points and you'll see that a circle form. This means that if I click there, I will have closed this shape. I'm going to press V on my keyboard to change to the selection tool. Now I have a close path. I can move it. If I change the fill and the stroke, you can see that I have a square. Let's go back to the way that we had it. I'm going to press the letter B on my keyboard. I'm going to zoom in a little bit so you can see better what I'm doing. If I select my Pen Tool again and I go over any area of the path, you can see that the cursor change again to a plus sign. That means that if I click there, I create a new point. Anywhere I click, I keep creating new points. If I decided that I don't need one point, I can go over any of them, and the cursor will change again to a minus sign, which is the delete anchor point. At this point, I'm just only moving my mouse over the path. I'm not making any selection on my keyboard or shortcut or even in the toolbox. If I click in this icon with a minus sign, I will have deleted that point. Now, I have changed my shape. If I select the Direct Selection tool with the letter A on my keyboard and I click on any of these points, you can see that now it's blue instead of white. I can move that point. I can change again to Pen Tool, Create another point, create another point, and another point. Change to my direct selection tool. I can keep editing the same exact square that I created. I can keep editing it. What if I decide that after I created this shape, I don't want to close anymore. You're going to choose your scissors tool. That's the letter C on your keyboard. You can see it here on the keyboard is selected. You can click on any anchor point. Then select your direct selection tool with a letter A, click again. Now I can move and I have an open, I don't have a closed shape anymore. I have an open path, again. If I decide that I wanted to join these two points, I can click on the endpoint, press Shift and click on the other endpoint, and then you keyboard press Command J. Now those points will unite again. These are the basics of the Pen Tool. Practice them and they will become your best friends. In the next lesson, we will be using the Pen Tool to work with curves. But before, makes sure to download the practice sheet and play around with the Pen Tool and its functionalities. Create points, add points to the path, delete points from the path. Use the direct selection tool to move points independently. Use the scissors to two separate a closed path and joined two points by selecting them with the direct selection tool and using the shortcut Control J. Then go to the next lesson to create curves. 9. The Pen Tool: Curves: Now you're getting familiar with the pen tool. So far, we have learned a lot about how it works by creating a square and editing it with the pen tool functionalities. Now, we're going to create curves with the pen tool. As we have seen so far, both the selection tool and the direct selection tool, are very useful when working with vectors. Remember that you can select a move any object in Illustrator with the selection tool. The shortcut for that is the letter V on your keyboard. You can select independent anchor points with the direct selection tool. The shortcut for that is the letter A on your keyboard. Now, let's go back to Illustrator to the Figure Number 2 to create some curves with the pen tool. Let's start to create this figure by creating an anchor point, and I'm going to move to my next, the end of my shape. I'm going to click and drag and you can see that I have now handles, which if I use the direct selection to the letter A, I can move them. I can edit this shape until they have this shape that I want and as you can see, this is pretty tight. I'm going to delete this and start over. When creating curves, what you need to do is at the moment that you create your first point, you're going to click without releasing and drag. These are the handles of the pen tool. You're going to move it towards the area more or less that you want your curve to go. Now, you can see how I can preview how my curve is going to go. Now, I'm going to click at the end of this tracing exercise and click again and drag without releasing. Now, I will release. Now, you can see that my shape is more similar to the shape that I want to create. You can go back to your direct selection tool and move things around. You can edit again this anchor point, and this one over here until you get your desire shape. Now, here we have our Shape Number 1 and the Shape Number 2. If by any reason you want to make a straight line to a curve or a curve to a straight line, you just need to use your anchor point tool. Click on there, and move towards the anchor point. Click and drag. Then they have transform that straight line or corner to curve. The same thing here, if I wanted to change this curve that was triggered, I just click and click, now I have a straight line. If I have a straight line, I can go click again and drag, and I can create the handles. That's the way to use this tool. Let's go to Figure Number 3 now. I'm going to set the pen tool, I'm going to click and drag. Click and drag, and click and drag. If I want to make any more edits, I can click, I can press the letter A on my keyboard and make any adjustments that I need. We should have whenever you move the handle at the left, you will edit the path at the left, that you previously made. If you move the one at the right, you will affect more than one that you just created to the right. That's how it works. Let's move to Figure Number 4. I want to select the pen tool, again. I want to click and drag, click and drag, click and drag, click and drag. But now, I don't want to create a curve. I want to create this straight line. I'm going to click on my last anchor point and you'll see that as small arrow changing the cursor, meaning that I'm going to create a corner. I want to click there and now we can create a straight line. You can see that with the pen tool, everything is editable. As long as you practice, you will be better predicting worded shape will go depending on where your anchor points are. I know that this is a reason most people give up using the pen tool. They just get frustrated but not getting the shape they want to create, but give it time and practice. Before going to the next lesson, trace Figures 2, 3 and 4 of the Practice Sheet. Edit Figure Number 1 to change corners to curves and vice versa. Once you have practiced and understand how the pen tool works, go to the next lesson to start vectorizing your photo with the pen tool. 10. The Pen Tool in Action Pt. 1: In the past two lessons, we learned how the pen tool works. We trace practice shapes to get to know the tool and shortcuts. Now, we're going to put that into action and start tracing their photo. Let's go back to Illustrator. Now we're back in Illustrator file that we created before. The first thing that I'm going to do is to make sure that my fill is set to none and I have a stroke, I'm going to change it to red. If you double-click on the stroke, you will open the color picker. I'm going to choose red because it's a color that really make contrast with our image and it's easier to see. Now, I'm going to click on my "Layers." If I click on my "Layers" now, you will see that the color palette will disappear because when you have stack your panels, you can only have one panel open at the time. If you want to see more, you can click on the arrows over here and click, "Expand panels" and you can see more things, but I like to have mine organized this way. Let's go back to our layers panel and make sure that I'm working with my vector layer, not my photo. The ones that I've highlighted is the one that I'm working with. First, I'm going to press "Command R" on my keyword. You can see that my ruler appear here. You can also do that in view and rulers. In this case it says, "Hide Rulers" because I just created it. But if not, it will say, "Show Rulers" and what I prefer to use the shortcut because obviously it's faster. Now, the ruler you can drag from the corner and change where the zero starts. If you want to start for any reason in another area, that is not the corner of your project, you can do that. In this case, I'm going to leave it in the area. I'm going to, "Click and Drag" to the corner and I will have my zero or my documents starts, my artboard starts. I'm going to Zoom out a little bit, "Command minus". Now I can drag from the ruler and create guidelines. In this case, I don't want my guideline to be all over the document. I'm going to press, "Command Z" on my keyboard. I'm going to select the "Artboard tool", click here. Now you can see that I have selected my art board. This way is the way that you can change the size of your artboard or any other thing related to it. But now I'm going to drag from my ruler to my artboard, to the middle of it, using the rulers looking up. I can see that now I am in the center of my image I'm going to release. Now I know I can press, "V" on my keyboard. Now I know the center of my image. Now, I'm going to go to my photo layer and click, "Unlock it" and move my photo to center it. I'm going to lock it again and go back to my vector layer. You can hide or show guidelines in view. Guides, you can hide them, you can unlock them and delete them using these shortcuts also, but also in the view guides. Now I'm going to select the "Pen tool", make sure that I have it selected. I'm going to Zoom in to start tracing our biggest object with widgets. The Garita. I'm going to start here at the bottom. I'm going to Click, press, "Shift" because I want a straight line. Click again, press, "Shift", go up because I want a straight line. Click. Now I'm not pressing Shift because I don't want a horizontal, a vertical, or a 40 degree angle line. I just want to a line with more control. I'm going to Click. Now I'm going to go up, press, "Shift" because I want a vertical line and click there. Now I'm going to Zoom in using the command plus or minus whatever you need at the moment. I'm going to use my Spacebar to access the hand tool. These area, you can see that it has curves and straight lines and I'm going to trace it now and later and we'll go back to make some changes. But for now, I want to make a curve, so I'm going to go to the area that I think is the right place. Since I'm looking at it and it's the shape that I want to do, I'm going to, "Click and Drag" to create a curve. Now I'm going to Click, I want to create a small horizontal, straight line. I'm going to Click. Now I'm going to go Click, Drag. I want to create now a straight line, so I'm going to Click my last anchor point. Click, now I want to create a curve. I'm going to "Click and Drag". Now again, I'm going to create a straight line so we need to click on my last anchor point. Create a straight line. Now, I'm going to create another curve. I'm going to, "Click and Drag". Now I want to create a straight line again, so I'm going to click on my last anchor point, pressing Shift to help me. I'm going to create a vertical line. I'm going to click and release. I'm using my Spacebar again to access the handle. Now I want to create a curve, so I'm going to, "Click and Drag". I'm going to keep using the hand tool, I'm going to create another curve here. "Click and Drag" using the hand tool with the space bar. "Click and Drag" again, the spacebar. Click and drag a little bit. Now, I'm going to go back to my last anchor point. Click to create a straight line. I'm going to click. Now I'm going to move to the next point that I want. "Click and Drag" to create a curve. I want a corner now again, so I Click my last anchor point. Move up, Shift, Click. Now I want another curve, so I, "Click and Drag". Now I want a corner, so I click my last anchor point, Shift, create a line, and now I move to the next point that I want and I, "Click and Drag". I click again, my last anchor point to create a straight line. Press Shift, Click. Now I'm going to create a curve so we move along. I create Click, Drag to create a circle, and continue on. Click, Drag to complete that circle. I'm going to Zoom out to see 100 percent. I'm going to press on my keyboard, "Command zero". Now I'm going to press, "The letter B" on my keyboard because I am done for now with this cheap. Now, I want to continue and create this door in the Garita. This so-called door. I'm going to Zoom in again. This is an area that I start my tracing. I'm going to press again, "The letter P" access, the pen tool. You can see the line. That means that I can click there and continue creating. I'm gong to go up, use Shift to make sure that this is a straight line. Click. I'm going to move to the center. I'm using my guides here to make sure that I'm in the center. I'm going to, "Click and Drag" to create a curve. Now I'm going to Zoom out again, press, "The letter B" to access my direct selection tool. Now I'm going to work with this area over here. I'm going to Zoom in to this section. As you can see, my tracing is a little bit different than the photo, because if I follow the photo, it won't have much sense. But now I'm looking at it and it's not exactly what I want. I'm going to select the direct selection tool, "The letter A". I'm going to click on this point. Actually, let me change the color of my guides so you can see better. I want to change it to green okay? This is exactly what I meant when I showed you how to change the color. You see now I can see better the shapes that I'm working with. Now I'm going to move this around, I think that this point is extra, so I'm going to press my keyword, the minus sign. I'm going to delete this point. I'm going to use again on my selection tool and keep changing it. Now I have a better shape to my taste. You can change it however you like. Over here, we can also make some adjustments to make it look smoother. You can see that the pencil gives you complete control over your illustration. Now I have the shape as I want it to. Maybe I want to make some changes here, want to look from far away, make this more rounded. You can keep editing as you like until you feel you are happy with your creation. But now I want to copy this area so I can have what we can call a perfect shape. I'm going to select my path, press the "Option" key on my keyboard. You can see how my cursor has changed from a black arrow to a black arrow with a white arrow. That means that now I'm making a copy of what I just had selected. While I have the Option key down, I'm going to press "Shift" and keep dragging so it doesn't move up or down, it keeps in the same level. Now, I'm going to release my mouse and my keys. But now I need to reverse this. I'm going to press the letter "O" in my keyboard, press "Shift" in my keyboard, and I'm going to drag to the direction that I want this shape to look, I want to look to the left, so I drag there. If this is complicated for you, you can also do it while having selected your shape. You can go to Object, Transform, Reflect, and there you can choose vertical and click "Okay". Now you have changed your shape. Now, I'm going to drag it, pressing "Shift" so it doesn't go up or down, the closest that I can to the other shape, more or less to the center. Now, I want to remove my guide. I can go to View, Guide, hide guidelines so this doesn't bother me anymore. Now, I'm going to zoom in. I know that even though they look together, you can see that if I go over with my mouse, it's not one shape, they are different shapes. I'm going to select my direct selection tool on my keyboard, the letter A. I'm going to drag over this area. Even though I can't see it, I know that I have selected both sides because I can see that the path is selected. On my keyboard, I'm going to press "Command J". Now, this is one shape. You can see it because I am selecting it. I select it and I can see them in both sides selected. I'm going to go down to the area over here that I know that this area is not closed. You have to close every anchor point that is open. You have always two open paths, first one and the last one. This is our last one. I'm going to use the direct selection tool, drag over it, and press on my keyboard "Command J". Now, if I use, again, my direct selection tool, you can see this is one shape. Now, if I swap my fill, I'm going to hide my photo, here we have the shape of [inaudible] I'm going to turn on again this, I'm going to do over my object. I'm going to lock it, "Command 2", and then I'm going to trace this wall. I'm going to select again the pen tool. Going to click here. I'm going to do the same thing. I'm going to press "Option", "Shift", drag. I'm going to press "O" on my keyboard, press "Shift", drag to the left. As you can see, sometimes that can happen, it can go crazy with the shortcuts. If that's difficult for you, I'm going to delete this and do it another way. I'm going to select this wall. I'm going to press "Command C" on my keyboard to copy just as we do even in Microsoft Word. I'm going to go to Object. I'm sorry, Edit, Paste in Front. Now I have the exact copy of this. I'm going to press "Shift" and drag because that's easier. Then I'm going to go to Object, Transform, Reflect. Choose vertical, choose Okay. Now, I'm going to place it in the right place using Shift to make sure that it's aligned. If for any reason it moves and it's not aligned, you can just select both walls and look for your Align panel and choose vertical to the bottom or to the top and make sure that they are aligned. Now, I'm going to use the Pucker Tool to add a little bit of character to my wall vectorization. I'm going to select the wall here, I'm going to zoom in a little bit, and I'm going to look for the Pucker Tool. Again, if you don't see it, you can go to the three horizontal dots, edit tools, and find it. It looks like an X with arrows all around it. Now, with my shape selected, I'm going to go to the border and click. You can see how the path is changing. It's created a new anchor points. I just want to add a little bit more of character because this is an old structure that I'm vectorizing. Got to use my selection tool, select the object, again, the Pucker Tool. We can drag. You can see that the walls are not super straight, they have more character. I'm going to hide my photo so we can see better what we have done so far. So far so good. Now, we can see better what we have created. I'm going to File, Save, and save it before going to our next lesson. Before you go into the next lesson, trace your main object into the photo and save it. In the next lesson, we will continue to work with the pen tool and add some accents to our vectorization. 11. The Pen Tool in Action Pt. 2: In the past lesson, we used the Pen tool to create our main shape, the garita. Now, we're going to keep using the Pen tool to create some accents. Now I'm going to go to my Layers panel, and I'm going to create a new layer. I'm going to double-click on it and rename it Accents/Brushes, because in this layer, I'm going to work with all of the lines that I'm going to make. As you can see, it's also green as the path will be green as with the vector layer. I'm going to double-click on it and choose another color. I'm going to choose magenta. Now every path that I create have that color. Then, I'm going to go to my Vector layer. I'm going to select everything. As you can see, my garita still works, so I'm going to go to Object, Unlock All, I'm going to select everything. I'm going to swap my fill color, it's a nice job. I'm going to turn on my photo layer so I can see better what I'm doing. I'm going to make sure that the photo layer is locked and that the vector layer is also locked. I'm going to select the Accent/Brushes layer. I'm going to zoom in. You can also make your panels a little bit smaller. There you need that. Just drag when the arrows appear. Then I'm going to create lines over here. Just to create a more accentuated border. For that, I'm going to use the Pen tool again. I'm going to make sure that my stroke color is a different one than red. I'm going to choose green. Now I just zoom in to see better. I'm going to click in this corner. It doesn't affect the red path because it's locked in another layer. If I would have this in the same layer, that would be a problem because I would be creating another point in this path instead of creating a new one. I'm going to click and drag. Now I'm going to go to the other side, click and drag. Now I have that line. I'm going to click Escape in my keyboard. I'm going to click and drag again, click and drag. If your artboard moves like that, it's because you don't have too much space and you're moving the mouse, it doesn't matter, just release it and if it doesn't look right, you can always use the selection tool, click on the point, and manage the handles here in this side, or in this side, however you need to. I'm going to press Escape in my keyword, I'm going to press the P for the Pen tool again, pen. I'm going to click, click again and drag. This one I want to fix it a little bit more. Then I'm going to create another one and to press Escape. Choose the P in my Pen tool, click and drag, click and drag. This will move a lot. This happens because I'm so zoom in. If I would be a little bit more zoom out, this won't be happening, but I just want you to be able to see better what I'm doing. But it doesn't matter because as you can see everything, you can fix anything. Now I'm going to create another one from here and I don't have a corner, but I'm going to click and drag and press Shift. I have the same level as the one at the left. Click and drag. Now I can use the direct selection tool and work with this. Now, it looks a little bit better. I'm going to do the same thing over here. But first, I'm going to select these green lines and I'm going to select Control Command tool to lock them. When I am using now the Pen tool, it doesn't bother me. I'm going to click, I'm going to click and drag, click and drag. Here you can work with. If you don't see the handle to the other side, like in this case, you can just go back to the anchor point tool, click and drag, and you will see the both of the handles. I'm going to select again the direct selection tool. I want to edit the previous paths, so I'm using this tool, this handle. Now I keep working with it. Now I'm going to use the curvature tool, which is similar to the Pen tool, but you have to make two points, and after you create them, you can just click and drag, click and drag, and is another way to create curves. I find that in this case it's not that useful, I will say. But in some instances it might. But I prefer to use the Pen tool always because I have more control. I'm going to select this, press Option, Shift, Copy, press the letter O, press Shift, drag to the left, press V to use my selection tool and move these similar, but it looks like a reflect from this one. Now I'm going to create this over here. Click Escape. Then I'm going to create lines here. I'm going to click and drag, Escape, click and drag with shift to help me here in these lines, we can drag and then I use the direct selection tool. That's that. Now I have these lines ready to go. We're now done with the Pen tool. I want to celebrate yourself for learning to work with it. Many people hate or fear the Pen tool, but in reality is that they don't understand how it works. Now, you do. Use the practice sheet from Lessons 8 and 9, as many times as you need until you get comfortable with it. Before going into the next lesson, trace any lines that you need to add more definitions to your vectorization. Remember to always save your document. In the next lessons, we will learn about pencil, paintbrush and Blob Brush tools. 12. The Pencil Tool: In the past two lessons, you learn all the ins and outs of the Pen tool, which is one of the most powerful tools inside Illustrator. Now I'm going to teach you about the most familiar tools in any drawing program or app. Well, even into our daily lives since gets the pencil tool, the paintbrush, and the blob brush tool. At first, they look as if they do the same thing, but the attributes are different and you can use them to create different results. Let's start with the pencil tool. Now we're back in our Illustrator document with how we finish our last lesson with a vectorization of the data, and now I'm going to create a new artboard. I'm going to open my art-board panel, again, if you don't see it, go to Window and look for the art board there, artboards. Now I'm going to go to the plus sign, on the lower area of the panel I'm going to click New Artboard. As you can see, I have, art board number one that I can even rename and name it vectorization, and the second one I'm going to name it test because we're going to test two different brushes here. If you select the Artboard tool, you can see that you can click on top of any of them and move them. I'm going to move the test one a little bit farther. It doesn't have any issues with the artboard number one. I'm going to press the V key on the keyboard to have the selection tool. Now I'm going to go back to my toolbox, and I'm going to look for the pencil, blob brush, and paintbrush tools. Again, I have them together because I have arranged them that way. I'm going to put the window folding, and if you don't see them, you can go to the edit toolbar and look for them. As you see when you click on top of them, on top of that tool, you can see that the paintbrush, the shortcut is P, the Blob Brush Tools is Shift B, and the pencil tool is N. For now we're going to work with the pencil tool. Again, we're going to change our fill to none, and we're going to leave our stroke in black. I'm going to make sure that I'm in my vector layer. As you can see, the cursor half an asterisk, meaning that I can start working. In this case, I'm going to also use my Stroke panel. I'm going to set the stroke of 10 points. We can see better what we're doing. I'm going to zoom in a little bit, and I'm going to click and drag, and create a path. There you go. This is our pencil. I can use the letter a in my keyword to use the direct selection tool, I can click on any of them to select them. This is the one that I have selected. I can move this however I like. If I double-click the pencil icon, I get the pencil tool options, and the first thing that we see is the fidelity. If I move it to the left, which means accurate, our path will have more points, more anchor points. If I move it to the right, which is smooth, you will have less anchor points and the image will look smoother. Here we have some options, and we're going to go through them right now. Luckily, lowercase to explain them to you. If you check the box, fill new pencil strokes. What I will do is that it will always feel a color here as we said in the previous lesson that we don't want that. I have it unchecked because no matter if I have a color fill, I'm going to unselect this. It doesn't matter if I have a fill color when I select the pencil tool, it will automatically set it to none which is what I want. I have that option not checked. Then non selection is Keep Selected, which means exactly this, that I created something, and it's selected. If I uncheck that, it won't happen. If I trace something, it will be unselected. Option key toggles to smooth tool, smooth tool is another option that you have inside Illustrator which do exactly that. It creates a smoother line with less points. The selected path means that if I have this path selected and then from this point I move to the side, it will edit that path, and I can do that. If I unselect that, I won't be able to do that. This is how the pencil tool behaves. As long as you get familiar with the pencil tool, and start working and you got your workflow, you may want to make changes to the selection so they work better for you. Just as with the preferences setting I mentioned at the beginning of the class, if your brushes are not behave in the same way as mine, probably you have different settings than mine. Before going into the next lesson, play around with the pencil, and make your selection in its options. In the next lesson, we will learn about the paintbrush tool. 13. The Paintbrush Tool: In the past lesson, you learned about the pencil tool. Now we will dive into its brother, the paintbrush tool. As I said, these tools may look similar, but now we're going to dive into an interesting twist with a paintbrush, which is the pressure sensitive setting. We're back in Illustrator. I have the pencil tool selected. I'm going to trace a line just to show you something later. I use the Shift to make it straight. Now we're going to work with a paintbrush tool. For these tool, we're going to use the brushes panel. I'm going to open it because I don't have it open here. This is the brushes panel. I'm going to go to this three horizontal lines to the upper right corner. I'm going to go down to Open Brush Library, then I'm going to go to artistic and choose artistic paintbrush. This will open another set of brushes that I can use. I'm going to select the first one. Whenever I select a brush from these options, it will appear automatically in the brushes panel. I'm going to drag and you can see that this brush looks different. I can still use the direct selection tool. Click on any of the points and move it. I can even select this line that I traced with a pencil and apply another brush as you can see here, and you can still make changes to this. I can use the pen tool options and select that plus sign and I can add points to this line. I can also use the minus to eliminate anchor points. The main difference between a pencil tool and the paintbrush tool is that you can style the appearance. As you can see, pencil just do straight lines and the paintbrush can do different styles. You can even have transparency with them. As I said, you can apply it to a pencil trace. Also after you make your selection, you can go to Object, Expand Appearance, and it will transform your what it used to be a stroke, like over here you have a stroke, to a shape. Now, I can change the border. I can. But now you see it's no longer. If I select the one on the right, the left is a stroke. You can see here in the colors. If I select the one that I just expanded, it's a fill. I can add a brush border as you can see here to a fill. That's something that you can work with. I can still use the direct selection tool to choose points here and edit this shape. This is useful just to use as a base sometimes to create a shape and then you can edit over it. Now I'm going to close this panel and I'm going to drag this one to my doc here. If I leave it, if you see the blue line, this means that I'm going to drop it independent there. If I move it into a group, it's going to be part of this group and then they have access to all the panels at the same time. That's how that behave. If you double-click on the paintbrush icon, you access the same similar options. The fidelity works the same way. Accurate, you will have more points. Smooth, you will have less anchor points. The fill new brush strokes behave the same way. Right now, I have a fill of black and a stroke of none. If I trace, I will ultimately have a non-fill and a black stroke, which is what I liked. So I have that not selected. The keep selected works the same way as the pencil, which means that I have created a path and then it keeps selected so I can keep working on it. The edit selected paths, which I have also selected, is the same way as the pencil. I can drag from any point and redirect that path. Now I'm going to select all of this and delete it. Now I'm going to use the calligraphic brush, which are these are the top of the brushes panel. You can also go to the three horizontal lines. Go to Open Brush Library, artistic, artistic calligraphic. Here we have similar options. But for now, I'm going to select one of them. I'm going to select and double-click on a calligraphic brush. Here you can see you have different options. I'm going to change the size to 15. In this drop-down menu, I have different options. Depending on if you have a mouse or pen tablet, you will see more or less options available for you. I'm going to choose pressure and then I'm going to change the variation here and look over here what happens. I'm going to set the variation about endpoints. You can see that when I'm doing less pressure, I'm going to have this size. When I'm doing more pressure, I'm going to have this size. I'm going to click "Okay". No pressure, more pressure. I'm going to do it the other way from down to up. No pressure, more pressure. This happens whichever direction you choose to do this. Also, you can use the direct selection tool and make changes to this brush. If you don't have a pen tablet, I'm going to click on this brush again and I'm going to choose random. I'm going to click "Okay" and I'm going to say "Apply to Strokes". You have to choose that. Now this strokes changed to random instead of pressure sensitive. I'm going to choose my brush again. It doesn't matter the pressure that I'm given to my pen in this case or, in your case, your mouse. You will get different width or size of the brush, and it doesn't have anything to do with a pressure that you are using in your mouse. This is a way to get a variation in your brush if you don't have a pen tablet. But now you get the idea of the benefits of a pen tablet if you have access to one, so you can do more controlled strokes. Before going into the next lesson, practice with a paintbrush and make your preferred functions in these options. If you're using a pen tablet, change the options to pressure. If you're using a traditional mouse, change the options to random. In the next lesson, we will learn about the blob brush tool. 14. The Blob Brush Tool: In the previous two lessons, we have worked with the pencil and paintbrush tools. Now let's talk about the blob brush tool, which behaves a little bit different than the others. We're now back inside Adobe Illustrator and we're going to work with a blob brush tool. I'm going to select it in the toolbox. As you can see, a circle around the cursor of the brush, and I'm going to use in my keyboard, the opening bracket will make the brush smaller and the closing bracket will make the brush bigger. I'm going to trace here something and as you can see, this is no longer a path. This is a closed object, and you can see also because it's swatches, the stroke is non and the fill is the one that is in black. I can again use the direct selection tool and move points. I could use the minus key in my keyboard and eliminate points. I can use the plus sign and add points. I can even use the scissors, which is the letter C in my keyboard and click on any point, then use my direct selection tool, and now I have created a path because I can change it and now it's an open path. I'm going to press "Command Z" to undo all of this. As the other tools, if I double-click on the icon, I get the blob brush tool options. Keep selected means the same as the pencil and the paintbrush. It means that once I create a shape it's still selected, merge only with selection if I shut that means that if I trace over this shape, it will merge together, but if I create another one, and then I go over this one, it's a different shape, is not merging. If I choose uncheck that box and then trace over this one, it will merge. This one is not selected, I trace over and it merge, and that what it means. I always have it unselected because that's my preference. Fidelity means the same as the pencil and the paintbrush, to the left, more accurate you will have more corners and more points to the right, you will have smoother lines and less points. In this area we're going to work just as with a paintbrush. They have made some selections here, 30 points. I'm going to be working with a size of their points. I'm going to choose pressure and the variation of 20 points. The angle I'm going to use 114 angle. I'm going to choose the pressure to 30 percent and the roundness, I'm going to choose 65 percent. Make sure I have pressure selected and the variation of 30 percent. In all of the changes you can see how it will look over here at the top, I'm going to click, "Okay" I'm going to select everything that I did here. Delete it just like in the brush, and I'm doing no pressure, more pressure. No pressure, more pressure. No pressure. Again, you can keep working with this, and you can see how it works. If you don't have a pen tablet, which is the one that allows you to work with pressure, you can just choose random. Here, I'm going to choose this one fixed, fixed. I'm just tracing lines without making any difference in the pressure. I'm working right now as if I was working with a normal mouse, and you can see that it have as a variety of thickness every line. You can double-click again on the Tools option window and play around with these numbers and make changes and just try and try again to see until you get the result that you want. Now you can see the advantages of using the pen tablet. Having the functionality of pressure-sensitive can allow you to add more character to your work. Before going into the next lesson, open that blob brush tool and practice with it. Change the options to the ones that you prefer and try the pressure options. If you're using a pen tablet, change the options to pressure. If you're using a traditional mouse, change the options to random. In the next lesson, we will put these brushes into action. 15. The Brushes in Action: In the past three lessons, we learned all about the technical aspects of the brushes. Now, let's work with them. In Lesson 11, we used the pen tool to add accents to our vectorization. Now, we will continue to work with the same layer. We're back where we left our vectorization before with our accent/brushes layer. In that same layer, I'm going to add now some accents with the Blob Brush Tool, which is the tool that I have chosen to use because it's the one that I have more control with. I'm going to select the Blob Brush Tool, and I'm going to make some changes in this area. I'm going to use a size of two points and a variation pressure of two points. The angle is going to be 150, reduce this pressure again here and a variation of 30. The roundness will stay in 65 and a pressure in the variation of 35. I'm going to click Okay. I am going to zoom in. Make sure that I am in the right layer. I'm going to try to create this effect of bricks. I'm going to start from the top. I'm going to click, make some more pressure, make less, make more. Then you can see that I have created that line. If you don't like it, you can just select it, delete it, and go again. Click. Make more pressure. You just keep going doing this through all of the lines that you will like to have accents. [MUSIC] You can turn off your photos so you can see better what you're doing and if you're happy with it. Now, I'm going to create some lines in this walls. The photo is a reference. You going to have to do exactly as a photo because it will probably don't look that great. You have to just work around it and use it as a reference. [MUSIC] You can move around lines, rotate them. You can even turn off this one to see it better. In this case, you see this line here that goes up. I don't want that. I'm going to zoom in and use the minus in the keyboard to access the delete anchor point. Then we're going to work around. Here, I'm going to use the Direct Selection tool. With all the tools that we have been working with, you can go around and move things. This is slob. I'm going to unlock it. We're going to move it more down here, so it fits the same thing here. I'm going to go perfecting my illustration to the best of my abilities or to make it the way I want to look. Now, I am ready to color this illustration, to put some color on it. But before, remember, go to File, Save, or use your keyboard with Command S or Control S. Before going to the next lesson, choose the brush of your preference and trace the details of your image that will benefit of a hand-drawn style. Don't forget to save your document. In the next lesson, we will put some colors to our vectorization. 16. Color Your Illustration: So far in the past lesson, we have worked with the drawing tools to vectorize inside Adobe Illustrator. Now, we will select colors to tune up our design. Now we're back in Illustrator, and we're going to color our illustration. The first thing that I'm going to do is to turn off the visibility of our vector and accents. I'm going to unlock my photo layer, select the photo and set it back to 100 percent. Now, to decide, I am going to create some squares and copy them with all of the tools that we have taught previously. You can make as many squares as you need. Then you're going to select one square and select the eye dropper tool in your toolbox. You're going to go around your photo selecting, making color selections. This can take a while, because we're very picky our colors. But the important thing is that you have dark colors and lighter colors. So we can have contrast in our vectorization. Once you have made your selections, I have made mine already previously, so I'm going to already copy them from this other document, and then going to paste them. These are the colors that I'm going to work with. I'm going to go to my swatches and because I paste them, they are already appear here. They automatically were added to my swatches. But if you are creating them just there in the document, you just need to select them all. Go to the three horizontal lines over here and go to new color group. You can name them whatever you want or you can just leave this standard name. Make sure that convert process to global is selected. This means that your colors will have this small white triangle in the bottom right corner instead of these others that don't and then click, ''Okay''. This is important. You can delete these or not. But it is important to create them global, because if now I double-click in this square and it's global, and let me set preview and then change this color to this, I don't even have this square selected, but it change color automatically. Let's say that you place a color to your vectorization and then you say, you know what? That brown is too brown, well, you can just double-click there and make a change here in the window. Click ''Okay'', and your vectorization will be updated. I'm going to go back to my color. Now I'm going to go back to my photo layer and then I am going to lock it and turn off the visibility. I'm going to turn on the visibility of my vector and accents brushes. Now, I am going to place the cover first in my vector layer. I'm going to select everything in my layer and I'm going to swap the fill and have the stroke set to none, and I'm going to select this brown. Now, I'm going to lock this layer and then I'm going to unlock the accents layer. Remember that we created these lines with the pen tools, meaning that as you can see here in the swatch, these are strokes. These down here are fields because they were done with the blob brush tool. What I'm going to do now is to select it and go to object, expand, click ''Okay''. But I noticed that I don't have the border as an accent and I want that. I'm going to unlock the vector selected. I'm going to select the garita, as you can see here. I'm going to copy that garita, lock my vector layer, go to my accent's layer, and go to edit, paste in front and as you can see, is there, I'm going to swap the color and the fill. I'm going to select the fill to bring it to the front. I'm going to select the same green. So now I have my accent as a border. I'm going to select the object, expand and now everything in the accent's layer, it is a field. How do I know that? I know that because look at this stroke, it has non-fair. I'm going to go to the fill color and it has a question mark. This means that maybe the green that I use at the top is different than the green that I use at the bottom. That doesn't matter because I have everything selected. I'm going to select the darker brown. Here you go. Now I can see my accents. Now, I am going to work with the background of this illustration. I'm going to go to the layers, create a new layer, drag it between the photo and vector because it's the background. If I create something and it is at the top, it means that it's going to cover my illustration. I'm going to select the rectangle. This will be the sky. I'm going to choose this light blue. Now I am going to choose another one and create the ocean. I'm going to select this turquoise. Now I am going to create the interior of the garita. If you remember the garita had a window, so I'm going to create something here. I'm going to split it another color and I'm going to select that red rectangle with the background. First, I am going to go to the align panel and I am going to choose the horizontal align center, and then I am going to go to the Pathfinder panel and use the minus front. Now, I'm going to change this brown or a darker brown in this case because this is the inside. There you go, you can see that I have a window going to lower the ocean view and this is a sky. Now I am also going to do the floor and I will make it background. Now I have the sky and you can see it's definitely looking much better. If you move the photo to the top of photo layer and turn it on, you can see how your illustration is looking. Now I'm going to create some clouds here, I'm going to use the pencil. I am not in the right layer. That's why it creates something but it doesn't appear and they have the circle with a line saying you can create here. I am going to select the background layer which I haven't named yet. I want to double-click and rename it background. I'm going to create a cloud. I'm going to go to my swatches panel, select ''White''. But I don't want this cloud to be this by contrast with the sky. I'm going to zoom in, I'm going to select it. I am going to open my gradient panel. As you can see, I'm going to put it over here, mucositis so we can see better where we are working with. If I click here, it's going to apply that default gradient to my cloud. But in this case, I want a radial gradient. I want to make cloud to go from white to a blue, the same sky blue that I have. So it looks smoother like a transition. In this case, I know that this is the blue from my sky. I'm going to click ''Drag'' and leave it in this black circle. Now that color change. Now, my cloud still looks like not that smooth and we're going to work around that. I'm going to select the gradient tool. As you can see, this is the area that the gradient is applied to. I want to make it a little bit smaller that the area that I'm working with. That way, it looks better. You can keep adjusting here, where the colors are this bar here is the same like this. If you move it further, you can see how this square is also moving. I wanted to look smooth like that. Now, I will continue to create more clouds and playing with the gradient until I get the results that I like. Before going into the next lesson, create your own color palette and bring to life your vectorization. At accents, use ingredients such as the clouds. Don't forget to save your document. In the next lesson, we will add texture to a vectorization using the image trace. 17. The Image Trace: In the past lessons, we have trace and color vectorization. But now, we will work with a feature that is a little bit different, the image trace, which allows you to convert raster images, such as a JPEG, to a vector. The first thing that we need to do to work with the image trace tool is go to our Layers and make sure that we have everything locked, except the Vector layer. I'm going to zoom out, and I'm going to bring in my photo of the texture. I'm going to drag it, drop it here. You can adjust it to the size that you prefer. Now, with the picture selected, I'm going to go to the Options menu up here and go to Image Trace. This will take a while depending on the capacity of your computer. Now, I have the texture picture that I had. It is vector technically. I'm going to go to this small icon over here, which is the Image Trace panel. I'm going to click there. Here, you can see many things in this panel. Over here, you can see different presets that are similar to this one, but in the drop-down, you have more options. Let's go to high fidelity photo to take a look at this. But every time you're working with image trace, everything that you select takes a while, even if you have a powerful computer, so be patient, make sure that every step that you make something, you save your document so you don't lose information or work if the program crashes. Right now, you can see that it looks technically the same as our picture. But if we zoom in, you can see that those are vectors. This is the magic of the image trace. This will happen with any other picture that you use. You can get the idea that this is a very creative tool. But we're not using this as a high-fidelity photo. We're going to use the default. But you get the idea that you can play around with this for a long time. In the View section, you can decide which way you want to see your tracing results. I'm going to the default. I want to work in black and white, but you can choose grayscale or color. If you choose Color, you can even limit the amount of colors because imagine, a photo can have hundreds of colors to create something. Vectorization so complicated. You can limit the amount of colors that you can use. The threshold is something you can play around. If you move it to the left, you will have less texture or color. If we move it to the right, we will have more up onto the point that is really dark because everything is selected. I'm going to set it to around 160 because the black sections are the textures that I'm going to be working with. The white will be transparent. I'm going to click here to see the drop-down of the Advanced options. I'm going to leave the path to 50 percent, the corners to 75 percent. If you leave your mouse on top of the words, they're explaining what they are, but you can also move them around and see how they work. But keep in mind that every time you move something to one side is going to take a while to show you the results. Here, I will have more pointy path. Here, we have smoother paths. I'm going to leave the coordinates at 75, the noise is going to be 25th pixels. I am going to select the averaging. Think of this as the fence between two houses. If I choose the Overlapping, this creates many houses with fences because every black space will be different shape. If I choose Abutting, they will be altogether one big shape. This take less power from your computer, and it works faster. I'm going to leave field checked, and I'm going to check Ignore White. This is how our vectorization of this texture will look. I'm going to go to the Options menu over here and click "Expand". Here, we have our texture. Now, we're going to use a texture to add it to our vectorization. As I told you, we can now move the panel to the dark area. We're working with the Vector layer. If I select all of these, I'm going to select the Garita and the walls. I'm going to make a copy of this. I'm going to press "Option", drag, and "Shift". I'm going to move the texture to the side for a moment. I'm going to select everything, and it's important that I have it all in one shape. I'm going to open the pathfinder again, the panel, and use Unite. Now, this is one shape. Now, I am going to select a color for my texture. That color looks fine. Now, we need to move my vectorization to the front, so you can go to Object, Arrange, Bring to Front, or use Shift-Command-Closing bracket. Now, I am going to adjust the size of the vectorization to almost the size of My Garita shape. Now, I'm going to select everything. As you can see, I have the Garita and the illustration both selected. I'm going to press in my keyword, Command 7. As you can see, now, my texture is within the shape that was in the front. Now, I'm going to move this on top of my illustration. You want to make sure that it is very perfect aligned. You select your texture, select the wall, go to the Align panel and align to the left and align to the bottom. Make sure that you click outside, so you deselect the wall. Only now, select the Texture. Go to the transparency panel and choose Multiply. Then in the Opacity, turn it down up to 10 percent, or around that, or 12, around there. There, you can see that now we have texture in our vectorization. Now you can look how your vectorization looks. If you will like, you can lock your layers, go to the accent layers. We can go to the blob brush tool, make sure we still have our last selections. If not, you can edit them again. Now, you can keep creating accents as you like. Now, we can go back to our photo layer and turn it on and off, so you can see better everything that you have done. Now, go to File, Save, very important. We'll go to File, Export, Export As, go to JPEG, select "Artboards", in this case, all. It's because I just have one artboard. If I don't choose artboard, what will happen is that it will export up everything that is in the artboard. Even if this background was more to the left, it will export everything. But I just want my art board in this case. I'm going to click "Export",. We want to leave it as a JPEG high-quality. I'm going to leave it at 150 because I'm going to share it online and it doesn't have to reach 300ppi. I'm going to click, "Okay". Now, you'll go to your folder, double-click. Here it is, the vectorization of your photo. Here you have it. Our final vectorized photo. Before going into the final lesson, make sure to place an image trace your texture photo, then use it to make a clipping mask. Place it back on top of the illustration to add texture, then adjust the transparency and export it as a JPEG. A big congratulations to you. You made it. Now, go to the last lesson of this class to share some final thoughts. 18. Final Thoughts: Once again, congratulations, you have reached the end of this class. You can now factorize any photo or drawing to create amazing work. You learned to use the pen tool, which gives you absolute control over lines, curves, and corners. This tool is great for tracing big shapes or for vectorizing lettering. The pencil, paintbrush, and blob brush tools are more free handed tools that gives you the similar effect as if you were drawing by hand or painting. You can manipulate the pressure of the paintbrush and blob brush tools. These tools are great for adding personalized strokes and really bring into life your personal style. The image trace gives you a creative freedom to transform any photo into a big spectacle or in vectors. You can manipulate many options until you get the look that you want. This feature is great to create interesting artwork out of photos or as I prefer to use it to create textures. Finally, you create a color palettes to bring your work to life. You now have this skill to design whatever you want, the whatever medium you need from minimal illustration to elaborated ones. You can vectorize an image as a gift or create your own products. Please share your vectorization in the class project gallery, for all of us to enjoy. Just go to the projects and resources tab below this video. Then look at the right and click on the green button that says "Class Project." There you can name your project, share your process and images with all of the community. Have any questions? Feel free to ask them in the discussion tab below this video. If you enjoyed this class, please share with someone who you think it might be helpful to. You can also visit my profile and follow me so you can be notified when I publish my next class with related topics. I invite you to read my blog at naydacruz.com to find content that supports all of my Skillshare classes. Thank you for taking this class. See you in the next one.