Create a Vector Self Portrait in Google Drawing

1. Intro: Hi everyone. I'm Jessica guarantee and I am an artist designer and teacher, and I am so excited to share this new workshop with you guys where you'll be creating your very own vector, self-portrait in Google Drawing. So Google Drawing is a free program that everyone has access to because it's included in the Google sleep. So whether you're an advanced designer, maybe you've been doing a lot of production work in the past, or maybe you've never touched a design program before. That's okay if this workshop is for everyone because I'll be walking you through from start to finish how to create a vector self-portrait in Google drawn, which again, it's free software that everyone has access to. So I'll be showing you how to use Google drawn to create shapes, add value, and really refine your artwork. So at the end of this workshop, you all will have really amazing self portraits and I can't wait to see them. So make sure to share your portraits in the gallery that way you can check them out and give you guys feedback on your work. So I hope you guys enjoy this workshop. I am stoked to work with you all. 2. Getting Started: So let's get started. Like I mentioned in the previous video, we're going to be making a self portrait for our project. And you'll be using Google Drawing, which is a free drawing program that allows us to create vector graphics. And so you might ask, well, what is a vector graphic? Basically, vector graphics are made up of a series of points. Rate these little dots here, points, lines, curves, and shapes that are all based on mathematical formulas. So we could actually take this image and scale it infinitely if we wanted to, we could make this huge size of a billboard. And it's still going to look the same, right? It's not going to lose any detail, it's not going to lose any quality. So that's what really sets vector r apart from roster or raster art is kinda like a photograph rate when it's made up of a series of pixels. And if you stretch out that photo, it's going to start to get blurry. So that's why a vector really is incredible, because again, it's mathematical formulas creating these shapes. So it's infinitely scalable. So a lot of flexibility that we have with this type of art. And then once you have your final photo, you can use this. I've maybe your new avatar on your social media sites. You could definitely share it in the gallery on skill share, there's so much that you can do with that. Though. I hope you have fun creating your own avatar. And the best part is it's super easy and free. So to kick things off, I did go ahead and share a starting file for you guys that has the direction. So you should find this in the skill share description under the resources. But our first step is going to be to open up this document. So I shared it as a link. It'll take you to this. And then what we're gonna do is we're going to make a copy. So you click on the link, click File, Make a copy. Alright, gotta name it what you want. So I'll call this my self portrait and hit OK. So now I've got the mind self portrait file all setup because I named it in that initial step. Number two is not really necessary. But if for any reason maybe you did not change the name to myself portrait, you could go file Rename, call it what you want, or just click up here to change the name. So that way it's easy to recognize your file if you're looking for this later. You'll be able to just quickly identified. So always nice to name it. Something that's really cool too, because it is a part of the Google Suite. As long as you're logged into your Google account, you can really easily access your files. So you'll find this in your Google Drive along with all your Google Docs. They will automatically save as long as you're logged in. So a really, really great feature there. Now our third step is adding our reference image, right? So in order to create this digital self portrait, we need a file dereference. So what I recommend doing is just taking a quick selfie and the next video I'll be walking you through just some tips and suggestions for this step. 3. Taking Your Photo: Now in order to create our vector portrait, we need a reference photo. So to take your reference photo that you really don't need anything fancy for this. I'm just going to take a quick selfie on my phone. It really doesn't matter because you're going to be drawing over it anyways. So don't really stress about the quality or anything too much. But it is helpful if you do have decent lading that way. When we work on the drawing, you can clearly see the shadows and highlights and things like that. But again, it doesn't have to be anything fancy. So I'm just going to take, it's kinda weird taking selfies sometimes I know. But anyways, I'm just gonna take like a few selfies. And I'm taking them in different poses because I don't really know what I want. You know, sometimes hands or fund incorporate, sometimes. Sometimes they're not. So maybe take a few and just to kinda get a feel for it, to get the angle that you want. Something you could always do. I'm taking a pretty basic one, but you can incorporate props. So maybe it's a fun hat or you have some cool sunglasses. Any fun accessories are just really going to help add some personality to your Google, John. So, yeah, up to you. I've got my selfies here and we are ready to get started. 4. The Tools: Okay, so I just took my photo now I'm back in my Google Drawing file here. And so what I want to do is we'll talk about the tools and a bit. But what I really wanna do is insert that photo that I just took. So I went ahead and uploaded it from my phone to my computer. So now that I have it on my computer, I've gotta get it into this document. So to do that, I'm going to go up to insert at the top Choose Image. And then I'm going to choose upload from computer because again, I just took it from my phone, added to my computer. So I'm going to upload from computer. From there I'll navigate to the photo, hit open, and there it is. So let's talk about our tools really quick because I need to do a few things to get this photo ready to be my reference. So first off, right here we have our selection tool. So this is what we use to make selections, right? So that could be selections like selecting our photo to move around. Maybe you want to select this text frame, right? Maybe we want to select our shapes that we're going to be creating leader, we can change our canvas size by clicking and dragging here. Rates or selection tool is really going to be a big go-to for moving and selecting shapes or images. Now let's go ahead and use that. So I'm going to click on my photo they just added. And then I'm going to click and drag to make it fill the canvas. So now that we have our photo in, I can actually go to number five, which is delete this text box. And you'll be following along my skill share clause. So we are ready to go. I'll rates we've got our photo in here. I'm now going to click on the canvas. Rates are kinda looks like a checkerboard. That just means it's transparent. And I'm going to click on this little handle here and just drag it inward because basically I just want my full canvas to be this image. So underneath that photo you can see the canvas is still there, but now it's the perfect size, the perfect size. So again, all I did was use my selection tool. And if you click on these little handles, these little points in the corner, you can resize it by clicking and dragging. So pretty simple there. Another tool that we use a lot is our zoom tool. So it looks like this little magnifying glass here with the plus. So if you click on fit and makes it full size, and then if you click on this little drop-down, you can choose zoom out to zoom out a little bit further, right? So zooming in and zooming out, you will use a lot. It's going to be super helpful, especially once we start working with our points. Now a really good shortcut is if you're on a Mac, it's Command Option plus zoom in or command option minus to zoom out. If you're on a PC, it's just control alt plus Control Alt minus half. So Command Option plus or minus, zoom in and out. Again. Super helpful shortcut there. O rate. Then the other really, really useful tool is our lines up here. So if I click on the drop-down, I don't actually want the default line. I want something called the Curve tool, right? To create curved lines, to create these shapes. Now, to create a curve shape, I'll just go ahead and demo it off to the side. You just click once delayed on a point. And you can see this line that's creating from that point to my cursor. So if I click again, it's going to automatically laid on that anchor point in turn to a curve rates. And I can click again, it's curving, clicking again, curbing. And then if I hover close the start point, it will automatically connect those. So that's creating a shape rate. So if you click once, you create a point, then if you drag out that point, you're making a line. Click again at a point we're still making a line. Then if we connect that line, we make a shape. Ok? So these shapes are going to be the building blocks of our digital self-portrait. So again, that's with our Curve tool. So something I get asked a lot is how do you access that tool? Right here underneath line click on the drop-down and select curve. Ok. And then go ahead and play around with that a little bit just to get started to get acquainted with it. So here are all of our shapes. Yours might be coming out as a different color and there's my funky smiley face. And that's okay. And if you remember selection tool, we can move these around. Beautiful. There's our self portrait. Now for demonstration purposes, I do have cursor effects turned on. So all of these red rings that you're seeing army clicking. Okay, so hopefully that helps. Just kinda give you a visual of when I'm clicking, associate with laying down points. So again, these are points. And to edit our points individually, we double-click on a sheep. So if I click on the Shape ones, I can move the entire shape, but if I double-click on it, I can edit each point individually. So if we use our shortcut right and zoom in, oh, I went too far, scrolling over. Double-click. Now I can go and manually manipulate these points right again, double-clicking. And i concert to kinda clean up my shapes a little bit. Maybe I want this to PQ, a little ugly inner, you know, or maybe I want to make him more expressive, these angry or sad. But anyways, you can just double-click to go and manipulate those points. And of course, something else I could do if I was trying to do a perfect circle, for example, I have the shapes option. So right next to that curve tool, under you'll see the icon that looks like a circle and a square. You can select shapes. And from there you can view quite a few different options. So I can always go to this like double circle one. If I hold shift on my keyboard, it constrains those proportions. And then I can scale out to serve to create more perfect sheet, the eye or whatever I might be creating. He's looking all crazy there, but that's all right. We're just getting used to it for now. So something we'll talk about in the next video is outlines and fills, because as you could see, I'm just using the default fills, but there's many more options here. So yeah, we'll talk about that more in the next video. But for now, just go ahead and start to acquaint yourself with the curve tool, creates some fun random shapes. And I'll see you in the next video. 5. Creating Outlines: All right, so now that you guys are acquainted with some of our tools here in Google Drawing, we are ready to get started. So we're going to be building out the foundation of this image of our self portrait. So what that means is blocking out the key areas of things like the shape of the face, the eyebrows, the ears. Rate all of those foundational components that we need to create the portrait. So to do that, we're going to go ahead and make sure our curve tool is selected. If it's not, you can click on little drop-down to select curve. And then with our curve tool selected, we can go ahead and start blocking out the parts of this face. So remember if you click once, you're putting down the point, dragging out to create the line. And we're just going to go around the outside of this face. Now. Don't worry, if it's not perfect, it's not going to be perfect. You're not a robot. The reason we don't have to worry about it being perfect is because we can go back over this and modify it later. So I'll go ahead and turn on some curse or cues to so you can kinda see where I'm clicking. Because each of those clicks, as you know, it represents that point that we're laying down. And then once you kinda hover over the end of the shape, it will go ahead and close that line for us to create the shape. So here we have our base face. Now I'm going to remove the fill from it because I want to be able to see the face that are because we're still missing parts right now I can't see the eyebrows are the mill. As though to make that transparent. We're gonna go ahead up here to our little paint bucket tool. Click on that and select transparent. So now we just have the outline, which is great, our eight. So now we're ready to build out the rest of our shapes. I'm going to go ahead and start to just create our hair here. Now, my hair is kinda crazy here. I don't really know what I was thinking when I took this picture, but it's fine. We'll we'll make it work. It might be a little bit of extra work, but that's all right. I'm up for a challenge. If you guys are now something to keep in mind as you are going over, your piece, makes your points are far enough away from one another. If they are too close, then Google Drawing is going to think that you are closing the line, right? They're going to think that you ended that path. And that's not the case, right? So we do have to make sure that our points are far enough apart from one another. So that way we don't run into that issue. So now I'm going over the face and they are going to overlap a little bit and again, that's okay. We will clean this up later. Yeah, curly hair is going to be more of a challenge of history here for your picture. It's going to be a little bit easier to work with, but you can still get really awesome results either way. And the cool part about Google Drawing is you can really make it, oops, you can really make it as simplistic as you want it to be or as detailed as you want it to be. You know, after we finish this demonstration, you might go and be like, I actually want to sit here and refine each of these. I want to add in a lot of extra details. Or you may be like, I like or really. Minimal aesthetic. I wanna keep mine super-simple. There's no right or wrong here. You can really get some incredible results either way. All right, so I'm just wrapping up a query is a hair here. Going around and again, does not have to be perfect, so try not to stress it. This is meant to be a fun, stress-free exercise. Make it then, and I know it's going to look weird right now. You might be looking at yours like, you know, what is going on here, what is this? But I promise you just bear with me and we will have a really awesome finished product at the end. So I'm gonna select my select tool to click out of it, right? Go back to our curve tool again. And now I'm going to go over top of the ear. So again, where you have a lot of overlapping shapes, but that's okay. It's all going to come together later on. All right. Ear there. Let's see what other parts we need. We need our eyebrows or I was, let's go in and create those. Now. I'll probably go ahead and fast-forward pretty soon, just because some of these steps are just going to get a little bit repetitive. So that way you don't have to we on me. You can kinda work on your own pace and then come back once you've created that base foundation. And we'll go over our next step, which is going to be to add in our shadows. But for now your goal is just to create all of these outlines. Let's go over the eye really quick. This one I'll actually do with you guys because ice can be kinda weird. What do I mean by that is lot of times when we think of an eye, we just think of it as kind of an elementary braid that there's so many little parts that go into it, right? We have that inside crease. We have the crease of our eyelid, we have the eyelashes. I'm in. I do want to include all of those in mind. So I'm going to go ahead and I had the initial outline. Now I'm going to draw the actual eyeball. Again, I'm kind of tracing over that outline I had created previously. And I can always add more details and stuff later on to this, but this works for now. Again, transparent film. I'm going to use a circular shape for our retina here, and I can always manipulate this later. So in a later step I'm going to be showing you guys how to adjust these shapes. But for now, this works. And then let's go over, I'm just going to kind of define the eyelash here a little bit. Kinda just following the curve. Given myself some extra makeup. So yeah, you're just going to do the same steps across the board again, it's going to look a little weird and that is okay. Okay. Don't stress it yet. Now, I use the circle tool here. But you really don't have to use the circle tool, right? I definitely could have instead just kind of gone around the eye. And then instead of that ellipse, we would just kind of draw the eye here. Now this might work better for some, especially depending on the shape of your eye and the positioning and the photograph. So definitely feel free to do it this way even if it does not look perfect. Don't, again, don't stress it. Don't stress. I know a lot of creatives are a little bit of perfectionist, but later on we'll be going through and cleaning these up, making them more rounded, perfect shapes of right now I'm fast-forwarding here, just going through more of our base shapes. So I'm ignoring a lot of the key shadows and highlights right now we are going to come back to those. So for example, the nose we would actually make out of shadows and highlights. And then the hand, for example, we would just draw out the base for the hand. And then all the little folds defining the individual fingers would be made up of shadows and highlights. So the malate, I did do an open smile, which is a little trickier because I do have to draw out each individual tooth. Now, I know this looks super creepy, but it will look better once we actually start to add color and cleaned it up a bit. But for now again, just blocking out those key shapes, the mouth and on the individual parts. Okay, so I've got, oops, I've got most of this created here. I'm just zooming in. I need to add these shadows for the male that looks like I skipped that step. So again, super creepy, but that is okay. And then in the next video, we're gonna go through and start to clean up some of these selections and change the order. After we do that, then we'll go in and start to add the shadows and highlights. And that's when this will really start to come to life and start to look more like an actual portrait. So I'll see you in the next lesson. 6. Moving Points and Changing Order: Rates. And now that we've got a 100 kinda terrifying outline here, what we're ready to start doing is start playing with the order of things, right? And also to start refining them. So one thing, for example, is this hand, right? I really need to clean up this handle little bit. So to do that, I'm just going to double-click on it. And when you double-click on something, it shows you all of the points, right? So again, I just double-clicked and there are all of my points, right? So I can see it's a little wonky here. So I'm just going to go ahead and start to click and drag these points to move them around until I can start to get the shape that I want. All right, so I'm going to make sure that this kind of rap sheets a little more tightly, a little more closer to the fingers. And again, just click and drag. And you're going to do this for all of your shapes that you want to start cleaning up nom scrolling with the scroll bar on the scroll bar on my mouse. Just to kind of pan around my image to move up and down. That's kinda handy shortcut there. Let's see, this part looks a little little off to me. Again, just kind of cleaning up the shape. That's looking better. The chin here, I don't want it to go over. I guess it doesn't really matter because the hand's going to be on top. But I'll just go ahead and kinda clean that up any ways. Right? That's looking decent. So yeah, this stuff. So yeah, this stuff's pretty easy again, it's just kinda clicking and dragging to clean it up a bit. And this one obviously needs some work. I don't know what was going on there. All right. It's looking better. Now here it looks like this is the outline to the shirt. And again, the hand is going to be on top. So even though the shirt goes over the hand, that's okay because again, this is, this hand is going to cover up that line, but some of these won't be covered up. So I definitely want to clean up like the color area. They clean up the hair. There we go. All right. It's looking a little better. Look a little better. All right. So then just go ahead and do that throughout the I might need it, especially the eye can be a little bit tricky. A lot of different points there. Let's eyebrow definitely needs it again. It's going to be covered up by the hair so it can go a little bit further out. The eye, again, the retina area. I might want to round this out a little bit further. And later on I can always change, especially once I add my fill. So not really a huge deal yet, but just something that's very helpful to be familiar with. So that way once we are ready to start refining it further, it's going to just make our lives a lot easier. Now it looks like I missed a pupil here, so I'm just going to copy this pupil. I'm hitting Command C and Command V. Those are shortcuts for copy and paste. Command C to copy command V to paste. And then I'm just going to move it over there. All right. So yeah, that's really how you go ahead and refine things. And then we also have the option to change the order. So let's say, for example, that I want this eyelash PR to be in front. I can right-click and choose order and then bring to front. And that's going to move that layer again to the top, so it's covering up the other layers. So again, once we start adding color and adding builds, we will be returning to this. And going further with it will be changing more of the orders are finding it out further by just wanted to give you guys that information now. So you have it as you continue to build out this piece. So in the next video, we will pick up and we'll start adding shadows. So we'll be adding shadows and highlights. 7. Adding Value: All right, so let me go ahead and pull this up. So we've went ahead and defined our key shapes or you did find that v-shape, the hand, the hair, eyebrows, the eyes, right key features. But there's a few areas that we haven't really defined yet. And those are things like the nose, right? Cheeks, the creases of the eye, ray, all these extra little details. And to do that, to define those areas, we're going to do that using shadows and highlights. So as you guys know, value is the lightness or darkness of an area. So areas that are very bright, right? Those are highlights and the darker areas are our shadows. So we need to define our highlights and shadows to create value. So let's go ahead and do that. We're going to start with the nose because that has it pretty apparent, pretty clear highlights, pretty clear shadows. So we are going to go to our curve tool again. And just like how we define the shapes for in our prominent features, we're going to start to create shapes for our shadows and highlights. Now in your photo, the shadows and highlights might not be super clear. And that's okay. That's okay because you can kind of make up where those shadows and highlights would be to help define these features. So for example, here, there's not really a break Kirby highlight, but I'm going to add that in just because I want to define this new shape a little further. So I did go ahead and add a little bit of extra curve there. And then I'm kind of wrapping up. All right, and we can clean this up a bit later. But there, I've got my initial highlight going to make that transparent. And then we're gonna do the same thing for some of these shadows. Like I've got a very harsh shadow here, kind of defining the nostril. And we've got a her shadow here. So I'll go ahead and add that in. I'm going to make it a little curvier than it actually is. Just again, to kind of match that shape of the eye. And then we'll do the same for nostril kinda define books. So I made the mistake there, accidentally clicking a little bit too close. So I'm just going to undo and we'll do that one more time. The curve tool selected going ahead and defining that nostril there. And then I've got a few little lines here. I'll go ahead and add those in, just give it a little more personality, I guess. And then a little bit here as well. All right, so we've got a few essential shadows and highlights and then I want to make sure that we get these creases are some very important creases above the eye. There's very, very dark folds that are going to make it look a little more dimensional, give it a little more depth and definition. And then also the highlights for the face. Now there's not really a super clear highlight here, but again, I'm going to kind of make it up a little bit just to, again help define the cheekbone area and just to improve the composition of this piece. Now this part would actually be shadowed from the hand a little bit. But I'll go ahead and keep adding it in, since we can always modify it later. All right, so we've got a highlight here. We've got some shadows. Now, I will go ahead and put it in fast forward as I continue to define the other areas. Alright, so I am putting this in fast for now and just kinda defining some of the areas separately, like the individual parts of the fingers, adding in a few parts that I might have missed like the fingernail, adding a few quick folds and wrinkles to the shirt. Again, I'm going through this relatively quickly, but of course you can always come back to this later on and add more details. Or you could spend much more time on the Israeli defining every area individually. Alright, I hope you found this helpful. And then in the next step, in the next lesson, we'll be going through actually adding color. This is my favorite part, so stay tuned for that. 8. Adding Color: I'll rates and now here comes the fun part. We're going to start adding color to this. So to start adding color, we're going to start out by selecting the shape that we want to add color to it. So make sure your selection tool selected It's the black arrow here. Click on the shapes, I'm just selecting the face. Then we're going to click on the paint bucket. Now, the paint bucket has quite a few swatches here. So we could go in and select one of those as a starting point. But that's definitely way too pink for my liking. So I am going to customize this a bit more. So I'm going to click on the little plus down here to add a new color. And then I'm just going to start to kind of adjust the hue here, which is our color, and then the lightness and darkness of it until I kind of get a good starting point. So I'm making my little less pink. Now. Something cool that we'll talk about later is we could also adjust the transparency. So for adding things like our shadows and highlights, this could be very useful. Or maybe you're doing really clear sunglasses over top or something. Again, transparency can be very helpful there, but for now we'll go ahead and stick with just a solid color. And I think this will work for you and we can always change it later. All right, so we've got our color here now because I click on the plus that's adding it to your swatches, which makes it really easy for me to apply it to other places. So for example, the hand, I'll just click on the shape again, click on the Paint Bucket, click on that swatch and it's going to fill it in. Now one thing to make note of is this stroke around it. I'm personally, I prefer it the style without a stroke. I think strokes make things look a little bit dated. So to give it a more modern flock appearance, I am removing the stroke here, but again, it's up to you. You can really get creative with these if you like the stroke. Feel free to just embrace that and work with that. But alright, otherwise, I've got my base there now let's go ahead and add a shadow. So to do the shadow, I'm selecting my skin tone, right? So selecting that original color. Now I'm going to create the shadow. So I'm taking that color and I'm going to just drag it to make a little darker. We can always change this later, but maybe something like that will darker version of my skin tone. Again, removing the stroke. All I messed up. This should actually be a highlight, but that's okay because look, now I didn't just go ahead and apply that shadow here, remove the stroke and I can select multiple areas by holding Shift and just quickly applying that to all of them, right, so no stroke and applying that film. So now let's actually make it the highlight. So again, I'm selecting my skin tone, clicking on the plus, and this time we're actually going to make it lighter. All right. So going up to a little bit later. Okay. So it looks like I made the face too late. So I'm going back to that middle tone, perfect. And going to my highlight and selecting that new highlight swatch that we just made our rates at certain income together, I'll do the same thing with this highlight here. Again, removing the stroke. And then we've got two more shadows here. And I've got all these little shadows. I can go ahead and select those, try to knock them all out. Right. And yeah, so again, holding Shift is a really helpful shortcut. Just you can kind of quickly go through and start selecting multiple areas. Now I also did shadows here along the hairline just because our hair will typically cost a little bit of a shadow. All right, now I could definitely already see a few areas that I missed, but I can always go back through and add those later. So then we've got our ear. I should probably add a shadow here, or I could just make the entire ear a little bit darker and then make it even darker shade for the ear shadows. That's actually a pretty decent options. I'm going to click on that year shadow at another swatch. Now you don't have to do this. You could definitely just stick with three different shades. You know, for demonstration purposes, I'll go ahead and show you guys what I'm doing here. So now I'm selecting the entire ear and I want to make sure it goes behind this face shape because it's overlapping right now. I don't want that. I want the head to be in front of the ear. All right, so I'm going to select all of the parts of the ear, right-click and choose order and then send it back. Oops, I should listen son backward. Because what I did was I just sent it all the way behind the photo. But that's okay. This works too. Now I can just like the photo. Right-click Order, Send to Back and perfect route a good place now. And then here we have the hair. So let's go ahead and pick out a color for that. I'll just use like kind of a blonde ish color as a starting point again. Now I have a very warm light on it, so it's making it look a little bit orangey. I actually don't mind that color that we're starting with here. I might keep that. Again. I can always change it later. Let me see. I'm just looking at the contrast here, so I think I do want to darken it up a little bit just so it has more contrast against my face. So let me go to that. I'm going to choose a darker shade, a blonde. There we go. That's looking more natural and again little more contrast against the complexion. And doing the same there. Now here I had shadows cast. So I'm going to make a darker version of that bond. Again, I'm selecting, selecting the shadowed area of the hair, selecting the blonde color, and then clicking on Add and creating a darker version of that. All right, Perfect. Where do the same thing here. Now I'm definitely going to have to manipulate these a little bit further. So one thing I need to do is I need to move this hair to the front, right, so I'm gonna select it right-click Order, bring to front, like just like we showed in the previous video. Now I need to get that shadow to the front again. Just move out of the way, Right-click order, Bring to Front. So it's kinda of like think of this as like stacks of construction paper, right? We're basically creating different construction paper cutouts. And we lay down one sheet of paper and then we lay down another sheet of paper for the shadow. So when you're working with the orders, That's a really great way to think about it. Again, just double-click to go ahead and start to move these pieces around. And once we go through and delete the photo, it'll become a lot more clear where certain areas and pieces should be. But I can still start to go through and manipulated a bed. Alright, so I'm gonna go ahead and put this into fast forward while I do the rest of the pieces, again, we're just following those same steps of selecting a, selecting a shape, creating a color for it. I'm actually going to go a little darker for this, but I rose or a little darker, clicking on Plus to create a custom color on a warm it up a little, hit, Okay, and then remove the outlines. Now one very helpful shortcut as you're going through these is pressing Command up on our keyboard and command down. Now again, this is going to be a super essential I tip, especially when you're using, especially when you're working on very heavily layered parts, such as the mouth with teeth, right? So again, I'm just pressing Command up to move it up in the stack, command down to move it down on the stack. Again, I'm just trying to get it behind those lips and behind the teeth. Now this still looks terrifying. So even though technically my lips didn't cover the wealthier, I am going to move these a little bit lower. And then I'm going to make sure this upper lip is on my top layer. So again command up. All right, then we're gonna just have to spend a little more time cleaning up these teeth areas. Already know I am speeding it up here just because we're kind of repeating the same stops, right? We're just, we're finding different shapes, cleaning them up and changing the order. Again, using those shortcuts, command up and command down to relay or things super, super incredibly helpful during the same steps for the eyes now, in the left eye, especially it looks really Grocery now, but I'm just tweaking it, cleaning it up, adding in the shapes that I might have missed. If you did forget anything in the previous step, that is okay. You can always add it in during this step. Now, something I'm going to be adding to the eyes pretty soon is a catch light rate. So that's that little like white shine that we get in her eyes. Adding that, that catch light is just a really great way to give your portrait a little more personality to also kinda create an entry point for your viewers. So when they look at your piece, they see that catch light in the eye. And it just makes it feel a little more warm and it gets a little more personality. So for the darker areas like the neck where the shadows at, I am just adding a large shape back there, filling it with a dark color to just keep building that out. So again, adding more shadows, adding more areas. And it really is coming together. So in the next video, we're going to talk about some other ways that you can color this in and add additional effects. So I'll see you in the next lesson. 9. Adding Effects: All right, so let's talk about some really cool effects and things that we can do. Now, this piece I had still, a little, could still use some work and refinement, but really quick, we'll talk about some options that you have. So one thing, Let's say I wanted to create this color here, right? I'm wearing a collared shirt. I'm going to draw out the shape for that. And then we can actually add effects to this piece. So I'm just being at the same colors, everything else. But then I'm going to go up to Format, Format Options. And that's going to pull up this panel. Here. In this panel we have a lot of cool things that we can do, such as add a drop shadow to it. So let's go ahead and see what that looks like. You can see, let me zoom in. You can see here this little drop shadow that it's adding underneath, we can change the angle of it. So if this is my light source, the shadow should be over here. So we can change that angle. So it does come out over on this side and change how far away it is. We can change how far out the blur extends with the blur radius. And then how noticeable that is. Do we want it to be very subtle. So it's pretty transparent, pretty see-through, or less transparent, and so very, very solid there. So those are our sliders to add those different options. And now let's take a look at what that looks like. Going back to my selection tool and look at that shadow it creates. So that's one thing that you can do if you want to start playing around with shadows, right? Maybe every layer has that sort of drop shadow. Now I personally am going for a more flat look, so I'm not going to keep that on there, but definitely a really cool option to experiment with. I've had some students that have used those effects and created incredible beautiful results. Now there's also another effects option for a reflection, right? So this is cool. Maybe you want your figure looking into a mirror. Maybe there's a water reflection or something. You can adjust how far away that reflection is. You can kind of pretend there's like a mirror here. This pieces reflecting and then tapering off. So this is how far that reflection is, and again, how transparent it is and how large or how small it extends. So another really cool option to play around with something else It could have done. I could have just made the IL-12 and then flipped it. I didn't want mine to look a little more organic though, little less perfectly symmetrical. So I did at hand draw each one separately. But again, this flip option, a really cool thing that you can always keep in mind. You can create 1.5 of the face, copy it, and then flip it to create that perfect mirrored edge. Now something besides, I'm gonna go ahead and close out the format pin, excuse me, Format Options panel. That's something we can do. Besides that, it's add some more cool effects and interests to our piece is actually use gradients. So to do that, you just go back to your fill bucket, select gradient, and then you could click on Custom. And so with custom, this is where you can choose if you want it to be radial rate or a linear. And you can add different gradient stops, so different colors for each one. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to, for the shadow here, I'm going to make the lightest part, my light hair, right? So the light color their hair. And then for the dark part, I'm going to click on that and then choose that dark part of the hair, right? So now I have a really nice gradient, right? Going from light to dark here. Now actually did it backwards. I want the darkness to start at the top right, that is the darkest area. So let's go ahead and customize that. We're going to go ahead and click on the plus here. And then this is where we could change the angle. So that's one way that we could reverse it. So I'll go ahead and do that. I'll just make it 180 and hit. Okay. And then there we have it. It's kinda starting at the top and then tapering outs that creates a really nice gradient there. So I'm gonna go ahead and just bring that down a bit. So blends a little more nicely and move that air in front of it. All right. Now I do want to go ahead and just kinda fill in that extra space I had behind the ear. Cool. This is looking really decent. Random and do the same thing in some other areas, right? Like so I want a shadow underneath here, a shadow under here. So let's go ahead and create those. So I'm just gonna go ahead and kinda taper this upward. And then we'll go ahead and fill that with our gradient. So I've got two different directions now I could take it, I can choose that first one or the second one. All right, so I'm going to create just some additional gradients. So I have about three different directions. And that'll just give me a little more control. So that way I can kinda pick where I want the darkest part to begin and where I want it to end. Now you can get way more advanced with this if you wanted to, you can add other gradient stops. Maybe you've got like some fun colored hair you want to do or in Combray style. Definitely feel free to play around with those gradient stops to really get it to be the way you want it. So I'm just gonna go through because I am working with curly hair, I'm doing a lot of really more organic glue shapes, right? But if this was a straight here, then of course it would be a little more vertical. But here I'm just building it out with those loose organic curls. And that's really the final effect that we'll be talking about in the next video, we'll go over just refining this further and adding our background. We're getting close to the homestretch here. 10. Background & Refinement: All right, so let's go ahead and add in a background. Now there's a lot of options you have for the background, you could put another image and behind it, you could illustrate a whole background. I've had some students really beautifully florals behind them, somewhat themselves like on the beach. There's a lot of really cool stuff you can do. But for demonstration purposes, I am just going to kinda keep it simple. I'll just go ahead and put in a shape. So first off, I deleted the background. I just selected it, hit Delete on the keyboard. Now I'm creating a square that's the same size as my canvas. And I'll just go ahead and put a solid color behind it. Right-click choose orders and the back. And there we have our start of a background. Now you could add some fun funky shapes behind it if you wanted to. Maybe we do another gradient. Right? Here's some preset ones. I do want to create my own gradient, though. I don't love any of these colors. I'm going to go ahead and click Plus to create a new one. Click on my first one. I did really like these teal colors. We could even try mixing one if we wanted to. Like maybe a pink to teal, That's pretty nice. Yeah, let's just go ahead and see what that looks like. I'll hit. Okay. Yeah. Pretty cool. I wanted to be a little less jarring anything though. So I'm just going to go ahead and click Plus again. And then I do want to add another gradient stop to it. And then I'm just going to bring it down. So that way we get a little more of that nice in-between color. Yeah, I like that. All right. So we've got our background there. Let's see what it looks like flipped. Sometimes a brighter color at the bottom is nice because it kinda pulls your eye down to the focal point, which is our figure here. And I do prefer that option now, a radial gradient would also be really nice. But I'll work with this. Cool. So now that we've got our background, it's time to just start cleaning this up. So I've got a lot a lot a lot of little areas that I need to fill in. So I'm just going to go ahead and clean up those spaces. So to do that same steps as we did before, we're basically taking our shapes and dragging them to refine them or putting new shapes behind it. So to kind of fill this space that I missed here, I'm going to go ahead and fill it with a darker hair color. So I'm going to choose a color like that and then I'm going to send it to the back order, Send to Back, and then do the same thing for the background order Send to Back. Now I could also do Command down. It would just be a lot of clicks. So I'll go ahead and do that here. I'm actually just holding down on my keyboard. So command and then hold the down button until it gets where you want it. That's a pretty quick way to go about it. I'm going to do the same thing here, sending it to the back. All right. I'm just going to keep doing that, moving stuff around, adding shapes behind it until I get the result that I want. Okay, we're fast-forwarding here. So basically I am just going through the refinement stage. I'm zooming in really close. The Zoom tool is going to be your best friend for this step, it makes it so much easier to select those individual points and individual layers. And that's what I'm doing. I'm just kind of zooming in and out, finding areas that I want to clean up and refine further, adding in some extra details, things like that. I did have like some earrings, for example, in the original picture. So I'm adding those in just because they give it a little more personality. But this is a great time, dad, any accessories you might wanna do to add additional shadows you might have missed, and feel free to take creative liberties. So what I mean by that is, you know, the nails, for example, I'm not wearing nail polish, but I'm giving my nails a shade of pink instead of the neutral tone just because aesthetically it looks a little bit better. The mouth, I'm bringing up the bottom lip a little bit higher. Again, even though it's not like on the original photo, that's okay. It just makes a again look a little bit, a little bit better, a little strange. So feel free to maybe adding some shadows that weren't, they are adding highlights that weren't there. Anything that can improve the overall just visual aesthetic of your image? Or if you want to just trace it exactly as you see it, That works too. And this is your image. You can really make it your own, as I hope you have a lot of fun with this stuff. And we're just wrapping up our image, wrapping up our self portrait. In the next video, we'll talk about saving this image and actually using it. You guys are all set. You made a portrait. 11. Final Export: All right, you've done it. You've made your very own portrait in Google Drive. So now that you have your image are probably ready to share it. Maybe you want to put on your social media or making your avatar. Maybe you did it for a client. You want to share it with them. To do to export this file, you go up to file and the top-left choose download. And from there you can choose your file format. So if you do want to export it as a vector, make sure you choose SVG, right? So that's our file format. Infinitely scalable. Your other options or you could export as a PDF. Again, maybe you want it for your social media. So you might choose a JPEG or PNG, and when you do that, it's only going to export your Canvas, right? So remember at the start when we resized our canvas, this is, it's really nice that it only experts our Canvas because that way we don't have any of this extra here. So let me go ahead and show you what that looks like. Again, I'm just going to File Download and I'll just go ahead and choose a JPEG for demonstration purposes. We can see my file here. I'm going to go ahead and open it up already. I just opened it up and preview. And you can see here the nice part about this is it does cut off all that extra extra shapes and stuff that was around the outside. Now, I didn't notice that there was a little sliver of white. It looks like they're still is. So even though we adjusted our canvas at the start, we can always do that afterward. So I'm just gonna go ahead and bring that Canvas and a little bit. Perfect. And now when we export that, we won't have that white flipper on the edge. And maybe I even want to bring it upward. You know, like maybe I want the bottom to be around here. Again, just click on that little handle to readjust. And there you have your final file. And we are all set. So I cannot wait to see what you guys created. 12. Conclusion: So I hope you guys found this workshop helpful. Again, we just went through the steps of taking a selfie for reference and then using Google drawn, building out shapes to create the foundation for her face, creating shadows and highlights for value in our picture, and then refining it a bit further. So hopefully now you all have a amazing vector portrait of your own and would love to see them. So please be sure to post them in the gallery if you have not already. In addition, you can find me online. I guarantee graphics, I'm on Instagram and YouTube. So I would love to follow there too if you're able to. All right. Well, thank you guys again for tuning in. I appreciate you guys. Take care, everyone.