Convert a Sketch to Vectors with Adobe Illustrator Live Paint - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. Convert a Sketch to Vectors with Illustrator - Introduction - A Graphic Design for Lunch Class: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch class, convert a sketch to vector art with live paint in Adobe Illustrator. Graphic Design for Lunch is a series of classes that teach a range of tips and techniques for creating designs and for working in applications such as Illustrator, Photoshop, and Procreate. In this course, we're going to look at creating a piece of cartoon art, and we're going to color it using the Live Paint Tool options in Illustrator. You're going to learn all about live paint. Now, if you're not really confident about drawing art like this yourself, I'm going to give you the piece of artwork that you can trace. Don't worry about having to do lots of drawing, you're here to learn about Illustrator and that's exactly what we're going to focus on. 2. Convert a Sketch to Vectors with Illustrator Part 1: To create your kitchen cartoon art using a drawing that I've created for you, choose File and then New. The document size is going to be 1439 by 1385 RGB color. Click "Okay." Now choose File and Place and go to the location where you've stored the image that I've given you and click "Place." Drag over the document to insert the image. Now go to your layers palette, open up this current layer, and lock this layer. That means it's not going to move as you work on it. We're now going to go over all the straight lines first of all using the pen tool. I'll select the pen tool. I'll make sure that there is no fill color. I'm going to select a stroke color that's going to be really obvious as I'm working, probably a bright pink color going to also make the stroke about four points, so I'll see it really clearly. To create my lines, I'm going to click at one end of the line and every time I come to a point I'm going to click again. When I finish the line, I'll press the letter P, that just stops the pen tool from drawing and I'll go and create the next line. Because this is cartoon-style art, it doesn't matter that everything's not straight and it really shouldn't be because you're going to lose the effect of the art if you try and make everything nicely lined up, but you do want to overlap the lines wherever possible so that one line finishes on top of another. If you get into this situation, I'm just going to zoom in, so you can see what's happening here. I have the pen tool and when I hold it over this point here I get a minus symbol right the bottom right of the pen icon. That just tells me that if I click here because this path is still selected, I'm going to knock out this point like that. I don't want to do that, so I'll press "Control or Command Z." Now if I click somewhere else on the line, you can see there's a little plus sign that tells me I'm about to add a point onto that line. Again, not something I want to do. If your line is still selected like this, you have a couple of options. The first one is that you can just go start drawing somewhere well away from the line and then that's not going to happen. The other option is with the lines still selected, you can de-select it, hold down control, and shift and tap the letter I, that's "Command, Shift I" on a Mac that deselects the line allowing you to now go and redraw your lines. If you need to move the artwork as you draw, hold down the space bar, and that turns the mouse pointer into a hand, allowing you to move your art. I'll press the letter P, I finish this line. I'm going to press "Control and 0" to get back to seeing my image. Now, I'm going to continue to work around this art and I'm going to speed up the video. I'm just going to draw in the straight lines. I'm going to leave the curvy lines such as the towel here, these handles the tree, and so on until I come back and we're going to do those using a different tool. 3. Convert a Sketch to Vectors with Illustrator - Part 2: Once you've completed the stripe bits, it's time to do some of the more curvy bits. I'm going to zoom in up here. One of the things I want to do is to actually just curve up this line. I'm going to grab the direct selection tool here. Just grab hold of this line here, and just drag it up a little bit. I'm just need some room for the trees. Doesn't have to be curved if I don't want it to be, but I might want to bring this one up just to match it a little bit. It's going to look a bit better. Now, for the trees, I'm going to the pencil tool, going to make sure it's set up with the exact same settings, and now I can draw in these lines using the pencil tool. Now I've got my pencil tool on a restable compromise between fidelity and smoothness. I don't want all the wiggles that I'm creating as I'm drawing it. I want the curves to be smoothed out quite a bit, and I'm just going to show you in a minute what my settings look like. Double-click on the "Pencil Tool", same halfway between accuracy and smoothness, which is giving me a pretty good result here. I also have these first four checkboxes turned off. That's allowing me to draw a line and then to draw intersecting line and the pencil tool isn't doing its usual behavior of trying to pick up and remake that line for me. This is a better option for the drawing that I'm doing using the pencil tool. Again, here I'm just going to trace over these shapes. Once I've finished making a line, I can just stop and continue on. Just aiming to join these up as best I can. Since this is cartoon art, the pencil tool is a really handy way of getting these loops in very easily without having to draw them with the pen tool, particularly if you're not really very handy with the pen tool. It is an acquired taste. I'm just going to press the letter "A" here to get this anchor point. I'm just going to make sure it butts up against the tap that I've just drawn. Going back to the pencil tool by pressing the letter "N", which is the shortcut key for the pencil tool, is going to continue to draw these elements. Now, we're going to speed up the video as I continue to draw these last curvy pieces, and then we'll get on to creating a color swatch and coloring in our art. Once you think you've got everything drawn in, open up the last pallet and go to the very bottom where you have the image, and just turn it off and just check to make sure that everything looks pretty good. Now, if you have some really big gaps like I have over here, you may want to just close them up. Grab the direct selection tool here, just clicking on the end of the line where there has to be a anchor point. I'm just dragging it down a little bit closer to the line that's supposed to be attached to. Just looking for really bad gaps here. Because they are going to be a little hard to close up later on, and we run the risk of the paint running through the gaps. I'm thinking that that's pretty good and I think that we're probably ready now to go ahead and to do the coloring. 4. Convert a Sketch to Vectors with Illustrator - Part 3: Before we can color this illustration, we need some paints or some colors to use. I'm going to open up the Swatches palette here. Now I have big size swatches enabled. I click the drop-down list here and chose large thumbnail view. Now I'm going to get rid of pretty much all of the colors in my swatch by clicking on the first shift, clicking on the last and just drag them all into the trash can. I've got a swatch. I've already created a swatches palette, so I'm just going to click here and choose Open Swatch Library, User Defined. I have one called kitchen cartoon. I'm going to give this to you so that you can add these colors to your own swatches palette. All you'll do is exactly as I've done. Click the menu here, choose "Open Swatch Library", but you'll go to other library and just navigate to wherever it is that you've saved the AI file that I've given you and just open the Swatch Library. Click on the first of the swatches, Shift-click on the last and just drag and drop them into your swatches panel. They're now ready for us to use for coloring. If you want to create your own swatches, by all means, go ahead and do so. What you'll do is you'll first select a color. I'm actually going to re-color this one. I'm going to click it to add it as a stroke or a fill. Double-click on it, and then go and select a different color for it. Well, maybe we'll call it that our first color. I'm going to click "Okay". Then I'll take it from here and put it in my swatches panel. There's a color that I can use. Then I can change it and create a different color. I'll want some colors that are in the same tint or shade range. I've chosen another one. I'm just going to slot it in beside this. I'll probably want to color between these two as well. I've just built up my own color palette by selecting a color and then finding some tints and shades of that color. In some cases I've gone a little bit off. For example, I might have just dragged to one side a little bit to get a slightly different color. Or I may have changed the saturation to get a grayer version of a color. But I just want a whole range of colors that I can use to color this art. Now I don't want those, so I'm just going to get rid of them. We're ready to start the coloring process. Before we can do that, however, we need to create a shape around the entire piece of art. I'm actually just going to go and pick up my red color again. I'm going to choose the Rectangle Tool. I'm going to drag a rectangle all the way around the piece of art because we'll need that to be able to encapsulate some of this color as well. Now, I'll select the entire art by choosing Select All. And then I'll choose Object, Live Paint, Make. What that does is it prepares this entire piece of art work for coloring with the live paint tool. Now go here in the toolbar because the Live Paint Tool share a toolbar position with the Shape Builder Tool. You want the live paint bucket, so I'm just going to click on it to select it. Now I'm going to select a fill color. I have the fill pallets they're selected. I'm going to click this blue color. Now I don't want to lose the red right now because if I do because the object is now selected I'm actually going to lose all my red boundaries. I want to be able to see those boundaries of the art. But I'm going to double-click on the Live Paint Bucket Tool to see the live paint options. Right now we're going to be painting strokes. We don't want to do that. We want to paint fills. I'm going to select Paint Fills and I'm going to de-select Paint Strokes. The yellow is just telling me that I'm going to see yellow around an area when I go to paint it. I'll click "Okay". Now when I hold my mouse pointer over the art, you can see that it changes color as each of these individual blocks are selected. Even if I didn't draw this as a triangle, illustrator is seeing it as a triangle that can be filled with color. For my drawers I'm going to color them in this blue color. I'm just going to click when the yellow coloring is around the area that I want to color that way. Now if you have a look at the little Live Paint Bucket, you'll see that there's a swatch of three colors immediately above it. You can control those with the arrow key, and they correspond with this color here and the two colors either side of it. If we wanted to create a handle here that is a lighter color, well, we can hover over the handle and then we can use the right arrow key to choose the lighter color this one here in the palette. But we can do it all from hovering over the document without needing to continually come backwards and forwards to the palette. Although we could, of course, if we wanted to. Now I'm going to choose this darker color for my handles. I can see where I am in the swatches palette, and I just need to press the right arrow key twice to get the color I want for the handles. It's now in the palette so I can just click to apply it to the handles of my object. Now I want some lighter blues in here. I'm just going to arrow back until I find a lighter blue that I want to use. I'll just put this color down. I can work through the entire illustration, hovering over a piece of the illustration and then filling it with a color. If I fill it with a color and decide I want some different color, then I can either arrow across in the palette to get the right color or I can just go and select it here. That's the second option that I can use. I'm now going to go ahead and fill up all the areas of the image that I want to fill with color. I'm going to ignore the strokes for now and just focus on filling the areas that are fillable with color. If I find that I have a color that I don't want to use I can come in here and change the color. I can add that color to my color swatch. I've now gone ahead and filled all the fillable areas in this piece of art with the colors that I want to use. It's time now to turn our attention to the stroke. 5. Convert a Sketch to Vectors with Illustrator - Part 4: To adjust the strokes around each of these objects, we can do that all at the one time. I'm going to select the Selection Tool and just click here to deselect everything. Then I'll choose Select, All. You'll see here that the fill color has a question mark in it indicating that there are mixed fills on all of these objects, but they all have the same pink stroke. I'm going to target the stroke and select a different stroke color. The stroke color of all of the strokes in this illustration has now been changed. But what happens if I want to change the stroke of just some elements along the floor here? Well, I can do so. I'm going to double-click on the Live Paint Bucket Tool to get the options. I'm going to deselect the fills which automatically selects paint strokes. This time, I can use the Live Paint Bucket to fill strokes instead of shapes. I'll click "OK". I'm looking at the floor here and I'm thinking that this would probably be a good color for the strokes. I'm going to hold my mouse pointer over the line here until the stroke shows up, and I'm going to click. Now it's not actually picking up the color that I'm using here. I'm just going to make sure that this thing is actually listening to me. It is now. I'm just clicking on the stroke lines. When they show up in yellow. Only when they show up in yellow, which is the highlight color that I have selected, am I actually going to change the color of the strokes. Now I can come up here and do the same thing up here if I want to just draw a little less attention to this element. Then you see that there are lots of stroke lines here that have been used for this element. There's also a few things happening in the corner here that I will need to zoom in to get. But again, I'm just looking for that yellow highlight that's telling me that I've got these pieces. Then Control or Command 0 to just zoom out. You can see that the Live Paint Bucket Tool gives us the ability to fill objects that really aren't entire objects. This is not necessarily a square. This is not a shape that would normally be able to be filled any other way. But using the Live Paint Bucket, Illustrator is saying it's surrounded by these lines and it's saying, "Okay, well, if it's surrounded by all of these lines, then I'll call it a shape, and I'll let you fill it with whatever it is that you want to fill." It's a really handy way of doing cartoon art like this, because it gives you the ability to just draw lines and later fill in things that look like shapes, but really aren't true Illustrator shapes. When you're finished using the Live Paint Tool, you can just go back to selecting a regular tool in Illustrator. Go ahead, and save your piece of art, and you're done. My name's Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch. I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.