3 Minute Drawing Challenge :Sketch to icon

1. Introduction : Hi, I'm Elma, and I'm an illustrator and surface designer. I have plenty of food imagery in my portfolio, especially food patterns. Food is always popular in surface pattern, from watermelon as the summer theme, through to gingerbread at Christmas time. In this class, we're going to carry on with the three Minute Challenge, where you will be using the food sketches to create icons that you can use in your portfolio, or your surface patterns. We'll be making foodie icons from your sketches, which will retain the spontaneity and hand rendered quality, which is quite sought after at the moment. We are going to be using all brushes, and pens, or anything that makes a black mark. I hope the food icon that you create, will be unique and distinctive to you, and you will have lots of fun creating them. Please join me. 2. Inspiration on Pinterest: I just wanted to quickly show you a great resource, which is Pinterest. Surprise. Surprise. This is my food and kitchen pattern board. It's got over 900 paintings. I have everything from fruit, vegetables, ice cream, popsicles. Further down, we've got kitchen items like Pyrex teapots, teacups, and even mushrooms. So for this particular project, please feel free to just include whatever that you are inspired by. If you want to add flowers or leaves, please just go ahead and do what you think is going to be best for your portfolio. I am just going to be so happy to see whatever you produce. So let's get on with the rest of this project. 3. Drawing your icons: In order to make the black line work, I'm going to be using a series of different brushes and pens. We've got just all sorts of brushes here, just a flat tip one, several different fan ones, I've got a micron, and also a deep pen I can use with ink. I also have white uni-ball and a white posca brush pen and the sharpie and have using black watercolor. I'm just going to start with these, but you just use whatever you have at hand and whatever you feel comfortable with. I'm using just small pieces of cartridge paper which I can scan in and then set three minutes on my clock. There we go. I'm just going to play around with various shapes for pineapples. That will be the main body of the pineapple, and leaving a bit of space for the spiky part. I will draw like an outline. I'm going to use a different brush now. This one will create maybe a cross-hatching effect like that. It's going to look good. I'm going to try the really big fan one now. Let's give it, oh, there's some weird things going on there. Try again. That creates a certainly different vibe. But it's still really handmade. I'm going to get back and draw another shape here, I think. There we go. I'm now going to go and add the spiky green bits. I'm not thinking too much about it, the basic shapes for pineapples. I'm just adding these and we are going to scan them so there's different ways that you can manipulate it and play around with it. But just for the time being, just disengage your brain and have fun and play with these. Do something like that for this one. Oh, I've put my finger in that but never mind, just going to carry on with it. What we're going to do with these, I'm not going to draw an outline. I'm just going to look at the negative space around it and then block it out. Again, I can show you in Illustrator. You can play around with the shape of your final pineapple in Illustrator. It's not a problem and I'll take you through that process in the next video. I'm going to do the same here. Once you scan this in, we can play around with it some more and we can make some really nice effects. I've used some white gel pens and posca pens to add a few different elements. Well, I think I'm going to do the same again with some pears. I'm using a variety of brush pens and actual paint brushes to create the outline and also to fill in the pears, which creates different textures and uniqueness. I'll use a posca, another pair up here may be. What else? Use my tip pen. Just here and all these different lines, once they're scanned in they are going to make a lovely contrast to the pattern that you can create from this. This is just a really quick way of making icons. I'm just going to fill these in really quickly. Something fairly decorative down the middle here. I'm just making instant decisions I haven't thought about this in advance. In this one, I might do some more dots. Again, once I scan the scene is going to just create some lovely differentiation between the different pears. Stalk here and a leaf. This one, I think I'll use the white. Here's my page of pears sketches. I've added a few posca highlights. Now I'm going to be moving on to ice cream and popsicles. Here it goes. Starting with the bowls of ice cream, I think. It's just another version here while I'm at it. Just in loose watercolor. Going to take my tip pen and draw a cone, get these versions. I'm drawing another cone and I'm filling it in with some cross-hatching with my tip pen. I have another version, I think will be popsicle. I'm just going to mix and match all these. I'm keeping their brushwork very loose and free and not worrying too much about outlines either. I take my brush pen, and now add the sticks. What shall I do up here? I've got about 30 more seconds. I decided on a double scoop of ice cream with a wafer and also a slightly wider cone with another cross-hatched pattern using my brush pen. Here's the finish sheet of icons. Now of course you don't just have to do foodie icons. I will be mixing up some flower rolls, and maybe some leaf and also some mount making to create my patterns and just keep on making it loose and fun. Whatever food, floral, or leaf icons that you create, we shall be scanning them in and taking them into Illustrator for image tracing. 4. Image Trace & manipulation : Here we have one of the images that we drew out earlier. I have scanned in at 400 dpi. You can see that some of the areas here, there's probably not enough differentiation between the black and the white for the Image Trace to fully pick it up. We're going to do Command L, which will bring up the levels and I'm just going use these sliders. You may have seen me do this in another Skillshare video, but it just helps when we come to image trace this in Illustrator. So that looks pretty good. There's a bit more differentiation here and picking up on these little edges will really help make your image unique. We're going to save that and take it to Illustrator. Here I've placed the pair image into a new Illustrator file, and now I'm going to image trace it. I find the Sketched Art option is really good for this purpose. I'll just expand that and I'll show you all the little nuances it picks up, including all the uneven edges and all the little blobby bits which I think make your work unique and it picks up on the unique way that you create marks or paint. You can create more icons from these shapes that you have. You can copy and paste this. You've got one more shape there, you can copy and paste this. Also from these, you can do more versions when you take the leaves off. I'm going to use the eraser tool and I'm just going to chop the leaves off. Now, this is just a palette that I've pulled from Pinterest and I'm just going to just start playing around with the colors just to show you what can be achieved very quickly. Always copy and paste different versions, try to keep the originals as they are. I'm just going to color some of these up as well. Now I have pulled apart the icons and I've mixed and matched some of the little marks that we created and this scan as well, I've pulled some of the floral shapes and there was a few heart-shaped happening. I've just copied and pasted perhaps outlines, and I've added different elements to them. Out of the original nine icons, we've now got 18 and you can do whatever you want with those now. Here's a repeat that I created using the pair icons and I've pulled some of the florals apart and added a few little marks to fill the gaps. I'm really pleased with the way it's turned out. I think there's a lot of movement there and it's a fun repeat. Here we have the pineapples, which I changed the levels in Photoshop so that the contrast would be better and I have image traced them. This lot here was something that I was looking forward to marking about with. So I'm going to copy and paste this particular one and show you something that's quite easy to do. You can see that the bottom of this is missing. So I'm going to do n, which will bring up the pencil tool. I'll just draw a shape in to make sure the two ends are joined together and go to transform and the unite tool, so now it's all one path. Copy and paste this. Again, because I'm going to do something with the spiky part of the pineapple, I'm going to take away the outer path. Now you are left with the negative space. I'll go to the eraser tool and just get rid of this because we're going to do something different for the spiky part. Erase that section so that I can put that on top. With this leftover pineapple body, I'm going to just delete a little bit more of this outline, I may be able to use it. I'm not sure at this stage, but it's handy to have. I'm not going to use the same spiky bit. Let's take this one. I think that would be a really nice fit. There's a bit too much happening there. I'll just delete that section there. The other ones that I showed you were these two, let's copy and paste them into a slightly different part of the board. Let's just un-join them. I'm going to copy and paste this. Again, because I'm not quite sure what I'm going to do the spiky parts, but first of all, what I can do is delete that outside bit, so what we're left with is the negative version of the cross hatching of the pineapple. To get the spiky bits back on, I'm just going to erase those two sections and carry this over here. That looks nice. Now again, we're left with this body here. Just delete, basic outline there. Let's see how that looks. That could be usable. Here we have the pineapple icons and the slightly tropical leaves that we did right at the beginning and I made it into a very basic repeat pattern. There we go. I'm really pleased with that. It's very simple, but I enjoyed making that, had lots of fun. I hope you'll have fun with your icons. Here are the ice cream and popsicle icons that I painted earlier. This is what I created with them using some of the techniques that I talked about with the negative and positive shapes. Along here is the pattern, pretty basic, that I've created, but I think it's fun and it works well as a repeat. I'm really pleased about that and I can't wait to see all of your work. 5. Final thoughts : I really hope you had lots of fun with this class, and I can't wait to see your food icons. Please share them in the class, and I would love to share them on Instagram. If you did decide to create patterns with them, please let us see them too. I hope that you have a beautiful set of icons, and that your proud of yourself because most of it was done in three minutes, which is a real achievement. I look forward to hearing from all of you soon. Bye for now.