Transcripts
1. Welcome!: Hey, I'm Liz. I'm an illustrator in Northern New Mexico and I am so excited to welcome you to my studio. In today's class, we're going to talk about how to transform your sketch or drawing into a vector image. When I made the leaf from drawing on paper to working digitally, I went through a lot of trial and error to figure out the best streamline system to turn my sketches into vector images. That's why I made this class because I want to help you out, the beginner illustrator. I want to give you my tips and tricks so that you can avoid some of the mishaps and mistakes I made along the way. This process can be really important if you're working with clients who need their files in a vector format so that they can shrink and expand the image without losing its quality. You'll walk away with this class with a clear understanding of a step-by-step simple process to turn your drawing into vectors. For this class, you'll need a black pen, a white sheet of paper that doesn't have too much texture, access to Adobe Illustrator, and the option of also using Procreate on an iPad with Apple Pencil. I think we're ready. Grab your tools and let's get started.
2. Class Project: For the first part of your class project, you'll select a subject from nature to sketch. This can be a sketch on paper or a digital sketch on an app like procreate or both paper and digital. I would recommend not choosing a whole landscape for this project, but instead a smaller objects from nature, whether it's a leaf, a piece of spinach, or a raspberry, ideally something that you can hold in your hand. For your final class project, you will upload that initial sketch, whether it's on paper or digital and your final colorful vector image. You can do this by taking a photo or scanning your initial drawing on paper, or saving the image from procreate your digital drawing. I would love for you to include with your class project some of your own discoveries along the way with this process, any tricks that you found, any hiccups that happened, and how you enjoyed the process of going from sketch to vector. To upload your process and project, you'll go to the Projects and Resources section of the class. Here is where you will create your project so you can select that, and then add your project title, upload any process images, and you can add content, whether it's talking about the process and what you learned along the way or any tricks you picked up, or just sharing how you went from your initial sketch to that final vector colored image. You can upload all of that here in the Project page. If we go back, I would really love for you to be engaged with the class and other class members so we can go to discussions and if you have questions or if you discover new tricks, feel free to upload them here. I can't wait to answer any questions you have and help you out with this process and learn about the fun things that you discover along the way too.
3. Sketching on Paper: This first step is simple. You want to create your sketch, which you're probably used to doing on paper. I highly recommend for this process using pens that are really crisp and clear. The pens that I enjoy most right now are Prismacolor illustration pens and this is the five-pack. There's a seven-pack as well, which has a chisel and brush tip included. But I really like this because it goes from a double 05 up to an 08. So you have five different thicknesses of pen, which can be really nice when you're illustrating. I highly recommend if you're going to vectorize your sketch from paper, using the number 3 paint in this pack. I find that it delivers a still fine line if you want to get nice detail in your illustration and yet, it's not too thick. It doesn't cloud or make the illustration muddy, but it's just thick enough that it doesn't have as much breakage with the texture of the paper as the 005 or the 01, which are super thin. Those have a little bit more breakage and so when you try to vectorize that size, it can be a bit trickier to make them one fluid line, and I find that the 03 typically delivers that fluidity really nicely. Further, you want to be sure that you're using paper that is really quite smooth. You want to be using white paper, a sketchbook, something that doesn't have a lot of texture or tooth to the paper so that the texture isn't breaking the ink up when you're drawing. You really want a smooth, thick, fluid, black line. I'm just going to start by drawing some really simple leaves. Here you see some very simple line illustration leaves, and I'm going to zoom in to show you some tips and tricks for when you're sketching on paper that will eventually become a vector image. So here we have three different types of leaves and in the left one, you can see there's no veins and that the outline is a little bit broken at the top. The bottom leaf in the center has radiating veins that are broken off from the center line, and then the top right leaf has veins that are all attached. The center line is attached to the radiating lines as well. Once we're in Adobe Illustrator, we'll talk about how those different approaches, those different types of leaves, are affected when we add color. But my main word of advice here is just keep it to black and white illustration. Just keep it to the line drawing. I work in a very flat illustration style and this is really helpful for coloring in a flat way later. Before I went digital, when I started drawing on paper, I was using markers and the streak lines would show up, which was okay for the point where I was at that time. But I really wanted flat color and I really wanted it to pop. So when I moved into digital illustration, I was experimenting with how to create the drawings I was used to creating on paper, shifting them into Adobe Illustrator, but still retaining the flat color quality, and I experimented with still adding color on paper before scanning into the program. As I discuss later, I experimented digitally in Procreate with adding color before shifting it into Illustrator. But now I've learned for the most streamlined process, I just keep my initial drawings to a black and white line drawing, put it into Illustrator, vectorize it, and then start adding color.
4. Scanning Your Ink Sketch: Now I have my drawing, my sketch on paper in pen, at number 3. I'm going to scan it into my computer. To do that, I have to go to Finder on my Mac to look up my printer, which was also my scanner. So I just look that up on my Mac. Here it is. I open it. Then yours may look this way too if you're using a Mac. I open the "Scanner" and then it'll wait to load. It will start with this overview scan. What I want to do is select the boundary that I want to scan in. I'm just going to select these leaves and the surrounding space. I'm going to use 300 DPI, 300 resolution because I really want it to be high-quality. The size was determined by that boundary that I made. Everything else looks good. I'm going to do it in color even though it's in black and white. I'm going to name it, Leaves Skillshare. I'm going to save it as a JPEG. Now I'll click "Scan". Now it's saved to my desktop. I can exit out of all of these things. In the next lesson we'll talk about how to vectorize this scan sketch.
5. Vectorize Your Ink Sketch: Now that we have the drawing scanned here on the desktop leaves skill share, I'm going to open up Adobe Illustrator. I'm going to do a new canvas. I'm just going to do this custom 12 by 12 inch that I have set up. I'm going to keep it in RGB color mode, which is four screens, 300 and create. Now I'm going to go to file, place, and I'm going to snag that from my desktop. I'm on my desktop and leaves skill share place and you can see that it has this one of one on the clipboard. I'm just going to place it right there. I'm actually going to rotate this and now I'm going over here to image trace. I'm going to keep it at preset default with black and white since it's just this black and white drawing, I'm going to ignore white, and I'm going to select preview. It's going to take a minute. That's okay. Now what I'm looking for here is that the lines are really streamlined and really clear because if they're not, then once they're vectorized, they're going to be treated as different shapes. For example, over here you can see this nice line is happening, but it breaks up here. What would happen once this is a vector is that this top space that would be one shape, this would be another, and then this whole continuous line would be another, and I really want them to be connected. Let's go over here, so you can see there is some texture happening from that pen because it is interacting with the paper and there's some breakage that does happen. To fix this, I'm going to come to threshold and increase it by dragging this to more. I don't want the lines to be too thick, or clunky. I just want them to be continuous enough that they'll be treated as a singular line and shape. I'm going to keep upping this until it's to my liking. That could be okay. I want a little bit more. That's all right. This is a little iffy, but that's okay for now. See this looks really crisp and clear. I'm liking that. It could be that I move forward with this leaf instead. This connected some of it, some more. There's still a little bit of disconnect right there. I'm going to up it just a little more and that's a little thick, especially on this one, but we'll focus with this leaf and see how that goes. I'm going to unclick preview and trace. I'm going to zoom back out and go to object, expand, make sure object and fill are selected. Now all of these subjects, they're grouped together. Well, actually first I want to make sure the color space is in RGB. Right now it's in gray-scale. I'm going to select RGB. That should change everything so that we can work in color and now I'm going to right click this box of everything, anywhere, any subject. Right click it and ungroup so that I can work with each leaf at one at a time. Now what you'll see here, we can zoom in, is that these are actually separate. This outline of the leaf is separate from here. If I want those to be together, I can select them by dragging a square across them and then command-G on the Mac to group them. But I actually don't want them grouped for the moment, so I'm going to ungroup that. I'm going to start with making these paintable. We're going to turn this into a live paint leaf. We're going to select both of those and then this paint bucket, I'm going to click this and you can see that now we can apply different colors into this leaf. I'm going to just select this outer leaf line and you can see that this is grayed out, so this is an isolation mode so we just have this outer leaf line. I'm going to come to green and select that. Now that line is green, which is awesome. Now I'm going to select both of these at the same time and I'm going to grab this live paint bucket and come into this interior space and paint that green as well. Now I want to change these veins, so I'm going to select a lighter green. So come in here and get that, and then there you go. Now we have that really, really basic illustration leaf. It's very flat. Definitely a practice sketch, but it shows you how to scan it, vectorize it, and then add color once you're in the illustrator space as opposed to trying to add color before coming into this space. Now up here, you can see that this, like I was mentioning earlier, this is still treated as a separate line from this and it's all right. This actually creates a little bit of a cool texture break moment. But if I want to be sure that I'm not working with them separately like that, then I will just group them like we did. I'll select both by dragging, command-G to group them, and then I can do the paint bucket so that it turns it into live paint. If I want this exterior line to be the same as this dark green, I can just use the Eyedropper tool to sample that and then it will be applied. I mentioned earlier when we did these initial sketches that there would be three types of leaves. We had this open one with no veins, we had the one where the veins are not attached to the center line, and we have this one where the veins are attached to the center line. As you noticed when we filled in the colors with this leaf, the veins and the center line all became the same color because they're treated as one shape. Now, when we look at this leaf where these are separate, these are each treated as individual shapes, and so is this, and the outline as well. Theoretically, all of these shapes could be different colors. So rather than this being all attached and needing to be the same color, we can have more variation here depending on what you want your style to look like. Again, we're going to group these since we had them ungrouped just by dragging across to a live paint bucket tool. Now, I'm going to deselect this and just select the outline, and eye-drop this color, and then for this middle vein, I'm going to eye-drop this color. But then just for fun, let's select one of these and I can double-click on the fill square and let's play with another, oh, that's bright. Somewhere in between. Let's try that. It's still quite bright. So each of these could be a different green, and I'm actually going to sample this to start and then come in here and change it. You could do a rainbow of greens. Let's do one more. Alternatively, you can group these by selecting multiple at the same time. I can select this one and then hold down shift on the Mac, select this one, keep holding shift, and select that one, and then go into the colors and pick green, and then it'll fill it automatically. I'm actually going to change these to match this screen. I've selected them with that shift method, go to the eyedropper tool, select here, and they should all be changed to be the same. Then I'm going to fill in this background whites-pace with the green background that's found here. I'm just going to eye-drop that first and then select this altogether, and then select my paint tool. It's already been selected from this color, so I have that ready to go and then I'm going to fill in that green. There you go. If I were really working this piece, I would change this smaller veins to be brighter so that there was more contrast. But for the sake of example, you can see how because they're separated from the vein, they can be a different color. With this leaf, we talked about how it's not fully connected up here and because of that, it's not a closed shape. That is a drawback if you're wanting to fill your shapes in because when we select these, make sure they're grouped and then try to fill the interior, you get this no can do sign and say you can't sell the inside. This is tricky. This is a pretty big gaping gap. But even if you have something small that happens, like if we zoom in here and just the texture of your pin, if there's enough of a break, then that might cause your shape to not be fully complete and it might have issues filling in. That's why when you're drawing your image, you want to be using smooth paper and a nice thick enough black smooth pen ink line. Then when you're tracing it on illustrator, you want to make sure that it's traced enough with that threshold that these breaks aren't happening because that can become a block to you filling in the space. Now, if you just want the outline for contrast with these filled spaces that actually looks nice, and that can be a good sense of contrast in a composition. But if you're wanting to fill in the space to make sure that breakage is not happening so you can do that. That is how you vectorize a sketch on paper and to save this, we can go to File, Save As, and right now it's titled Leaves Skill Share which we'll save and it's a Adobe Illustrator document. I'm just going to save this to my desktop right now. But I always save one copy as the Illustrator document in case revisions are needed because if you only save it as a jpeg, then it's harder to chromate and revise, whereas if you have the master document, you can come in and make those revisions. So down here format is Adobe Illustrator, so I'm going to select, Save. I selected cancel because I already have it. But if you want to save this as a jpeg instead, you can go to File, Export As, and then format, you can select from the selection jpeg or have it as leaves skill share to the desktop. I'm going to select use art boards. We only have one, but I'm just in the habit of using them because when you have multiple on your canvas, then you can type in the art board that you want to export. But right now we just have the one, so keep it simple. Just use art boards, all is fine, or you can do range one and then leaf skill share jpeg and then you'd export it to the destination, whether it's your desktop or a hard drive. This is how you turn your sketch into that vector image and remember not adding color until you're in the Adobe Illustrator space, if you're looking for that flat effect. If you do want to experiment with more texture and watercolor before adding your images into illustrator, I would highly recommend visiting Bonnie Christine's Skill Share page to learn more about how to work with color and texture. In the next lesson, we'll talk about how to make your digital sketch into a vector image.
6. Drawing Digitally: All right, now that we've done the paper sketch to the vectorized image, we're going to move into digital drawing. For this example, we're using procreate on an iPad with an Apple pencil. I'm going to open procreate here on my iPad. That was from a previous example. Here I'm going to select the plus symbol. I usually do 12 by 12 canvas, which here you can see there's all these different untitled canvasses. But my 12 by 12 was labeled roots. Often I'm using a 12 by 12 to do illustrations for my marketing on Instagram. We're just going to use that canvas size as an example today as well. Its similar to when we talked about pens to use with the sketch on paper, you want to use a thicker pen that really created a solid line without a lot of breakage. That when you go into vectorize it, it's really crisp, clear, and clean. For me I work in a really flat illustration styles. That's really important to me that I don't have a lot of texture. That's what we're exploring today in the digital sketch as well. To achieve that really crisp clear line, it really depends on what brush you want to use. I really enjoyed the mono line in procreate, which is found under calligraphy because it delivers a really solid black uniform line. I find that it's really nice for the flat imagery and shapes that I'm trying to create. I'm going to use two fingers to tap the screen to Undo that. In contrast to that, if we were to use something like chalk also under calligraphy, you can see that this gives a much more texturized line, which best your style, that's wonderful. But I've just found that what I'm trying to vectorize something with texture, it becomes a lot trickier to achieve the look I'm going after. If you want to work more with textualized lines in vector images, I highly suggest popping over to Bonnie Christine's Skill Share page because she has some courses that deal with how to involve texture when you're vectorizing an image specifically with watercolor. Okay, I'm going to double-tap again to get rid of those lines and go back to the mono line. I have a medium thickness just because I want to be really visible in what we're working on today. If it was this, then we could still see. But I think here at the medium [inaudible] me it becomes really crisp and clear what we're doing. For this example image, I am just going to draw some simple leaves. I'm going to make sure that all the lines connect. Rather than there being a break even a very small break like that, that I don't even intentionally make that can affect our vector image and coloring later. So I really want to make sure my lines are connected. So you can see here is the main leaf shape and I'm going to do a little stem. Off the bottom, I'm going to zoom in so you can see this break connect that I'm going do a little tiny loop from the bottom. Then we're going to put some veins just for a little interest. Very quick sketch, just an example. Here I am breaking up the veins that are radiating out from the center line, because I might want to play with different colors and not, and if they're attached here, it becomes a little trickier. Because once it's vectorized, that's treated as one continuous line. The color effects, that main center line and the radiating point. I'm going to delete that and I'm going to actually make these disconnected so that we can play around with color later. I could do it on a new layer if I wanted to play with composition and arranging these things. But we can do that actually in Illustrator once everything is vectorized. Right now I'm just going to keep all the leaves on the same layer for ease of use. I'm going to do another leaf here. Make sure that's fully connected. And then I'm going to come down with another stem, veins and radiating this leaf. I'm not going to connect the bottom, I'm just going to come straight into the stem. Then I will connect to these ones just we can see what happens once that's in a vectorized format in Illustrator. Okay, there are the three leaves. In the next lesson we're going to talk about how you transfer this image from procreate on your iPad to use an Adobe Illustrator.
7. Transfer Your Digital Drawing: Okay. Now I have this drawing, this digital sketch. I'm going to click this little tool button up next to gallery. It is already on the share button, which is great. I'm just going to share it as a JPEG. Usually I use AirDrop to do this so that I can send directly to my computer. You can see Elizabeth popped up. You can also mail it to yourself or message it to yourself if you need to. But I'm going to use AirDrop for ease of use. I click that, and now it said sent on my iPad. I'm going to exit out of that, and I'm going to get out of procreate and move to my laptop to show you how to vectorize this image.
8. Vectorize Your Digital Drawing: Now we are on the laptop, the computer portion of sharing the file, and I saved it to My Downloads when I did the AirDrop, so I just went into My Downloads here and then dragged it over to My Desktop for easy use. Here we have it right over here. Untitled artwork. I'm just going to open up Adobe Illustrator and I already have this Canvas, but let's just say New, just to start from scratch, new documents. I'm just going to do that 12 by 12 shape to stay in line with what we did in Procreate. My color mode is RGB because we're working on the screen. That works right now and then high resolution. Create and we'll wait for it to open. Now we have our square art board. I'm going to check the color. Yeah, we're good to go there. Now, I'm going to go to File, Place, I'm going to click my "Desktop" because that's where I dragged the Procreate image, and I'm going to select Place and then place it in here. I'm going to zoom out command minus symbol. Here are our three leaves. You can see how there's no breakage in these lines, they're really crisp and clear, which is really great for that flat illustration effect. Now I'm going to go over here to Image Trace, select Image Trace. I'm going to keep everything default tracing result as black and white because we just have these black and white lines and have it checked with fills and then I'm going to select "Ignore White". I'm going to click "Preview" it's okay, it'll take a while, that's fine. In the preview is exactly crisp and clear. What's really nice about going from digital to digital is that you have less of that breakage happening that can come from the texture of a pen. Again, this is all about your style and what you're after, so if you want that texture, that's great too but if you want the flat, crisp lines, then this can be a really simple way to go straight from digital to digital. We don't need to adjust any of the threshold or anything because everything looks crisp. I'm going to unclick "Preview" and select "Trace" and then I'm going to go to Object, Expand, Object and Fill are checked. That's good. Now we have these three shapes. Well, it's actually a lot of shapes because each of these little tiny veins that are disconnected are their own little shape. But we have these three main leaves and they're all grouped together right now which you can see, because they move together. I'm going to Right-click and ungroup. Then I can click "Off" and then that way, when I select one thing, you can see that this blue line is just the outline of the leaf, but it's not these interior little veins. As I mentioned earlier, this disconnect allows us to treat each of these as an individual object. But if you look here, if I select that, all of that is selected as the same. This starts to affect how we color things. When I'm creating in procreate, I start to think about that final image down the road and how I want flexibility with color. I'm actually going to select all of these by just dragging the box around all the leaves and there's this little paint bucket, live paint bucket. I'm going to select that. That's turned all of these into a live paint space, and so now we can come in with color and fill in the different shapes. I'm going to select this leaf first, and right now it's selected on black. When it come to the fill, let's go classic green and you can see that that just made this gray. What that means is that the color space is no longer listed in RGB. We want to make sure we switch it from grayscale to RGB. I came over here to Color, switch that. Now the green appeared, then I can click this paint bucket again, and that just changed the line itself to be green. If we zoom in, we can see that happening. Now I'm going to have this paint bucket and you want to make sure that you select the object otherwise it will have that can't color it symbol, we all know. Select your objects and then I'm going to use this and then you can see where it highlights. I'm going to come into this whitespace and click that too because I want that green and I could do it in here too. Let's make the whole leaf green and then let's change these inner lines to be lighter. I'm going to select this line. Again, you can see that it's black. I'm going to come over here, change that to RGB and I'm going to come back and get the light green. Now I'm going to double-click this vein line and I want to do the same color as this. So what I can do here, well, it's actually in grayscale, so I'm going to change that, and then I can take the eyedropper tool and eyedrop right there. Another trick, if we want all of these veins to be the same color is to select each one of them. I'm going to start with one and then hold my Shift button on the Mac, select two and just click each one all around, and then we can change all of them at once to RGB, and then I can sample again with the eyedropper tool, this one right here, and then they're all colored so you don't have to do them one by one. I could go around and then I'm going to do the same color down here for this little space and sometimes you have to double-click to get it. But right now I'm going to sample this color and then I'm going to take my little fill bucket and fill it in. Now if you want to track this color, you can open up, fill and copy the color number here so it's selected. I just click Command C, so that instead of eyedropping the color, you could come over here to this leaf, double-click it, change the color space, and then instead of doing the eyedropper or the paint bucket, I could come in and double-click the fill and then just Command V on the Mac that code in, and it will place that color code and change the outline. Then now it's the color code for the paint bucket so I could come in and select the leaf and then fill in the inside as well, just like we did with the other one. Just like we talked about with the paper sketch to a vector image, when we talked about the veins being separated from this middle line, the same goes for this digital image as well. Here we were able to color each of these shapes individually, and when we go over here, again, I'm going to click the paint bucket, make sure the color space is in RGB, and I'm going to sample this color. I'm going to select both of these together, paint bucket again and fill in this interior space. Since these veins are connected to that middle vein, that middle line, I'm just going to double-click on this shape so it's in isolation mode. It's separate from these leaves over here and the background main shape of the leaf here. This, I am going to do the paint bucket, switch to RGB, and I'm going to sample here. Like we went over with the sketch on paper, this turns the whole vein system into the same color because it's all connected, whereas this, you could come in and change one of these to be a different color. You could change each of these to be all different colors if you want. Now if I want to save it as the vectorized file, I will just go to Save As, and it's in the Adobe Illustrator file, which is the vector file. So I could just click Leaves save it to my desktop or a hard drive, and then click "Save" if I wanted to. I always save a vector file, even if I'm going to eventually export the file as a JPEG or a PNG or something else, I always save the vector file so that I can edit it and alter it. But if I do want to save this as a JPEG, I can click Export As and then down here Format, JPEG, use art boards. There's only one art board on this right now, so I could do that and then enter in Leaves for the title again and then export it to my desktop.
9. Thank You!: All right, there you have it. Thanks so much for joining me for this class today. I really hope that you're walking away with more confidence and skills to turn your drawings and sketches into vector images. Don't forget to upload your class project down below in the project section so that I can cheer you on and we can all see the creations that you're working on. Also, if you have any questions or your own tips and tricks that you discovered along the way, drop them in the discussion section. I'd love to be in touch there. I hope we hang out again soon. It was a lot of fun having you in the Prints & Plants studio, so consider taking another one of my classes. Now let's hang out on Instagram at @prints_and_plants. All right. Enough said. It's time to illustrate. To creativity and beyond.
Liz Brindley, Illustrator & Creative Biz Coach
