Transcripts
1. Digital Illustration > Introduction: welcome to a digital illustration course, learning how to turn hand sketches and defector art part to the pen tool. In this class, you will learn how to take a hand sketch, whether it was digitally drawn, using an iPad or hand drawn using sketchbook, and turn that into a vector Graphic using Adobe Illustrator and the pen tool, This class assumes a beginner to intermediate understanding of Adobe Illustrator, and we'll go over every single tool you need and broken down steps and lessen tutorials. My name is Alexandra, and not only have I created a few skill share classes, but I am also a full time instructor at the university, teaching visual communication, graphic design and environmental design. In addition to having my own illustration and graphic design business, this course will begin with workspace, set up layer organization and bringing in a reference sketch image into Adobe Illustrator and then moving into color palettes, learning not only how to create colors but different ways to integrate them in several different tools available, such as Adobe Color to help you decide a color palette going over the pentacle, various different techniques and adobe illustrator to create your own vector graphic and then, lastly, going over all the different exporting options to create your own image that you might add to a digital portfolio or print out to frame on the wall. The Quest projects will include the original reference sketch and your final vector graphic to upload and share with the group really looking forward to this, and I hope to see you in the class.
2. Lesson One > Workspace Setup: Welcome back for the first lesson. Unless a number one for digital illustration, we're going to go over workspace set up in Bilby Illustrator. So hopefully at this point, we're assuming that you have a sketch already drawn. You can see my image example here on the screen and we're gonna open that up in Adobe Illustrator, set up the layers and get started. Okay, So opening up a new file in Adobe Illustrator, you want to be sure to open a 2000 by 2000 pixels square if your images a different size, that's okay. I'm going to be walking you through this basic square set up now on the for right. I have my layers panel. Oh, and you can always go up to window and click on layers. Sometimes you may have a keyboard shortcut. I am on a Mac so you might see the command sign around or it might be referring to that to pull up your layers. Now, if you don't see any of these panels or your workspace doesn't look like mine, I like to use the Workspace Essentials classic. However, there are many different work spaces in Adobe Illustrator and you can always reset that essentials classic. If you have lost some of your view, um, and you can see here I'm working individual ST or 2021 of the creative cloud versions, and that is the time creating this video. Okay, so layer one, we're going to double click that and call it our reference sketch layer and hit Enter. And then, while we have that layer selective, I'm going to go to file, place your files and look for that sketch image and click place. Now, when I bring that in, I'm going to align it to the art board says, scrolling out and holding on the shift key to maintain those proportions, dragging that image out to the extent of the square and then clicking outside. When you click on that image, you should get the toggle points around. It should be on this blue reference sketch layer and placed on that art board. Now the art board tool shift plus O is the short key. We'll bring up your art board, and this is a great place to check the width and height in that aspect ratio that you have it set. Um, and you can also call this the name of your image and in this case, want to call it skull share class. So this is really nice tool to have any of multiple reports. However, in this class we're just going to working with one, All right, so now that we have a reference sketch set up, we want to set up a couple other layers. So if I scroll forward to the final product, you can see that we have six different layers. The reference sketch reference color palette to different graphic layers. One is the edit and women's the original pen tool. I'm going to talk through both of those different different layers, and you might end up having one layer. But for the sake of this tutorial, I have two and then a background. So the background is just some image in the backdrop of that that I've added in. So we want to go ahead and set up these layers, and if you'll notice here, the reference sketch layer over here is on the very top, so the layers stacked will represent what is is layered or stacked on your art board, and we want to make sure that sketch layer is the very top with an adjusted opacity, so you can still see through it and refer to those lines as you go through your artwork. So going back to our illustrator file, making sure to save it as we go along, you can go ahead very bottom of the layer panel, create new layer, and if you click and drag these, you can drag them below. And above that reference sketch soon. Make sure reference special here is on the very top, and we'll call this reference color palette, which will go over in the next lesson. Um, okay, so I want to just keep these two references for now going to that reference sketch later, we're going to select it. And at the very top, um, under opacity, I'm going to move that toggle down to somewhere near 50%. I landed on exactly 50. You can also, of course, Typhon 50. But anywhere around, that should be fine, and you might find yourself wanting to adjust that capacity as you go on. The last thing I like to dio is lock that layer so I cannot accidentally grab that sketch reference layer and moving around so I can easily work with it as we get going. Okay, so I'm going to save the file and I'm all set up for the next lesson that concludes the end of lesson one hope to see in the next lesson.
3. Lesson Two > Color Palette: Welcome back to lesson number two in digital illustration. The color palette. In this lesson, I will cover how to create your own five color swatch to use and draw with more your vector illustration. I will also introduce a couple different ways to integrate swatches using the Dewey illustrator. And if you have Internet access, another great tool using color begin by opening up your do people straighter file from last lesson where we ended by creating two different layers, having a reference sketch placed and locked on that top layer and then a new reference layer cold reference color palette. This is the layer we will be working within in lesson number two. And I want to point out one other thing. So on the far right, we've got her layers panel over here. They also have the swatches panel. So you don't see this. You could always go up to window and pull down to swatches. Now you can see here that I have the defaults watches pulled up with this base Adobe illustrator file. One of the first things I like to do working in any new project is clean up. This watch is on the right, so I can bring in only the colors I'm working with. So the first thing I want to do is select what we call a group or one of these folders and then going down to the very bottom. Right? Clicking. Delete Swatch? Yes. And then you can also do this. Rich individuals watches. So what, Down the shift key to select money. Same time clicking, bleats, watch and delete that selection. Now you can see here I'm left with black and white and a group of grayscale values, which is okay. I like to leave those in there. The other panel option I want to show you is cold libraries. And if you haven't used this before too familiar. This is integrated with your creative cloud. So you definitely have to be logged in and integrated into that creative cloud in order to access it. So if you don't have internet, that's okay. I'll show you one other way too creating integrate your own swatches or a pellets into the Adobe Illustrator file. The first option is using adobe color and your creative cloud libraries. So pulling open pillar themes, you can see here that I have several different themes. And if I scroll down to the one I'm using called vintage, I can right click, say, add theme. Just watches. So the theme collects all five years is color will only bring in one color and then navigating back to my swatches panel. You can see that that's added a whole new group, which is great. That's what I want to use for my selection. If I go up to the top left, you can see that it's already integrated into my direct color picker there. So in order to integrate and choose these imprints, watches going back to that Option one and using Adobe Color to open up any Internet browser and go to color. Got adobe dot com slash Create where you can just type in adobe color into your search panel and try to find us. Now. Adobe color is a really great tool, creating any kind of pallets with five colors, and then you can integrate them if you save or log in to your creative cloud account in order to save those in your library, and that is how you can pull it up in Adobe Illustrator. Now I'm not loved in right now. That's okay. I just want to show you how this works and let you play around with it on the left. Here, all of the different colors are derived from basic rules and concepts and color theory. So different ways the colors are put together on the basic color wheel. So analogous, monochromatic. Try out or try attic complementary, split, complementary, etcetera So you can go around and play with some of these different schemes or rules and then toggle around the different cursors playing with what the base color is this white arrow adjusting some of those tonal values to adjust what that might look like and then saving your theme where you can always screenshot this. Take notable the different hex codes, or note the color mode, whether it seemed like a or RGB values, noting, if you are creating a digital file only or planning to print thus in physical print, so going back to your colors once you saved and selected one of those and it's logged in into your creative cloud and go back to to be illustrator, open up your libraries panel and then right click thought saved theme. Add the Indus watches, then go back to your specials panel to see it pop up. All right, So option number two is if you do not have in an access a connection to Creative Cloud or don't want to use it to be color at all, that's OK. There's another way that you can create your own swatches, which is also really handy. So going back to the correct player, our reference color palette, I'm going to navigate over to the left here to my rectangle tool and drawing out a basic rectangle that I can see on the left can see. It's a signing black fill and stroke. I want to get rid of the stroke just because I want to fill only on and then going back to my direct selection tool. We're sorry, my selection tool. I'm going to click on this morning, the option key to make a copy and this shift to keep it in that same orthogonal plane. I'm going to copy five different squares to create a color palette. Now you can see here my smart guides were on. You can always go to view, make sure smart guides around, toggle it on and off by command or control you. There's also some other snaps typically like to turn off snapped pixel. But that won't matter so much for our design right now. Okay, so I have now five different colors although their whole black eso, instead of going up here and dropping down and selecting the color, I've just integrated into my creative or from my creative cloud libraries. I'm going to go the bottom left, double click on the Phil of the color picker to pull up his entire panel. This is where you can type in that direct hex code or any other values. Or alternatively, you can select an arbitrary color through the color picker by going through each and every individual rectangle over on the left here. So I'm just going through pretty quickly and you can see why it might be helpful to really think about your color palette. I have time rather than arbitrarily choosing things just because they might not really match very well, we're pair well together. But just for the sake of this tutorial, I'm going to assign it five random colors and then I want to integrate this now so it is really handy to have these rectangles on the left of the screen. This is just a workflow preference. I think it's really nice to see what colors, but in order had its here swatches. We want to pull open. That's watch panel on the right. Select all five rectangles, making sure everyone is selected. And then, with that Swatch panel, open, navigate to the bottom and click on New Color Group. What looks like a little floater icon and I'm just going to call this example. You can call this whatever you would like, and you can see here. Now I have a new group, that group of five different colors that I've created in my swatch. Now, for the sake of this project and exercise, I recommend trying just to use five different colors. However, you could always adjust and expand your color swatch whenever working in different vector graphics. But these were two different ways. Option one to integrate using colors using adobe color and the Creative Cloud libraries, an option to creating your own different rectangles and creating a new color group. This concludes lesson to, and we will start to use the pencil and integrate and draw with these colors in the next lesson.
4. Lesson Three > The Pen Tool: Welcome back to Lesson three and digital illustration, pen tool basics and this lesson. I will walk through all the basic tools and commands that you have available using the pen tool and Adobe Illustrator to get started. We're going to start in our Adobe Illustrator file from the last lesson where we have created integrated our color swatch panel, both in a reference layer and into swatches, in addition to that same sketch layer that's locked on the top on. Then at the end, today's lesson. We're going to aim to finish and be somewhere near this. So if I turn off that sketch layer, you can see here that I have drawn all of the elements and main blocks of color into my design, even though some of the edges are a little bit rough. You look at the very bottom of this. We're gonna talk about how to make some these micro adjustments and edits in the next lesson. So today the goal is to draw all of the elements with the pencil. So to start, I'm going to create a new layer and the very bottom of that layers panel cooking the plus sign. I have now created new layer. It is okay if it's above your reference color layer. I like to keep all my reference layers the very top, but you do want to make sure that your reference sketches still the top, so you're able to see all the sketched line work as you go about drawing something. Double click on this layer. It'll pull up my layer options panel. I'm going to rename it Pen Tool for today's tutorial, and you can also change the color. And this is more for your own organization and layer space over here. Um, OK, so you'll make sure working in the pen tool layer and I've got all my color is just as a reminder. It's not imperative that that's owner off. I just like to keep referencing them and look at them as I go. All right, so the pencil pencil should be in your tool bar on the left. It's about six from the top, and you hover over it. You can see it, says Penn Tal P, as opposed to the curvature tool. And if I right click it, there's couple options here, so I've got our standard pencil. The ad anchor point delete, Anchor point and Anchor Point tool. We will get into all three of these and talk about anchor points and how to adjust. Um, but for now, I want to just click on that basic pencil and then going up to the very top, selecting a color. I'm so selecting one of the colors for now out of my handle. Now, if I zoom in, I'm going to actually turn off my sketch and show you a couple basic tools. So the first is creating a path or a shape of pencils. If I click once and let out, I now have my person in any which direction, um, and I can type in. Right now, it's distance and pixels. However, we're going to trace or drawing, so we don't have to get exact measurements. But if I just click one time, let go. Every time I click, I am adding what is considered anchor points. So every time I collect, it's an anchor point, and if I go over here to the very end, it is clicking on that in completing the shape. If I go to my selection tool, the very top left here, I have a bounding box on the extensively shape with your typical control points, where I can hold down the shift key to keep it proportional or kind of move and stretch different sides. However, if I click on the direct selection tool, I now have access to the actual path and every single anchor point in the corner here. Now you can see as I click on different anchor points, they are filling in a different color so I can move individual anchor points around on. And then I also have this option to adjust the radius and again in pixels so I could curve an edge. However, alternatively, I go back to my pencil command, I'm gonna click outside of this, go to my pencil, select another color and start clicking over here in the space. If I click and hold. I now have what are called handles, so handles are coming out of that anchor point, and those handles are adjusting the radius and dimensions of that curve. So this is a preferred method to start great curved lines to finish a shape. I can't even bring it on top. I can right click, arrange send to the back or used by different keyboard shortcuts over here. Command Z. During that buck, you can see here you can start to create a series of shapes, and it's OK if they overlap like this right here. Both this kind of later blue teal and orange shape. That's okay if they overlap, we're going to talk about the Pathfinder tool in different editing techniques in the next lesson. But the big point here is that you have two different options with the pencil in creating that outline, whether it's straight or if it's curved now to go the direct selection tool and click on this path. Now let's say this curve down the very bottom. This anchor, Um, let's say I want to make that curve a little bit tater, or maybe move the anchor point over to get that curve exactly where I want it. So you're able to manipulate and adjust those anchor points and curves after the fact using that direct selection tool. Now, another option you have here is the anchor point. We can change it back to a corner. So while selecting that anchor, the very top ribbon panel of my space, I'm still in essentials classic and see on the top right here. I can now click on convert, convert selected anger points to a corner, and now this should be a sharp corner, and I can always turn it back to curve versus Corner. And so you have a couple options to change it after the fact. But it's really great to try to trace over your drawing. The first go around all right, other things to adjust to the path. So let's say I actually want a couple more anchor points selecting that pencil in rate click, and you could also use a gun keyboard shortcuts over here, the plus and minus, we're gonna add Anchor point second adus many anchor points as I like more anchor points you add, the allergic file is going to become. I use that direct selection tool to move the different anchor points around, and I can also delete that her points and it's also appear in my ribbon panel Negative. Once I click on them, um, but you can go over to the pencil, delete anchor points, and now you have the negative cursor to get rid of all the different anchor points that you may not want. Okay, So that covers some basics and how to use the pen tool and make some adjustments. Let's now go to our sketch. Turn that back on. And I'm going to leave these two shapes, zoom out a bit and draw two different elements to show you some of those tools in practice . All right, so going back to my pencil, I'm going to click along this rough shape. And I would like this to be more corner sharp corners. The meantime, maybe click and drive to get that curved, because this is a pillow. And so there are some curves there. Um, and if I click back on the anchor point, it resets it. So that's a really handy tool as you go around and start to draw in, complete all of your different shapes. So now I've got one shape. I can move it around. I could make some adjustments to it if I'd like. That looks pretty good for me right now. Next, I'm going to do this other shapes, the left here, I'm gonna go over and select a different color and started one with the corners. It doesn't matter where you start. You just wanna make sure to complete the shape now, here and stuff, trying to get along this line Exactly. I'm actually going to go above and until this intersection point and then continue up with my shape and feel afraid to take your time on this. I'm going fairly quickly over the lines to the best of my ability. But if you really wouldn't accurate drawing, zoom in and really try to click along that sketch line that you've created very so adding just enough anchor points to really get the curve I want. And next I know I want this shape to be above the orange. So what I'm going to do is slept my orange shape, right click and go to arrange send back. And so right now they haven't overlapped. That is okay. You can see this pink path right here from my left most shape. We're going to talk about how to get rid of that and make this a really crisp edge where each shape is cut out into each other with no gaps of weight space beyond eso. For now, you want to just layer all of your shapes and stack them or arrange them in the appropriate order, using the pencil to create all of the different shapes or elements in your graphic for the remainder of this lesson so continuing as you go through, I'm just going to finish this one and hit enter, and then I'm going to send this actually to the back as well. So it's okay. This one's above. I just want to roughly see how I want the shapes in the end. Whereas if I hover here over some of them, you can see that overlap. All right, so continue to go through until you get to somewhere that looks like this. And then in the next lesson, we'll talk about all the fine tune editing and everything you need to finalize your vector graphics. This concludes Lesson three, and I'll see you in the next lesson.
5. Lesson Four > Final Edits: Welcome back to Lesson four Additional illustration. The final edits In this lesson, we will be going over all the different final editing techniques and tools you may use. Adobe Illustrator to finalize your vector graphic before we're ready to expert file. Beginning by opening up our duty illustrator file, we left the last class by creating and finishing all of the different shapes using the pencil. And if you see here, there's many different overlaps of those shapes, and they're all arranged in the right order to look like the final design. Even though as I hover, I have a lot of different overlaps going on. So we're gonna talk about one how to get rid of these overlaps and finally is the design and to the last finishing touches of cropping or smoothing out the outline of this pillow in my one example and to adding background colors or other rectangles and images. Great. So talking about the overlaps first, we're gonna open up a tool called the Pathfinder. So navigating up to window, wanna pull open the U Pathfinder tool and bring that into your view now, making sure we have the right layer selected over here on the right in that layers panel. I'm going, Teoh, highlight everything that has turned on So you can see here have turned my sketch off. No, I could even turn those colors off just to clean up my workspace. And now I want to use some of the tools in the Pathfinder. So the goal here is to crop out all this kind of excess image. We brought it over where we needed to for all of these different shapes and order to have a crisp line. We're bordering colors rather than having that's for white space. So I want to actually go over here to the Merge command so you can see I can hover over all the different Pathfinder icons. There's a lot of different options, but in this case we want to merge them gloves, and now everything should be cleanly aligned, and I can right click and ungroomed thumb. I still want to have the ability to move individual objects, but you can see here I pulled us away. It's the exact shape could have cropped to all of the other objects that I have placed in front. Awesome. So that is the U Pathfinder tool. The next edit I wanna dio were to get rid of the Pathfinder is critic clipping mask to smooth out the edges. So, alternatively, I could zoom in and grab the direct selection tool and try to really Finn ask, maybe even get rid of some of those anchors. Maybe this one is coming up here, But instead of doing so, I am going to use the clipping mask to make one large object to smooth out all the edges of the same time. So really similar to what we just did that the Pathfinder tool and cropping those objects. I'm going to create one more shape. So opening up my reference sketch and want to create a new layer. I didn't call this final shape and then selecting any color up here, it doesn't matter which one. I want to go back to my pencil, and I'm going to create just one big outline of my pillow shape. Now, you may not have to do this step depending on what you drew for your sketching vector graphics, but if you do have kind of rough edges or many different colors and shapes that are put together into one composition. This is one hopeful trick that I find really useful when finalising any kind of factor. Graphic. Great. So going, Teoh, quickly go through this. Now, of course, you can spend a little bit more time and trade to get this as precise as you like it. I'm gonna complete my shape here. After I've drawn the sheep, I'm going to either cut or copy that layer, come back into my pencil and then peace it into my art board. And then I'm going to actually adjust the A passing just so I can see the edges. So what I want to do here is make sure that my final shape is a little bit smaller than what Mike Rafic look like. Just so I can guarantee I'm getting nice, smooth edges. And this might mean coming in, zooming in and getting a little bit closer so you can see here. I want to make sure I get back corner that is covered. And then the very bottom expand this little bit to get more of the pillow there. All right, then we'll turn that capacity back to 100 turn off my sketch layer. And now that I have this. This overlay of my final shape. Um oh, it looks like up here. Maybe I will come down a little bit more to make sure to grab all of that. I'm going to select everything in type command seven or go up to object. Clipping mask, make commander Control. Seven is the short cut. So now I have cooked Piccolo and I go up to some of those edges. They're nice and smooth. I scroll down to the bottom here. What? We're resuming into its now nice and suit. So I can always right click and go to release clipping mosque to bring that back up. But I am going Teoh, do that one more time and clip it. So now we have our finalized pillow with all the different shapes and a smooth edge. Everything is aligned and stacked in there and you can see it's all one big layer because of that clipping mask. Love is the last thing Aiken Dio is at a backdrop rectangle. So I'm going to go down to this new layer five cool it background, navigate to my rectangle tool and either cook and enter the values or click and drag to fill that background. Now I am going to go to my color picker by double clicking. That color icon can go to a little bit of a lighter color here and alternatively, actually going to go back to a yellow that looks like that icon and go to more of a light beige you're getting. The last up that I did before was create based on my sketch rectangle the bottom here since okay, if it goes outside of that art board, will make sure we export it in the next video that everything is nice and crispy. All right, so making any final adjustments when you turn off that sketch, see what it looks like. Make sure you are happy with it. Save your file as you go. And that concludes lesson for in the next lesson, we will review all the different exporting options we have in order to expert this out as a final image. See you in the next lesson
6. Lesson Five > Exporting Files: Welcome back to Lesson five digital illustration. Exporting files In this lesson, we will complete our final vector graphic by exporting out an image file and using that for both the class project and any other means that you would like to use the image never getting back to your Adobe illustrator file. The first thing we want to do is make sure all of the layers are turned on that we would like to export, and all of our reference layers are turned off. Now there's a couple different expert options and illustrator going up to file expert. I typically use Export As and Save for Web. Both are different options. Expert for screens I personally don't use very often, but you have a few options here in Illustrator. So let's go ahead and click on Expert as so now eating to the folder that you want to save your final image. I could rename it at the very top, so I will call this example and then the bottom note. Two different things. One. The drop down for format into this little box to check art boards so we do want to check the use art boards box and in this case, we're going to check all or keep all checked because we don't have other art boards. So if you had more, you can also click on range and say, for instance, 2 to 3. But in our case, we're just going to click. All because we have one are poured. Then under format. You have several different options, so many of which will turn this into a raster based image and bus. Okay, as long as you know the exact resolution and pixel size. So for this instance, I would like to expert out a 2000 by 2000 pixel image. However, note that there's many different options, depending on what you need these images for something to keep with PNG and click export. Now I get a new panel that pops up for PNG options, and I do want to make sure my resolutions 300 pixels per inch, anything below 1 50 can come out a bit blurry. It's I like to leave that, and then I leave all the other options, noting that the background can be transparent and sometimes this is really useful with a PNG image. However, White is just fine for now and click. OK, now, the other really helpful expert option is up in expert menu file Export save for web. Once you click on this, you get a entire new prompt in box that pops up the very top. Here. You can name your file, but you can once you click save, you can rename that you have a couple of different options. So right now I'm selected on the PNG 24 bit, which is what I'm going to leave again. Another option for transparency. However, when I want to note here is you can change that pixel size as you expert out an image without changing that original art board and dot ai or illustrator file. So let's say I wanted Teoh Expert out 1500 by 1500 lips image and click Save and now again , going to call this example to file format. You only got images on Lee. You've already changed all the format on that panel with an illustrator cook save and again I will optimize and save that file different size. Now let's say that you've already exported out your final graphic and you want to expert out your reference sketch, which is part of the course, projects Middle and be great to see everyone's sketch images. So instead of turning on the layers of your final graphic, go ahead and turn on Onley that sketch layer and would actually unlock mine and click on that image and turn it back up to 100% just for the sake of this export. Next. Navigating up to file export export as or safer Web. Find the folder that you want to say that and name it accordingly, making sure to click that use art boards. Otherwise, anything that was over the art boards kind of overflowing or around the edges will be exported as well, Keeping that resolution 300 pixels per inch and wait background and in clicking. OK, making sure to save my file so I can always come back to this in the future and expert out different image files if I'd like to. This concludes the end of Lesson five a hope you've enjoyed the course, and I really look forward to seeing everyone's original sketch image and final vector graphic in the class project. Please feel free to give me any feedback or other different tools and techniques he would like to learn to deal with. Digital illustration in the future. Thank you so much for watching.
Ali Hooten, Illustrator & Pattern Designer
