Digital Illustration: Doodles to Designs

1. Project: Create an art piece from your doodle: I'm Jon Bugerman, and I'm an artist, and I'm based in New York. I do lots of drawings, and paintings, and colorful things, and all of this things I make start off from a drawing. A pen on a piece of paper. I'm teaching a class which I've called Doodles to Designs. So, we're going to take you drawings, your doodles, your sketches and we're going to process them and tidy them up, make them more beautiful on the computer, and then they'll be ready to become designs for almost anything really, from t-shirt's, sketch books, and stickers and posters and prints. The world is your oyster. The main point of all of this stuff, and by stuff I mean life, is to try and have fun. Let's enjoy the act of making and creating, and if you have fun whilst making it, it is going to transfer to the work. Have fun if you want it to. 2. Pens Are Your Friends: So, the first thing we should do before gangs dive really is to just have a little think about working environment. Now, I like to have tiny desk to keep it all organized, this is a little messier than I'm comfortable with. It's good to have some natural light, a comfortable chair, but it's pretty important to say so far that you can do some work, be prepared to get into all. Obviously, we're going to be doing some drawings and things. So, to do that we need some pens, we're going to be scanning the drawings into the computer, so for this instance will let's discount things like pencils, chalk. Oil pastels, they don't really go very nicely under a scanner. My favorite kind of pens is Sapolsky pen, which comes in nice colors, and things. Sapolsky pen it's nice, smart, solid, black line, that's good. Crank, it's a more heavy duty, smells a bit alcoholic in the component space maybe not so good. I like to be able to draw and the ink be fluid coming out of the pen. So, I don't have to pause and shake the pen or the pen dries out. One of my favorite pens to use is the Pilot brother. This is a really nice pen, nice smooth lines and very good for, for paper. Someone gave me a Japanese photo pen. I think this is a pen that can draw on glossy photographs. But again, it's a really nice, smooth, solid, consistent, black line when drawing and it smells quite nice as well, so I recommend that, though I can't tell you the name of it but maybe you can recognize it. Also these pens are good because they draw it quickly, they're not going to stick to the scanner bad or going to smell, are going to accidentally smudged little- I draw, I'm not very well-trained in the classical sense drawer so I pull my hand across the page quite a lot. So, when I'm drawing, it's good that the artwork dries quickly so I'm not worried about smudging. All right. So, those are the pens, pens are my friends and maybe they're your friends too. So, what should we draw? It doesn't really matter. Again, it goes with the pen, it goes way of like feeling comfortable, having it- for me, I like it fluid and smooth, so want a paper that's not too heavy or too grainy or it's not going to suck the ink from the tip of the pen. Paper that's not too thin, not like super cheap printer paper, the ink's going to bleed for it. I'm a big fan of the Muji sketchbooks, which I draw along on this paper it's pretty thin but don't to be too precious about it. You don't need the most expensive, heavy duty, wall color paper or whatever it might be. What I like about like a notebook sketchbook like this or any little sketchbook thing is that it collects all drawings for you. So, over a period of time, all the drawings are sequentially stored in a book already, which is a benefit oversight loose sheets which might get lost and spread around, it's just tedious. I find if it's inexpensive, then if you do make a mistake and you don't like the drawing then it's okay and you are like you have with a cheap notebook. You just turn the page and keep going. I would insist that you don't rip out pages, you don't throw them away, even if you really detest what you've done, keep it. Put it to the bottom of the pile, don't feel bad about it. Because actually, I've been doing this work for many, many years, like maybe 15 years now, and sometimes it's a drawing and you really think it's terrible, I'm awful, I hate this, I'm going to throw away, and I've learned not to do that. Then you go back to it a week later, a month later, a year later, and you forget about all that anger and frustration and self-pity and everything that you might have, and you appreciate it and you're kind of there's a quality, there's something in there that's good. So, don't dismiss anything. It's about enjoying making work and not being self-critical during the process of making. So, just turn the page, turn the piece of paper over, but don't throw away, don't rip up your work, that's a big negative thing to do, and we don't want to get into a negative mindset. 3. Research and Destroy: I got my glasses on now. That's serious. The idea is we're just going to draw stuff, and sometimes, it's completely normal and natural to go, "What the heck am I meant to be drawing? " Sometimes, that doesn't matter. You could just put the pen on the page and just free-form it. That's what I do. But, of course, it is useful to do research. We are all artists. We should always be looking and thinking. You never know when you're going to be struck by inspiration. You can't really predict that, but what you can do is make sure that you expose your brain, your eyes, and your senses to as many different interesting things as possible. Then maybe, something will click and you go, "Wow. That's amazing. That's totally given me an idea for a drawing, or an art work, or whatever it might be." So, libraries, and people, and museums, and galleries, these are all things that we should get out from behind our desks and go and see, interact with, and be out into the world. However, if we're at home and it's raining, you don't want to go outside, the computer has a wealth of stuff available to us via a thing called the Internet. Now, I'm always being distracted whilst working. It's a cruel thing that the machine that we're spending all our lives working on, also is a window to the most amount of entertainment and distractions that we could ever think about. It's a little cruel. I'm meant to be working, but with the click of a button, I can totally be distracted and see some amazing cartoons from people I've never heard of. So, what do we do? That's totally natural. It's totally good in a way to be distracted by things that are related to our work, and our lives, and things. So, what I do to mitigate the guilt of being distracted is, whilst going on websites and looking at blogs and stuff, I try and keep a record of the stuff that I like. I build a little digital scrapbook on my computer of those images. I just think this is a really good practice to get into so that when you're online looking at stuff, it actually becomes a little but useful. So, what I would do is simply create a little folder, and I call it Research. Then within that folder, I'm going to create other folders, and they're going to relate to stuff I've seen online that I think is pretty interesting. It could be anything. I don't really have particular sites that I go to all the time. So, they vary up. But there's lots of websites that blog about design, fashion, and art and because I do little bits of all those things, they're good first port of call. So here, I'm on a website and I'm looking at the paintings of George Condo. I'm like, "Yeah. His work is cool. I saw it at the New Museum. Look at these." So what I would do in this instance is, within my little Research folder, I might create a folder called George Condo. You can see how badly I am at typing. The important thing to do, you can just click and drag the work in there. See, like that? I'm not saying you would use this in your design, it's just reference material. So, you can click and drag the images in, which is good. But, perhaps, what is slightly better thing to do, is just to take a screengrab. For instance, this image has got when it was painted, materials it was made with, and stuff. So I would maybe want to take a grab of that. So, on the computer, you Shift, Command, Four, and you get this little screengrab you're seeing. So, what I like to do, is also grab the URL of the image and the information. When I do that, it saves a little picture to the desktop which I then drag and place inside my Research folder. So, in six months time, when I'm wondering where did this image come from, who is it by, actually all the information is on the screengrab. So, I can retrace my steps, I can research more pictures by this guy, I can go back on that website. If I'm using it for anything, I can credit it and not be worried about, where did I get that image from or anything like that. So, good research tips here. Always make a note of where you got your references from. 4. Doodling Exercise #1: So, hopefully you've filled your head with lots of amazing resource material, and books, and people, and art shows, and cakes, and anything stuff, weird stuff you see. Your head now, hopefully is full of fantastical things. So, let's loosen up, and do some very simple, basic doodling exercises to get ourselves in the mood. So, think of these in terms of how a athlete or sports person might limber up, and stretch before going into doing some drawings. An athlete might not do some drawings, before they play their sport. So, grab a pen, grab some paper. We're going to do some some fluid loose feel, and we're going to do them with our eyes closed. We're just going to put the pen on the paper, and very freely move it around. Doesn't have to be erratic, crazy scribbling, although it can be if that's your thing. But just like to get nice feel of the pen, the flow, and the important thing here is the uninterrupted line, that we're going to draw. We're not going to worry about what we're drawing because we can't really see what we're drawing. Make sure you're not drawing on your best table cloth. Or to take on to your knee or something, but it's about just loosening up and just sort of feeling the flow of the line drawing. So, we're going to do that, that's a good exercise. Do a few sheets of that. Can turn the paper over if you want to save the paper. Just get that nice flow, that nice action. Smooth, curly, whirly, scribbling enough. Feel the texture of the paper, and how the friction of the pen moving along the paper. Just going to get comfortable with that, and we'll see what happens. We'll see what happens. This is good, because you begin to imagine the lines you're drawing, on the paper in your mind. Maybe it fuses some synergy between mind, and hand, and pen, and paper. And if I wasn't talking, I'd be quite enjoying listening to the sound of the pen on the paper. It's satisfying. It sounds a little bit like the sound of people shoveling snow off driveways, that's what I think it sounds a little bit like. A little scratchy and scrappy, but also of soft. There's definitely some rhythmic element to this drawing. Imagine that the tip of the pen is one of those little balls that bounce along the words in karaoke videos, and we're hopping along some melody. Swap the line, is tracing around, and doing. So, it's ever so slightly meditative and pleasurable in that sense. We're here. All right, so yeah, it's a little scribble that I've made. Kind of nice. 5. Doodling Exercise #2: All right. So, number two, drawing it's nice too. I'm going to think about the things that we've been looking at. The arts, the cultural fun stuff, I don't know, whatever you're into. Skull and crossbones and heavy metal music or something, whatever it might be. We're going to draw, we going to keep the pen on the page. We're not going to be too focused or worried about what it is we're drawing. So, maybe you're watching something or listening to something or chat to your friend on the telephone or if you got a friend in the neighborhood, why don't you invite them around. You just have a conversation and do some drawing together. So, that's what we are going to do, but we're going to keep a pen on the paper as much as possible. So, we're just going to draw and talk and little bug is going to be some drawing as well. So, what have you been up to little bug? I know it's been a cold winter, have you made some snowman? Yeah, I guess. Had some nice pickles? Yeah, it's good. So, yes I'm not really sure what I'm drawing. It looks like I seem to be drawing a little portrait of- no, don't draw me. Try and keep the pen on the paper. Yeah, level the force. Just flow through you, through your hand and on to the paper. See, I seem to be drawing and maybe this is a good [inaudible] I seem to be drawing you little bug. So, maybe draw your friend or go with what you know. Don't have to invent crazy stuff. It's lovely. Keep going on. keep doing this. It's a bit more comfortable. Go for what you know, like draw stuff that you're interested in. That you find interesting and I'm sure other people will do. It's all about you, what interests you, what you are about as a person. Put your personality into the work. Don't have to pretend to be anything that you're not. So, [inaudible] and it's just a pleasure to draw and it feels great to create. That's good, looking very beautiful there. All right. That enough for you. All right. Well done. 6. Doodling Exercise #3: A little backstory, that's so precious. I think I set some nice textural scribbles in that. It's quite good. Not bad for a burger. So, now we're going to draw and we're going to think about the stuff we're looking at and we're going to keep the idea of being fluid and just drawing and stuff will come out, but we're not too worried what it is or how it looks so much. Then, every so often, we're going to turn the page around and then we're going to react to the things that we've just drawn. So, it looks a little new and unusual to us. So, there's no real hard and fast rules about that. If you're drawing is looking really good in a particular way, don't feel that you have to quickly turn it around. Think of it as kind of a little bit like a puzzle, that's what goes through my mind when I'm drawing. It's like, how can I solve this? How can I complete the composition? How can I make it look as interesting and as fun to me as possible? What can I add here? How can I react to that little bit of the drawing? So, whatever is in your mind and you can start to get some sort of rhythm and flow and balance to the work. Stuff doesn't even have to be anything, it can be abstract, it can be gestural, it can be crazy little characters. So, you can see already, I'm kind of waffling and drawing at the same time, but it's starting to have some kind of balance to it even though it's not even finished. Then it's okay, it's okay. It looks strange because it's a weird doodling exercise. It's not meant to be the most amazing of our work ever. So, yeah, have fun with it. Outside also, I mean, I've colored in some little bit, but let's not worry about shading and coloring in too much. Really here, we're focusing in on the line work, the rhythm of the line. So, we'll be coloring it in and putting it on the computer momentarily. So, we don't need to worry too much about that. That's why we should keep it black and white, keep it nice and pure and simple. You just get a nice quality of drawing and have fun. This is the thing, the main point of all of this stuff, and by stuff, I mean life is to try and have fun. Let's enjoy the act of making and creating and make nice things, interesting things, funny things, weird things that we can share with others. If you have fun whilst making it, it is going to transfer to the work. So, keep that in mind as well. Have fun. 7. Outputting Ideas: You've done the doodling exercises. You are primed and ready to roll in a doodling sense. Now, I want you to make lots of drawing and have lots of fun doing that. But before we do that, before we go ahead and do that, it's good to have in mind exactly what we're going to do with these drawings afterwards. Just so we can keep our eye on the ball a little bit as to anything we should be aware of. So, what might we do with the drawings? I think for this class, I'm going to run through, taking one of my drawing and turning it into a print. So, I will just show you a few examples of stuff like that. This is an example of a print that was a drawing and then turned into a screen print. With a screen print traditionally, you have a limited amount of colors. For every color that you would create, you need another screen. So, this is three colors; black, red and blue. So, the black layer would go first, then maybe the blue, then maybe the red. Be doing black more at drawing. So, a drawing's could easily be turned to a screen print. If it is a screen print like this and you could print it on paper, means you could also print it on a T-shirt. You like that? Just as an example as you can design it for one thing and it can also become another thing. We can also do a digital T-shirt print. So, it could have lots of colors. Now, in digital printing, you don't need any screens or anything like that, so you can have very colorful works. So, again, if you look at this, this was just black and white drawings of characters which are then colored in on a computer, and then transfer print it onto a T-shirt. So, you can put stuff on garments and not have to worry about screen printing and the costs of having lots of screens below. Something on your teeth there. Of course, you could put it on, say, an iPhone case or a mug. It's all the same process. So, the same artwork that's on that T-shirt is also on this case and if little Burgs, can you just open your mouth a minute and hold that? You can even put it on ceramics. It's a similar process. Once we have it on the computer, we can have it in a digital format, and we can output it to anything. Like I said, I think we're going to aim and go for just an art print, and we'll use probably a limited color palette even though it might be outputted digitally. From there, we'll have the opportunity to explore it in many different ways. Opportunities will arise maybe further down the line and you'll be able to say, "Oh, yeah, I've got this artwork that I made six months ago and maybe that will be applicable to put on a book cover or something." So, just something to keep in mind before you start the doodling. It's always good to have an idea of what it is you want to make. Get a pen and paper out and draw. I want you to make a lot of drawings. Have a lot of fun. Then, in the next video, we're going to review those drawings. We're going to look over them and we're going to decide which ones we're going to use and how we can take it forward to make the final piece of work that we're going to turn into the print. 8. Evaluating the Doodles: What are we going to do now is evaluate our drawings, and get a bit of an overview over what we've made, what we like the look of, what we should focus on moving forward to making the final piece of work that we're going to put onto the computer. You can do this in a variety of ways, simplistic. If you've worked on the leaf sheets, and so just put them around on the table, and maybe if you had a little break. So, you looking at them, a little a fresh and see what pops out. You walk out your eye, put them on the floor if you don't have a big table pin them on the wall, and just have an overview of the work. And, look at the bits that work best for you, that you are pleased with. If you've worked in a sketchbook, similarly, maybe you work in a few different, you have a little overview the work. Have a little flip through, see what pieces you like, and then maybe on a separate piece of paper, separate the work. To create, the final sequence will pick and choose the head from this, the body from there and a little bit from here and create the final piece of artwork. It's not going to be exactly the same. Unless you're really really good at copying what you've already made. I'm not very good at that. But it doesn't matter because the thing has to exist on its own and it has to be its own piece. And it has to have its own fluidity and rhythm, that makes it feel a finished piece of work or completed compositions. So, don't worry about copying and pasting in a literal sense. Now there are ways to trace things. If you do want to take the literal, literal element onto the page. So, these can be done in a couple of very simple ways. If you're using so cheap thinner paper you can literally put the work underneath. I don't really like tracing. I don't really know but, I think it, you kill something in the work. When you're very carefully trying to copy over the thing. Of course that's just from my style. And maybe from what you wanted to is totally making sense. So, now I've got this character here and I really like him. I just want him separate. Or I can like this bit. So tracing it does make sense and that's totally fine. So you can do that, you could also, if you have access to all. Put it on a light box, and trace it that way. That is a good way. If you don't have a light box, there are a couple of ways of tracing, which are life hack thing. But with a piece of paper, you could scan or photograph your drawing. Put it on a computer screen. Put the paper on the screen. Make sure the screen is very bright. And then with a soft nibbed pad you don't want anything too sharp to scratch the draw on the paper while it's actually on the screen. Another way you can do this, is to have the drawing, that you are trying to take it from and the paper, tracing paper obviously it's the best but if you don't know how to do that, put it up against a window. If it is a beautiful sunny day, you can see through the paper and that is super cheap light box. So,if youn't always be doing doodling on TV screens. I wouldn't recommend having candles or anything. That's probably not a good idea, with paper pretty flammable. Okay. So, with that in mind, and with the overview of your drawings and what you like, the look of what you want to put in the work. I want you to make the drawings. And the stuff you're going to make now, it's one of those drawings. It's going to be what we're going to scan, and work on the computer. So, it doesn't need to be super super perfect. There are some things we can fix, on the computer. But I think you really benefit, if it's right one nice drawing on one piece of paper. And that's whole work from. So, have fun do some drawings and in the next video we will digitialise and get it on the computer. 9. Methods of Scanning: Smashing. So, I kind of have a little all cover, all my drawings and everything. I went back to this one that I drew earlier. I wrote it with scale there, because when I was growing up Skill-man, that's something was cool. They are, man, that [inaudible] that is skill, and you know Skill share, so it seem to make sense. And in my drawing, we got some tea, and some [inaudible] notebook and then like painting. So, it's kind of along the creative vibe of this activity, this project. So I'm going to use this. So I'm going to scan this in. Like I say to friends and colleagues and people that ask me, it's going to work as a drawing, it's going to be a nice quality to the drawing first, before we put on the computer. And now, with the computer, we can tweak and tidy up, and all that kind of stuff. But if it doesn't work as a drawing, if it isn't nice or interesting or fun, buoyant, and radiant, and lovely as a drawing, then it isn't going to magically change on the computer. We can use computers as a tool. When using a slight kind of fashion that was not going to be over computerized. So, we won't need human nature, the human emotion and feeling in an analog loveliness of the drawing to come through in the work. Super quick simple scanning tip: Clean your scanner once in a while. It's been so many times, I've done like many in a multiple scans, and it's always got the same little smudge on the image file and it's like, "Oh, wait, I should clean this scanning [inaudible]. What if you don't have a scanner? There's a very quick alternate way to do it and you probably being a hip young cool thing, have a smart phone, and all smartphones have cameras. A method that you can do with your smart phone. I've got an iPhone here, other smart phones are available. But that pretty good the cameras [inaudible] things, so when I travel a lot and I used to take a scanner in my suitcase with me, but I don't anymore. If I really have to scan something I use my phone. So, I'll just put it on the camera as a couple of ways you can do there. But with only one is just so holding as flat above the image like so and what you want to do is get as much of the image onto the screen as possible. So, you don't want to take a photo and get bits of the desk in the keyboard or anything else, you want as much information of that image on your phone as possible, and keep it nice and flat and focused and take a picture. Now you can do this from above, or you can prop up your picture. So it's [inaudible] , and then you can have your phone camera resting on a table. So, it's nice and steady or if it's slightly elevated a box and this is super cheap tripod replacement. Do it near a window. Make sure it's an even light source, daylight is obviously good, some white paper to help bounce the light back in. This is total amateur way of doing it, but it's not a battle of life hack. But again, we're not worried about the color so much because it's just a black and white drawing. You take the photo on your phone and then you can email it to yourself. Click the email, open up the file, send it with the highest possible quality settings, and away you go. It works better for smaller images. If you got like a big drawing, you can [inaudible] sections, it's a bit nightmare. For a drawing of this size or a little character. So you've drawn some little icons for something and you just want to capture one little guy. Then it's super, super, super easy. Then there you go and that will be good enough to first, to work with. 10. Spit and Polish - Part One: So, I'm going to scan it and it's going to appear into Photoshop, I will just talk very quickly about the same. Now, if it tries to give you some automatic mode to do, I never lie that, trying get the professional settings, so you can see all the options. We're going to scan it in a black and white, in grayscale through the preview scan. It's going to capture the image which is, so I'm going to put a grayscale image, it's on a off-white piece of paper but we'll cover that and for the DPI, Dots Per Inch, we're just going to use 300. So, that will give us like a big enough resolution to play around with it, but we're going to factorize the image anyway so the DPI doesn't really matter. That's pretty much all you need to really worry about. Matrix fringe DPI, 72 DPI is probably not going to be enough or 150, there might be the default there, have a little look on that. Scan it black and white grayscale if not, scan it in color, we'll change it anyway and that's pretty much all you need to do. All we want is the black lines on the piece of paper, that's all we really want, I mean scanning in for import in Photoshop. Maybe a scanner will have its own scanning software in which case just use that and trying to open it up in your legally purchased copy of Photoshop. Okay, so we've got the image and all I did there is rotate it, I scanned and upside down, if you want to avoid having to go to image rotate canvas, just scan it in the right way around. Anyway, so we've done that, very first thing I would do here is to save it in its raw pure state and Skillshare folder on the desktop here and I'm just going to call the image 01. Save it as a TIFF file, you can save it as a PSD or something. I probably wouldn't save it as a JPEG because that's like a lossy format, it means when you save it and reopen it and save and reopen it, it's compressing the information to make the file size smaller but then you're going to lose a little bit of information in the file, so what I like to do is save it as the super cool, super hard, lossless format, and I like TIFF. Now, that I've saved it as image one, I'm going to save it immediately again, this image two and now I'm going to play around with it. I'm not going to worry owner of accidentally saved over the original log, because I've already saved as number two. So, the first thing that I'd like to do here is just a zoom in, have a little look, make sure I got a decent resolution and you can see on the screen, we were looking at a 100 percent. So, there you go, you can see some smudges, some stuff there. So, first thing we're going to do is try to clean that up a little bit. I'm going to use the shortcuts, maybe you are not that okay with Photoshop, but I employ you to learn the shortcuts, it can save you a lot of time, that's why they're called shortcuts. It's a lot quicker than keep going up to the menus and stuff but maybe I'll show you both. So, I'm going to just set levels which is Command L, I'll just show you what it is but that this will be the last time I'll show you, you need to learn shortcuts, so don't worry where it is. So, image adjustment levels, there it is. Then, what I like to do here is now I scanned it on the off-white piece of paper, and I want it to be a totally clean white background. So, I'm going to bleach the background, that's bring down this little marker here, it's going to bleach out but then I want to bump up the black, so they're going to pull that back up, okay? So, really I'm emphasizing the contrast and then click "Okay". If I do a little undo or redo thing, you can see the difference and what that will do, that will also take out some of the lightest smudges and things. Then, I'm going to press the button on the keyboard A, and that's going to bring out the eraser and then I'm going to talk and then make sure I've to block. You get this lovely square and I'm just going to where I see only image, some big splotches on things I don't want, I'm going to remove those. I'm not going to be super angle about it because I'm pretty lazy and everything. Also, some of these things will disappear but like here, it's a big smudge, I'm going to get rid of that. Then try not to get too close to the black lines. A good way to navigate around your image. Okay, so Command minus zooms out, Command plus zooms in on the keyboard, very useful for getting in and out of your image. Another good tool is keeping your finger on spacebar, you'll see the cursor turns into a little hand and when it's the hand, you're holding down the space bar, you can drag and move around the image, so move around the image with the hand and then let go, you back to the eraser tool, erase and press down again on the spacebar. So, this is why I like to do, is just have a little tour of the scanned image, get rid of some of the bigger spots and once that has been done, I can just do Command S which is File, Save, Command S, there it is. I have to worry that I'm recording saving over my original scan. 11. Spit and Polish - Part Two: Okay. So, once I've done that and I got rid of some of the bigger bits that I didn't want in the image, there's a few other little bits that maybe I would tweak. So, I'm going to use the brush tool, so I'm going to press B for brush, and I'm going to make sure I've just got black and white selected as my colors. That's the pen mark it's going to make. I don't want it so fluffy, so I'm going to go up here to where the brushes [inaudible] slightly hard edge and I'm going to make it sort of the same line thickness, maybe a little bit thinner as my actual pen. There you go, you can see what it is. With the mouse, now what I'm going to do, I'm going to see where I haven't quite drawn the pen against another line and I'm going to fill it in with the computer. So, you can see here the thicker pen line isn't quite touching the thinner ones. I'm just going to click once and it just tightens it up a little bit. So, I'm just going to go around and make sure things like that are looking good. Very simple. Now, here's the opposite of what I want. I didn't want this line to go over this face part of the character. So, you notice that I've got black and white selected as my foreground and background color. I'm going to press X and that toggles between those two colors. So, I'm going to press X and now I've got white selected. Just going to shave off these little bits here. As you can see, maybe I went too far there. So, I'm going to press X again and it's going to select black and I'm going to put it back here. Then, I'm going to press Spacebar and I'm going to drag my way around the image. Just going to say, oh, okay. I'm going to add a little bit there. Maybe I want these eyes to be solid black so I'm just going to color those in like that. Let's just find one more instance. Maybe I want this curve here to be a little bit smaller, so I'm going to press X. It's going to select white again. Just going to smooth it off. Smooth it off like that, like so. Then, I'm going to press X again to make sure black is selected. What else can I tidy up? Let's just do one more just to give you an example. Here, select X and make it white. Just tidy up these circles. Now, this is kind of anal and I wouldn't do it for the whole image, or I wouldn't do it for every last line, but I'll do it. I'll do it just a little. So, Command-Minus to zoom out. Okay. I'll do it on the really big ones like this. I think this will look much nicer if I just tidy that up like that. I'm such a butter fingers on my keyboard. But, I'm not trying to disguise the fact that this has been a hand drawn image. So, some of these things will make it into the final image and that's totally fine. So, I'm going to zoom out. Are there anymore really egregious marks that I want to get rid of? It looks good to me. There we go. So, now that I have tidied it up, I'm going to save it again, Command-S. It's ready to roll. Because the drawing was pretty well formed to begin with, I don't really have to do much else. So, it's just nip and tuck the image. That is ready now to be vectorized. 12. Vectorising in Illustrator - Part One: Let's vectorise the image, let's go for it. We're going to open up Illustrator, we're going to go and create new print document. It doesn't really matter what kind of documents size is because we can change it, we can type. We will do A3 for now. We're going to click Okay. Now, we'll go back to our image, image-02.tif, we are going to drag it and drop it into Illustrator, and there it is in all its glory. So let's save that file. It's always good to save this image-01, which is written down there. Yes, good. Okay. Now, you have it in your official legally downloaded copy of Illustrator. Now, this is still, this is your tif which is being placed into Illustrator. So, if we use Command plus like we did in Photoshop, we can zoom in and if you look at that quite close up, you can see what I mean about the pixilation. Here, it has an approximation of the image. You can see the line is not smooth there are little squares everywhere and this is the computer going. I guess it's not quite a black line there and it's not quite a white paper so it's little bit gray. So, you can see that is the pixel that is our enemy and we don't really want. We are going to use a really, really simple way of doing it. Illustrator has got an option called live trace. It makes it super, super easy to convert this into a vector shape. So, I'm going to use the default setting. We can have a quick look at the tracing options if you want, but basically, we want it black and white and we want it to have fills, we don't want strokes. Fills are shapes, strokes are lines that go around the shapes, go along the path. We don't we that. We're more interested in shapes. Like I said, you can struck in and click line trace. That's great. It might proceed slowly with a large image, that's fine. We are going to click Okay, wait a second. Now it's done. How easy was that? You'll see at the top here, we have a bunch of new options and we're going to expand. Basically, it gives you a preview of how it's going to look in live trace. When we click Expand, it means, yes that looks fine. Turn it into vector shapes. Now, we are going to zoom in, Command plus. Look at our lines. Well, look at that. You could slice cheese of both lines that's how sharp they are. They are sharp but they are not perfect. So, you can see it is still weird with the all imperfections but that's good because with imperfections you make things interesting. So, something that I like to do in Illustrator is Command quotation mark I guess speech mark and that turns on like a great background. I like that just so it allows me to see the difference between the page and our board in Illustrator. So, the first thing that I tend to do is double click on the image, select the background and hit Delete to get rid of it. The images are made up a lot of individual shapes and they've been grouped together. So, if we want to go in and alter any of those shapes, by double clicking the image, we enter that group. Then if we click off that image, double click away from that image, then we are back out of that grouped selection of the images. We can move around as a whole. So, if we double click, we go inside, then we could actually move parts of that image around. I don't really want to at the moment but look, there you go, there is a part of the image that's moving. Then we can double click outside of the image until it gets done. That's super useful to keep it all together and not accidentally yank parts of the image out and about. Now, we've done that we're just going to do a little bit of tidying up in Illustrator. 13. Vectorising in Illustrator - Part Two: All right. So we're just get a little bit tidying up in Illustrator and I'm going to show you some really simple tools to use in Illustrator. So, let's let's zoom in and we can use spacebar to drag away around the image like we did in Photoshop. I won't bore you with doing all the little tweaks I do, but let me just show you a couple so you get the idea of how Illustrator can work. So I'm going to double-click into the image, we're going to look at this little shape and I want to get rid of that little bump there. I going to select the pen tool, which is P, and you see the cursor has changed to a little old fashion nib. If I want to add a point on this path I can just click, you can see the little plus shape by the name. If I want to get rid of a point just go over a point that already exists, this is one of these little blue squares and click, and it will delete it. So, by doing this I can smarten up and just move the shape. So, I could delete all of them, I'll really wanted to, it will be nothing left, but you don't want to do that. So, I'm going to press command Z and bringing back that shape that's going through undo. There's two types of arrow tools in Illustrator and this is the selection tool, which is basically it means move around and can select stuff. If a shape is part of a group it will select the whole group. Oh, we've got this other little arrow which is direct selection tool which is A, and that will select things which in part of groups you'll select them as directly just the objects. I can just click on that shape, even though it's part of the group now I can select and move it around. So, these are super useful. So, I like to keep things grouped together so I don't accidentally mess them up. But I like to use A to select parts of it so I don't have to keep going double-clicking going into the group to alter it. So, let's just show you that removing gap points on the path again. So here, this is most ideal for, so I'm going to try and remove these bits of the path here, so I'm going to select that shade, this black line with the direct selection tool which is A, then I'm going to get to the pen tool which is K and then I'm going to click on this little points, and I'm going to get rid of them. You'll notice the shape shifts, so you take into account I've removed that anchor points. You'll notice that there's big long lines coming off these points as well. If we select the Direct Selection Tool, and we can click on them and drag these anchor points and change the shape a little bit. So, P to delete the points that we don't want, so get this lines a little bit smooth. So, there's another way that you can fix these little bumps and maybe you don't want to fix them, but I want to fix this ones. So, another way to word this is with the direct selection tool, click on the shape that you want to change, and then we are going to use the pencil, which is N, and then what we're going to do is go, alright this is a little bump, I don't really want this wedge-shaped here, I want to just to be straight. I'm just going to draw using the mouse then you shape for it and it doesn't have to be perfect, but you can see, you can very quickly fix all my bigger mess in my case here. The shape by just using the pencil, so remember the Eraser tool that we used in Photoshop which was just A. Well, there's a similar tool in Illustrator, which we can use which is just shift E, and we can use the square brackets to make it bigger and smaller. This allows us to directly erase parts of the shape. So we can also tweak lines like this, so direct selection tool that shape, shift E, eraser and then let's move that like that, there we go. Again here, spacebar to move the image around, save as you go, and that is a very good way of just fixing and tweaking the shapes and lines of your image. 14. Colouring: So, we have our image and it's time to color it now. Regardless whether it will be a screen print or a digital print or anything, I think we can just color in straight off, and then at the end, I'll show you how you might want to separate those colors out if you need to, but it might not be a concern if you're doing it digitally. The easiest way to color in is to select the whole group's mass, so it's already a group, so we are just selecting the whole image, and there is a tool in Illustrator called live paint. So that will put this group set of objects into a status where it can be painted, and we can paint it and fill in shapes and change colors, and then when we're happy with it, like before, we can click expand and it'll stop it being a live paint object. Of course, we can go back and turn it into a live paint object as many times as we want. It's just you need to be aware of it's in that status and then we can confirm the selection, and then it goes back to just being a static non-live paint object. What I would normally do is select the entire shape, and on the keyboard, press K. You'll see the group changes color, it changes the outline around it, and on the cursor, it will say click to make live paint group. So, at this point, I select any color, it doesn't really matter what, and I'll just click on the image somewhere and you'll notice it fills it in with a color. If I press the direct selection tool and click off the image, you'll see it looks exactly the same, and we zoom in, it's the same. But now, if I want to color it, I just press K again, and you can see there are highlighted selections as to where the paint can go. So, much like in Photoshop or using a stained glass window analogy, the color will go in within a confined area. If you look here, you can see the highlighted area isn't the whole of the shape. Live paint is saying, "Oh, look, it looks very much like at the top of this right-handed ear, its almost touching that other line. So maybe you don't want paint going into this bottom section here, only this section, not this section." So, it'll try and close gaps. That's okay, just select another color. We've got blue and blue, its fine and there won't be an actual gap visible, but you can see live paint does predict closing gaps. Sometimes live paint does us the favor and closes the gap. I'm not sure I can find [inaudible] because we probably would have closed all our lines up in Photoshop earlier. So, how do we go about coloring our image and what colors should we use? Well, there's no real right or wrong answer to this. One thing for certain, you can look at those research images, the stuff that you've picked off the Internet, you've put in your folder or you've put on your Tumblr account or on your Pinterest or any of those things. Any collection of stuff or in a physical scrapbook stuff you've collected, look at those things, look at the colors, see what kind of palettes people have used, and you can totally take inspiration from those. So, I'm always looking at things and going, "Oh, yeah, that's a good combo of colors. Maybe I can use that in a print, may be I can use that in my art work and take inspiration from that." Another thing that I do is I use a limited palette. So when I'm coloring something in, I don't try and use every color all at once. Maybe I'll start with just one or two colors and start painting in the image and seeing how that goes and whether it seems to have the right balance and the right feel to it, and if it doesn't, maybe I'll add in a few more. You can see in some of my analog work, just one color or one or two colors is enough. So, it has some kind of quality to it already. I mean, but you can use every color you want as well. Now, you can see very quickly, you can build up colors on your work. At this point, I would probably save the image. We probably should have saved it a little earlier, but we're going to save it as something else now, so we can always get back to that original version of it should we want to. Not that if you forgot to save it, it's a disaster, but it's always nice to know. Oops, made a mistake. Come on, Zed, undo it. An obvious little trick is not to have too much of one color in one area of the image at a time. This is going to be an art print, so I'm not so worried about using too many colors because it'll probably be like a digital print, I guess. When you're coloring it in, think about contrast, think about color, think about what style on top of what else, what makes sense in terms of the color of things, think of variety, think of balance. Now, let's say we're happy with that, pretty much we are and we like that, and so we're done with it in a general sense of it being colored in. I'm going to delete this palette because I don't need that anymore. I'll get that out of the way. I'm going to stop it being a live paint object now. So, I'm going to click on the object, and up here, we can see expand, I'm going to click that. Now, if I press K, you see nothing highlights, it's not a live paint object anymore. 15. Finishing Up: So, we are coming towards the end of this Skillshare lesson, really. So, we've got this beautiful, hopefully beautiful piece of artwork. Now, this really can be used for anything. Now, you might be wondering about turning it into a screen print. With any kind of printing, whether it's digital, or for a screen, or anything, you're going to go, and find someone who is going to manufacture it onto a t-shirt, onto a cup, onto a play, onto a paper, or whatever. Those printers are going to have their own specifications. They are going to tell you, we want it at this size, or this resolution, or anything. So, you really have to refer to that documentation. A general rule of thumb for screen printing is that, it's good to have the artwork in layers. So, I'm just going to show you a really quick way now to separate this up, so that each color is on a separate layer. So, if you do want to screen print it, it's not a very difficult thing to do. I don't know what size you are going to screen print it. This is an A3 size art board. So, I'm just, I can't help it, I'm just going drag, I'm just going to stretch the piece to fit this page, a little there, and when I'm doing that, I keep my finger on Shift so the proportions of the image are retained. I can drag the image from any corner, and that will keep the image in the right proportions. So, that is good, otherwise, if I didn't do that, you can see I can squash the image, and it would look very weird. So, just don't do that. Okay. How do I split this up? Let's do this. We see here in the bottom right-hand corner, we have layers, so choose like in Photoshop, you can have different layers. If you poke the layer in the eye, it disappears. Look at that. So, nothing. There it is. So, what we're going to do is one by one, we're going to take away the colours, and add them onto their own individual layer. Let's deal with the red first. So, direct select tool. Click on any red shape, then up to Select, Same, Fill Color, that selected the red. Then we're going to go Command+X, which is cut. So, we've taken that, we've ripped that from the opposition. Now, whilst it's now floating above the computer somewhere, in its cut state, while it's up there, we're going to hit, create new layer. I'm going to give that layer a name, I'm going to call it red. I'm going to hit Return. Now, with that layer selected, so it's light blue, I'm going to do Command+F. Command+F will paste it, whatever you've cut, directly back in the same position it was taken from. So, if we click off the image, and then we poke that red in the eye, and toggle it on and off, you can see it fits perfectly back from where it was. So, we're going to do that very quickly with all the other colors. I'm going to save that again, just so I've got a version of it now in layers. So, we've got a red letter, we've got a yellow, we've got the green, we've got the blue. So, let's just take the final one which is the orange, same fill color, we're going to cut, we're going to add a layer, let me call it orange. I'm going to Ctrl+F, so it's right in the right place. Look, the last layer is the black layer. So, we've cut all that for free. So, if this was going to be a screen print, it would be one, two, three, four, five, six, it would be a six color job, that would be, six separate screens would be required to print this. That's how we turn it into a screen print. That is really, brings us to the end of this fun Skillshare adventure, wouldn't you say? I hope you had a lot of pleasure, and fun, and a good time going through everything with me. I hope it's giving you a lot of inspiration and excitement to go forth, and continue to make cool stuff, to draw and use the computer together, and to keep a nice fluid drawing, this quality to your work. Yeah. So, let me just show you what I made. So, here is the drawing, and here is the print. I'm really excited, and intrigued to see what you will come up with, having gone through the class yourself. So, please post up your projects, post up your prints, and also show me what else you will do with them, whether you'll take your print, and you'll put it on a T-shirt, or on a mug, or on a notebook, or anything. There's so many resources, and cool things to do with your images, once you've got them. So, check out all the links, and things as part of this class. I use a lot of those links myself to get stuff made. So, maybe you've got other websites you use, and share them amongst the class. So, thanks very much. I bet you had fun, I think that you enjoyed spending time with us both. See you another time soon, cherry on. Bye-bye. 16. More Creative Classes on Skillshare: