Digitize Your Lettering with Adobe Illustrator

1. Introduction to Digitize Your Lettering: Hi, I'm Kiley Bennett and I'm the lettering artist, teacher, author, and designer behind Kiley in Kentucky. For me, lettering was the best hobby I ever picked up. But what made it into a full-time career, was learning how to pull my designs into Adobe Illustrator, and make them usable in an infinite amount of ways. I started by making desktop backgrounds and transparent overlays to put on top of photos, and then I moved on to creating my own logo, designing logos for others using my lettering, and now I've seen my lettering on a variety of products and publications. In this Skillshare class, I'm going to show you my step-by-step process for digitizing your artwork using Adobe Illustrator, and it doesn't matter if you're using pen and paper or procreate or lettering on your iPad, I'm going to show you how you can take those designs and make them digital. It's my hope to take the fear out of a program like Illustrator and give you confidence to move forward with your newfound skill and be excited to dig even deeper into your artistic process. Let's get started. 2. Lesson 1: Starting with Pen and Paper: In lesson one, we'll actually be lettering what we are going to take into Illustrator to digitize. First step I'm going to start with pen and paper and then we'll move on to procreate. There are really no rules because this is about digitizing your lettering. In this step, I want to show you just the tips that I have for making it easier to digitize your own lettering. So whatever lettering style or tools you want to use are encouraged here. The two biggest rules I have for when you know you are going to digitize what you're working on, start with clean, smooth, white paper. So no notebook paper with lines, no really textured paper that might show up when you are bringing it into Illustrator, and also to use black ink. Like I said, it doesn't really matter what tools you use because it's up to you. It's also up to the look that you want to get in the end. I've chosen four separate lettering pens here that will all give us a different result. I'm going to write just one word with each of these and we'll bring that into Illustrator. You can see how I would go about digitizing each one of these pens to maximize the look that they're going to give us in the first place, and really keep the integrity of what that pen is all about. You'll see what I'm talking about as we get into that stage. Because I'm trying to keep this brief, I'm only going to letter just a single word with each of these. I'll probably do a full quote when we get to the procreate section, but if this is your first time start with one word. Start with one letter if you want. Make it easy for yourself. The same process will apply for a quote that fills up this entire page as it does for one single word. So just start simple and then as you get more competent, you can move on to lettering a full quote. First up is this Pentel ink brush pen and this gives us a super brushy textured look. It's unlike any other pen I have and so I wanted to show you this one for sure. I'm just going to write just a simple word texture. So yeah, you can see that that is a ton of character and detail. I'm not going to be super careful here. Another thing to keep in mind is that this doesn't have to be perfect because we can adjust everything about this if we want. Once we get into Illustrator, we can change the color, we can add a colored background, we can take every bit of this detail away if we wanted that would take a really long time. So if you want really smooth lettering, don't start with a pen like this, start with a pen like this. Next step we'll do a monoline pen this is the Paper Mate Flair pen. This is a pen that I use when I want a handwritten natural look. Because sometimes a handwritten font just doesn't do it for me and I want to have my own handwriting in something. So I'm just going to scribble out the word handwritten in my handwriting. Next up we'll go with the Tombow dual brush pen because so many lettering artists use this pen and I wanted to include it as well. So we'll just write the word brush. We'll go for all caps this time just to change it up. Lastly, I'm going to show you the Tombow Fudenosuke soft tip pen. This is my favorite pen. If you've followed me for any amount of time, you know that. Just going to write fude. If you're interested in learning how to letter, I have a class on that on Skillshare as well and it's called Lettering and Color. Although it is about using colorful brush pens, I go in depth in how to letter using the brush pen. So if you're interested in that, definitely check that class out. So this is all we are doing for the pen and paper section. Now we need to get our lettering transferred over to the computer, so that we can bring it into Illustrator. I've seen a lot of different ways to do this. I've tried a lot of different ways to do this. A lot of people like scanning, but to me that's more time and more effort and hassle than it's actually worth. We can just snap a photo with our phone, so let me grab my phone. I'm going to take an individual photo of each one of these, so there will be four photos in the end. A tip for doing this is to make sure you are in really good lighting, and to also utilize your phone settings for this as well. So first I'm snapping a photo of texture. I'm going to change this into square photo mode. So that I can just get only the part that counts. I'm going to tap on it to focus and then that little brightness setting appears, and I'm going to go up in the brightness. This is going to increase the contrast, so that I can get a really good photo. So I'm going to snap that photo, and I'm going to do the same for each one of these. Now however you want to get these photos to your computer is up to you. I'm going to AirDrop them, but you can e-mail them, you can text them, you can use a magic wand to get them to your computer. It really doesn't matter. So I'm going to go ahead and get these sent over to my computer, and they will be waiting for us when we're ready to bring them into Illustrator. But now, let's move on to talking about procreate. 3. Lesson 2: Starting with Procreate: Let's talk about lettering in procreate and bringing that into Illustrator. The same rules of thumb pretty much apply with lettering on a white background with black ink, but one thing that's different when you're working in procreate is that you have control over the file size that you are creating. When you create a new document in procreate, it gives you lots of options for file size, and I always just go with the largest one because this will keep our lettering really crisping and clean when we bring it into Illustrator and once again, less work will need to be done once you get inside illustrator, and that is the goal for me as to make as little work as possible so that I can get done with my project as quickly as possible. Like I said, I'm going to do a full lettered quote for this one, just say you can see how that looks. I'm just going to speed up this process while I go through and sketch something out and I'm going to use a couple different pens and a couple of different lettering styles, so you can get the full effect of how my process works once we get into Illustrator. I've quickly sketched out the quote that I'm going to letter. This right now is in pencil, so I need to trace over this with a pen. Like I said, I'm going to use a couple different brushes here in procreate, but I don't want to talk also about having your pen settings on streamline. I'm going to choose. I'm going to use a mono style writing pen for some of this, and I am going to put it on a pretty high streamline setting, about 70 percent or so. If you're going to digitize, I find that it's easier to go ahead and put your streamline setting up really high so that when you get into Illustrator, your edges are really smooth and perfect. Of course, if that's the look you're going for I'll make sure to actually include a messy pen in here as well so you can see what texture looks like in procreate coming into Illustrator. I'm going to speed this up again. Another thing is the size of your artwork when it's in procreate. If you start at the large file size, your artwork doesn't necessarily need to take up your whole page, but it's definitely a case and the larger it can be, the better. As long as you're not lettering on just like a really tiny space of your file size, you should be fine. But I'm just going ahead and scale this up making sure my magnetic feature is turned on, so I can scale it. Proportionally, I'm going to Airdrop this to myself, but feel free to get this to your computer however you normally would, and it will be waiting for us when we are ready to start digitizing. 4. Lesson 3: Getting Started with Illustrator: Welcome to Lesson 3, Getting Started in Illustrator. If you don't already have Illustrator downloaded, it's really easy to get it and install it. I have this website linked below, but you can go to adobe.com/creativecloud/plans, and it will show you all of the subscription plans that Adobe offers. I currently have the single app plan, and I chose Illustrator obviously as my app that I want to use. I pay $20 a month for it, and I think it's well worth it. But there's lots of other options. I encourage you to look at the student and teacher pricing in case you are a student or a teacher, or the school and university pricing, you can get a major discount. Definitely check that out if that applies to you. Once you choose the plan that works for you, it's a very straightforward download process, very easy to do and pain-free. Now we are ready to open up Illustrator. I've already got it open here. This is what the icon looks like. When you open up Illustrator, it will show you this screen minus all of your recent projects because you might not have any recent projects. But we're ready to start our new document to begin digitizing. There's a lot of ways you can do this. Illustrator prompts you for some of their file sizes they have prepared and I don't ever go from those. You can create a new document with this button here. You can also go up to File, New. If you're opening a document you've previously worked on, you can open or you can go File, Open, very standard process. I'm going to go ahead and click "Create New". When this box appears, there's a lot to look at, but it's very straight forward once again. You can title your project here, but we can also do that later when we save our project. Then you have your width and your height of your document size. This is just set to a letter size because this is what I use a lot when creating PDF worksheets. That's 8.5 by 11 inches is selected. There are other options, and the only other option I ever use is pixels. When you're working for something that's going to go to print, I suggest using inches. But if you are working in something that's going to be viewed on a screen, I suggest pixels for that. It just converted my 8.5 by 11 inches into what it would be in pixels. I encourage you to just Google the screen size that your item is going to be viewed on. If it's only going to be viewed through a phone, so for instance it's a desktop or a mobile background, then just Google the screen size of your specific phone make and model. If you are doing a desktop background, 1920 by 1080 is a good size. Then if you're making something like a logo, start at a high pixel size, and I always work in a square. We can change it later. We can resize our artboard once we get inside Illustrator. There's not a ton of pressure to do it perfectly at this step, but it's just good to know what you're looking at. We're going to go back to inches because I want to create my document in inches. Also there's this bleed down here which is footprint. A good rule of thumb for print is to have a quarter inch or 0.125 inch bleed around your artboard. You'll see what that looks like when we get inside. But that's basically just to pad your artwork for printing best. We can talk more about that when we are saving our artwork at the very end. Then if you toggle this arrow up and down, you'll see some more options. I always have this set to CMYK. I always have it on high, 300 ppi. Then that's about it. I'm just going to change my document to be 8 by 10. Then I've got the orientation set to be this vertical or this horizontal landscape orientation. You can change it to portrait, and it will switch those numbers around. It's really up to you. Then I always start with one artboard. You'll learn what artboards are in just a second. We can also add more or take them away once we get inside. This is just a good starting point. Go ahead and start creating my document. Now we're inside and we have our artboard set up exactly as we chose in the previous screen. If you are really somehow zoomed in when you opened up your document, might look a little bit like this or just look closer than you want. You can easily zoom out by pressing Control or Command on your keyboard, holding that down and then pressing the minus sign on your keyboard, and it will zoom you out. I can scroll up and down and side to side using my mouse. But if you don't have a smart mouse, you can grab this little tool right here, it's the hand tool. That's also keyboard shortcut H. If you just press H on your keyboard, that hand will pop up, and you can use it to grab and move around. Right beside it is the zoom tool. You can also just press Z on your keyboard, and it will change to that. It's the same idea. You hold that, and then you can move in and out and get to different areas and switch back to the hand tool to move up, to move out. Really easy. Then to get back to just a plain old cursor, you can press V on your keyboard, or you can go up here to the selection tool and click this. The selection tool is your standard cursor that will allow you to move objects around. Anytime you have it up here, you'll be taken to a regular cursor, just like normal. But when you are wanting to move an object around, you'll need to have your selection tool selected. This little white arrow beside it is called the direct selection tool and it has its own purpose as well. But not yet, we are going to get to that. Let's look at the landscape of Illustrator. There are a lot of things to look at. I've already been pointing you to some things over here. This is called a toolbox or a toolbar. This up here is called the toolbar. This over here is called a toolbar. Yours might look different than mine because I have customized mine to my liking, pretty much which you can do as well. But let's first talk about this left-hand toolbar. If yours doesn't look like this, you don't see all these features that I have, you can go up to Window, and then go down to Toolbars, and you can make sure that you have the Advanced Toolbar selected. Because that's the one that I use, that's the one that I like the best. Even though it's called advanced, don't worry, we are only working with about 10 percent of the tools over here in this class. Do not get overwhelmed. As we move along, I will introduce you to tools as they come up. I don't want to bombard you with a lot of information right now. I will wait until we actually need that tool to talk about it and introduce it. Another thing, if you don't see something in this toolbar that I have, it could be because it's hiding in something else. These little boxes with the arrow means that there's a fly out menu. It means that you can actually click it, and more options will pop up. My computer's being very slow. Yeah, there we go. You can click it and more options will pop up. Also over here, I have this area definitely customized how I want it to be. You won't need pathfinder tool. That's something that I use as a designer a lot. But two things that I want you to have open are artboards. Artboards and layers are two great windows to have open. To open those, just go up to Window. Then you can click Artboard. Since mine is checked, that means that mine is showing up. Then Layers, as well I have that checked. When you open it up, so let's open up just brushes, for instance. This is going to pop up in this little panel. To add this over to your left-hand toolbar, you just drag it over and put it where you want it to be. To take it away, just go in here and deselect it. Let's go ahead and quickly go over artboards. I kept saying that you can change your artboard around once you get into the document, which I do all of the time. All you do is you go over here and you click on this little button here. This is artboard 1 because we only have one artboard setup. If we click on this box, it will open up details about our artboard that we decided in that original screen. It tells us our height and our width. We could easily go in here and change it. We can also change the name of our artboard. We can call this Practice 1 if we wanted. We can also double-click and change the name of it there. We can also add a second artboard. We can click "New Artboard", and it will bring up a duplicate of that same size artboard that we had before. If you want this artboard to be a different size, just click on that. Let's say you wanted to work in an 8 by 8, you can do that, right there, and you want it to be, well, it's the square, we want this to be this orientation. It will change that around for us. Let's say you also decide that you don't want to bleed or you need a larger bleed area around here. You can go up to File, Documents Setup. This is where you can change bleed. You can also change to pixels or another document set up if you want as well. There's a lot of options here once you get into this. Then another thing, yet another art way to change your artboard is to go over to the Artboard Tool here or a Shift O. Then this will allow you to actually click on which artboard you want to select, and you can manually resize this yourself. Once you click on these little arrows, your height and width will pop up and show you what you are changing it to; you can actually click on the corner here, hold Shift, and it will scale up your artwork or scale down your artboard exactly in proportion, which is really handy. You can also move your artboards around. If you want this artboard to be over hear out of your way while you're working with this artboard, you can do that as well. If you want to get rid of one of your artboards, you just click on which artboard you want to get rid of, or you can actually click inside of the whitespace and you can see these changes when I click over on artboard 2, it will select artboard 2. You can just hit this trash can, and it will be deleted, easy as that. Then the last thing before we move on to digitizing is, you probably see this Swatches panel here. It might actually be somewhere over here for you. I like to have this out where I can see it because sometime I'm working with a lot of swatches. We don't want to get into this, but this is something that's really fun about Illustrator that I just want to show you. If you click on the swatches libraries, you can actually go down to Color Books, and over to Pantone books, and you can actually see Pantone colors. For my work as a designer, I use the Pantone solid coded a lot. I'm just going to show you because I know that you all love color as much as I do. You can see all the beautiful Pantone colors, and you hover over them, and you'll see their color code. If you're designing something that requires you to Pantone match, this is a wonderful feature in Illustrator. But we don't need that. I just wanted to show you because it's one of my favorite things, that I get to do is Pantone match. If you don't have your watches menu up here, you can go to Window, and then down to Swatches. Just like everything else, this is the standard set of colors that comes in Adobe Illustrator when you open up a document. But we are going to customize this swatches panel later to suit our color palette that we're working with. That was the last thing I wanted to show you as we're getting started. Now we are ready to move on to the next lesson, which is where we will be digitizing our artwork. 5. Lesson 4: Image Trace your Lettering: We've got our document open and now we're ready to pull in the photos that we took of our written artwork on paper and also our procreate image right into our document. How we do this is we go up to a file and then we scroll down to place. This is going to show us all of our folders on our computer. My photos saved to my downloads folder. So I just go there and I had five images altogether, four that I took on my phone, one from procreate. I'm going to grab the first image, hold the Shift key and just select all the images. We can pull multiple images into our document at once. Go ahead and click Place and you'll see there's a little thumbnail of your image right there and if you only have one image, then it will not have that little one out of five message. That just means that I have five images altogether to be placed. Illustrator is letting me know that. There's two ways that we can place our image. First, we can just simply click and that will release the first image. It will actually drop this image at its full file size into our document. This is our little art board and then this is the huge image. I'm going to zoom out using command and then the minus sign. The second way you can drop images into your document is to just hold and drag. Now we've got all of our images in the document. I want to select all of them. I'm going to click Embed. That's going to get rid of this little blue X that's on all the images, but what's it's also going to do is it's going to embed the images into your illustrator document. This is a vital key in digitizing, but if you want to keep pictures in your document for reference or for color pallet or whatever, you will want to embed them because if they get deleted from where they were saved to your computer, they will no longer be able to be accessed in your document. That's just a step that I always take. With all of these images selected, I'm going to grab an arrow down here and I'm going to hold my shift key and just scale them down a little bit. Not too much, but just a little bit about halfway and then that will scale them proportionately as long as I'm holding down the shift key. I'm going to grab my first image here and I'm going to go ahead and crop this because all we're focusing on is texture and I just want to get rid of anything that we're not going to be focusing on in these individual images. To select the photo, go up to crop image, which will pop up when your photo is selected. It'll read where the information is for you. That's pretty handy. Just click Apply and then I'm going to do this for all of my images. We don't really need to crop this one because it's pretty good as is. Now that our images are craft already to take the first step in digitizing, which is using the Image Trace tool. If you select an image, Image Trace will pop up here at the top. You can use Image Trace presets from this panel here or you can go up to window and select Image Trace, which is how I prefer to work in Image Trace is from this full panel here. I'm going to zoom in a little bit so we can focus on this, maybe even a little bit more, just so we can really see it. There's a lot to look at in the Image Trace panel. With your image selected, you'll be able to use the Image Trace panel. There's a lot of presets that we can look at, but I'm here to tell you right now, sketched art is where it's at. If you used a white background and black ink, all you need is sketched art. You can try all of these. I have tried all of these. Some of them serve a purpose and maybe in a future illustrator class where we dig more into it, I can show you how all of these work, but for our purposes, for the fastest digitizing, most effective digitizing sketched art is it. Go ahead and click sketched art. You can instantly see that Image Trace has taken our photo from a photo and it's turned it into something that resembles a digital image, which is pretty cool. Now, if you're finding that you still have a white background, toggle down on this advanced arrow and make sure that your ignore white button is checked. If it's not, you'll still have this background, which is not a big deal but it's really handy for illustrator to take that white background away from us. I love that. I am going to go ahead and toggle this back up because we don't really need any of those controls. All I'm going to do to mess with this is to increase my threshold. Which is the amount of black that Image Trace is picking up. You can see as we increase our threshold, we get a little more of that original detail that we had in our writing on paper. There is a time when threshold becomes too much and that's when black starts to seep in from the corners. You just want to make sure that that's not happening. I think that looks really, really good. We wanted a textured look. That's why we used this brush. That's pretty much all there is to it. If we wanted perfect smooth edges, we would have used a different pen. We're going to get to how to do that, but for right now, I am super happy with how this looks and I'm ready to make it official if you will. I'm going to click Expand. When I click Expand, it takes it out of Image Trace mode and it's now a movable object that we can actually recolor. Another thing to note, I'm going to zoom in here. This is technically what's called a group. If we right-click and ungroup, you will see that all of these little detailed dots are now separated from the whole image itself. We can actually grab little things and move or delete them. We don't necessarily want to do that because these little detail dots are part of this overall effects. I'm just going to press Command or Control Z and keep pressing it until I go back to where I was before I did any of that. Actually took me back to where I had before I had ungrouped it. We're going to go ahead and group it again. We want to keep this in a group because those detailed dots are part of this. I'm just showing you how the group and ungroup setting works. This will be used to our benefit when we do the next example, but that is always what will happen when you come out of Image Trace. Everything will be grouped together and you might have to go in and ungroup somethings. To put these back into a nice group, we're just going to select over everything with our mouse and then you can right-click in group or you can click Command or Control G on your keyboard and it will put everything into your group. We have a little straggler here. I'm just going to delete him. We're ready to move on to our second example because this was so easy and we're so happy with how it looks because we did a great job. I throw this up on our art board here and I'm going to grab the next example, which is our handwritten example. We're going to do the same thing. We're going to use that image trace, sketched our setting because it's the bomb, it's the best one, and I'm going to up my threshold just a little bit. Because I know that I want a little bit more black. I don't want it to be so rough around the edges. I want it to still maintain that handwritten look, and that looks really good to me. I'm going to go ahead and expand this. This is a time when the ungroup tool can be used to our benefit, because I want to move some of these letters down to be more in line with this, so that it's not such a steep diagonal upward. I'm going to select this by clicking on it. Right-click "Ungroup, " and now I'm able to grab and move this down and manipulate it. One thing I want to do is actually want to group both pieces of the eye together, I'm just going to grab them both. To select more than one object at once, I'm going to click on one part of the object, hold the Shift key while clicking on the other part, and that will select both. Then I'm going to right-click and just group those together. That way. When I'm moving the eye, the dot is going to go with it and I won't lose my dot. Now I'm going to move the other elements down. That looks more in line. This is all connected, for right now, this looks really good and it looks a little bit more like I want it to look, but it still has that handwritten feel. I'm going to put this all back into a group by selecting everything, and I'm going to hit "Command "or "Control G", or you can right-click and group. We're going to do the same thing. We're just going to scale this down holding our shift key so that it's proportional and just throw this up here on our board. Next, I am going to grab the Tombaugh dual brush pen that we used. Once again, we're doing sketched art, and for this one, I'm going to be showing you how to smooth out these edges in the next lesson. There's not really much that we can do about those rough edges at this point, and I'm just playing around with threshold just to see if I can get it looking any better, but it's not really making that much of a difference. I'm going to go ahead and expand, and for this one, you might want to decrease the space between some of these letters. We just took it out of image trace, so it's all in a group. But instead of ungrouping it, I'm going to show you another way that you can move around objects in a group without ungrouping, you simply select your group and you double-click, and this will take you into what's called isolation mode. You know that you're in isolation mode because if you zoom out, everything else is grayed out. You're not able to click on anything except what was in the group. You actually now can move things around because you're inside the group, you're isolated inside it, and then when you click out of isolation mode, which is done simply by clicking this little gray bar up here, everything's still nicely grouped together. That's a really handy thing to do, and I use that all the time I go into isolation mode to just move something, tweak something that way. I don't have to ungroup and then worry about selecting everything and grouping it again, it's just something that makes life a little bit easier. Then lastly, I'm going to do the same thing with my fude example, sketched art. We'll also be smoothing the edges and manipulating these letters to look a little bit more professional in the next lesson. But I know there's really not much more I can do with this at this stage. I might just up the threshold a little bit more just to see what happens, and that looks pretty good. I'm going to hit "Expand," and all of this is connected. We couldn't ungroup this if we wanted to, we don't need to, so I'm going to hold shift and scale down and throw this up on my art board. The last example we have is our procreate image that's all the way over here, and you all are about to see exactly why I always work from procreate when I'm digitizing. Because using this sketched art tool, it is just going to look exactly the same. I mean, there is not anything that I would do to mess at this or to change it at all, so it's pretty darn amazing. Going to go ahead and click "Expand". Once again, all of this is in a group, so we can go into isolation mode by double-clicking. We can move some of these around if we wanted. We'll get more into this, into the next lesson and perfecting and smoothing and all of that stuff, but in isolation mode we can just make some adjustments to make it look a little bit better. Now, we're out of isolation mode and we're ready to throw this up on our art board for later on. One last thing is, you've seen me scaling these up and down. The thing really that makes it so special is that you can infinitely scale up or scale down your artwork and it is never going to lose quality. The purpose of bringing those pictures in at a large file size was so we could image trace them, and now that we have, it doesn't matter how big or small they are, you're going to get the exact same quality. If we zoom in, you can see these really smooth edges, there's no pixelation because these aren't pixel based images, you can also scale this up huge, and you still get that exact same quality. I want to show you how to save your file in case you are taking this class and bite-size pieces and you don't want to get overwhelmed. We want to be able to keep all of our artwork on this art board in this file waiting for us when we're ready to continue. You go up to file and click "Save". When you're saved, box opens up, you can just choose where your file is saved to. I'm just going to save mine to my desktop and I'm going to name it ,Image Trace Practice. It's going to save as an Adobe Illustrator files so that we can easily open it back up into Illustrator, press it to save, and then press "Okay". You can see that your filename is now added to your document and you can just exit out of this, and whenever you come back to it, you can just open it right back up in your recent or open it from your desktop by using open or file and open. Lots of ways to do that. I will open this back up because I'm going to move right along to the next lesson where I introduce you to this smooth tool and the pin tool so that we can perfect some of these letters and make them look really great and really professional, I'll see you there whenever you're ready. 6. Lesson 5: Smooth Tool + Pen Tool Functions: In this lesson, I'm going to pick up right where I left off and also show you some new tools that you can introduce into your digitizing process to really perfect the edges around your letters. To take them from being really rough and bumpy and make them really smooth and have a much more professional look. Specifically, I'm going to be focusing on these three because I've pretty much achieved the look I wanted from these two. I'm just going to move them off the art board. Just grab them both and then move them out of the way. Then we can bring these to a way they will be more accessible and we can really focus on them. Going to start this lesson by focusing specifically on brush. To introduce you and get you comfortable with the Smooth tool which is an amazing tool inside of Illustrator. I use it all the time. It is a game changer once you learn about this tool. Also, I see we have a scraggler here and I think that is supposed to fit right in here. I'm just going to delete this and really quickly I'm going to introduce you to another tool just because it has come up and it's definitely useful. If you have some little blank areas within your letters, you can go to something called the Shape Builder tool. That's going to be over here in your toolbar on the left-hand side. So you can just actually click this. Well, we need to select our object first. We're going to click the Shape Builder tool. Then you know it's selected properly when you hover over an object and it grays out like this. So we're actually just going to drag. We're going to start dragging within our black area and drag through that white space. It's going to get rid of that white space. So I'm going to go back to my Selection tool and that's just a really quick little tip. I think I see another one actually. There's more than one. Wow. Okay, let's try this again. Don't forget that there is a cheat sheet in the class assets area so that in case you're forgetting any of the symbols, what they're called or you're trying to do this on your own and you don't want to have to go back and watch part of the video, you can also check out that cheat sheet where it has the symbol and the name and the keyboard shortcut and the function of it. It's a really great resource. Now we can actually get to the Smooth tool and what it does, but I am glad that we got to use the shape builder and now you know a little bit about that. So the Smooth tool is hiding in this little Shaper tool right here. So we need to hold down on this arrow and then the flyout menu will appear and you can select the Smooth tool. We can't use the Smooth tool unless the object is selected. We actually can't use the Selection tool for that. We have to use the Direct Selection tool which is right beside it. So we're going to go ahead and click that. When you click on the Direct Selection tool, it instantly allows you to be able to access specific points along the outer edges or the outer paths and the inside paths of our letters. So if you click on any object while in the Direct Selection tool, you will see all of the points along the path pop-up. So I'm going to zoom in so you can see what this looks like a little bit better. The points are basically just areas where the path changes. It's kind of an abstract idea to explain. But if you were to click specifically on one of these points, you will find that you're actually able to manipulate it. You're able to move it around. These little handles pop-up and you're also able to control how the path looks using those handles, which we will get to that. But we mainly want to be using the Direct Selection tool right now because we're talking about the Smooth tool. To demonstrate how this works, I'm just going to click on the path here on the inside of this B. Now I'm going to select my Smooth tool. There's two ways that you can use the Smooth tool. You can hover over a point and simply click one time. It will reduce the number of points that you have on that path and it will greatly help out the shape of whatever it is you're trying to smooth out. So this instantly looks a lot better. I'll go back by pressing command Z so you can see the difference. You can see how this instantly changed when we clicked the Smooth tool. So I'm just going to click it again, hovering over a point. It just fixes it. It just makes it smooth, it does smoothing. So there's another way you can use it as well. I'm going to go back by pressing command Z. You can click and drag along a path. This is going to target specific areas where you would want to smooth out. So if you don't want to smooth one area because it looks good, you would not smooth over that area. It gives you more control over what areas you can smooth. If you zoom in, I want to smooth out this little bump right here, you can go over it multiple times until it is smoothed out. Actually wouldn't use the Smooth tool for that because it is going to take me a really long time to continue going over that like you just saw. So what I'm actually going to do is introduce you to another tool called the Pen tool. It's hiding right in here. So usually, this is the one that is selected. So this is called the Pen tool. Then in the flyout menu, we have several other things. Mainly, the Add Anchor Point and Delete Anchor Point. Going to be using the Delete Anchor Point tool for this because there's just one too many little points hanging out here that I actually don't need. They're not going to serve a purpose and I just want to get rid of them. So using the Delete Anchor Point tool, I'm just going to click on some points. Got to get in there so we can make sure we're clicking on the right thing. Delete some points that don't make any sense to me at all. So if we zoom out here, we have a really bumpy path. So I don't think I have to worry too much about deleting something that is going to mess everything up. Now I would go back to the Smooth tool. As long as I can see that these points are showing up, I know that the path is still selected. So I can just click and drag over top of that path. Click and drag. Click and drag. I would continue doing this and zooming in and using my Delete Anchor Point tool where I feel it's needed. Go back to our Smooth tool. Now here this bump is a really easy fix. I know that I can just grab my Direct Selection tool and move this up a little bit to be more along that clear path that I want. Then go over it with a Smooth tool one more time until it looks good. So that's a way that I would use the Smooth tool and you could literally sit here and play with this forever until it becomes absolutely perfect. So let's go down here with our Direct Selection tool. I'm going to grab this path and I'm going to do the same thing. First, I'm just going to click once to see how this looks. Looks really good. I don't think I want to go in and individually fix anything about this. I am going to fix this bump though. That does not look very good. I'm going to grab my direct selection tool or you can just press A key on your keyboard and these pads will appear. You can click on a point. I'm going to use these handles to manipulate this even more. About the Direct Selection tool and manipulating points and handles, you can get super hung up on the details of how this works. The best teacher in my experience is simply practicing and playing around with it yourself and learning how it works. Because that's the only way that you're going to be able to master a tool like this. So I definitely suggest that you use the pause button. You're working on this in real time as you're watching this class. You can rewind, you can watch the video as many times as you need to get the hang of what's going on. As always, don't forget about the cheat sheet with all of the definitions and shortcuts on it as well. I'm not going to labor over making this absolutely perfect, but I will continue to just finish the rest of this word and then keep talking you through the process so that you can get the hang of it before we move on to the other ones. Again, I'm just going to grab the Direct Selection tool, grab My Path, grab the Smooth tool, and then click once. I always just do this just to see how it looks. Sometimes you get too good of a result. I think we'll see that happen in at least one of these letters, and then we can cover that when we get there. I want to go back one step because I don't like what happened here. But overall that looks really good, especially from afar. One thing I might want to change is this inside bump. I'm so not loving that. Let's grab this handle. A rule of thumb for using the handles is that you want your handles to be pointing toward one another. That's why we have this little bump here because these handles are not pointing at one another. So if I turn this around to where they are pointing in a straight line, we will have a much smoother path. That's one way to remember how handles work. You want them to be pointing at each other in a straight line as much as possible. Sometimes these handles are really short. You can lengthen them or shorten them just depending on the area where you're trying to adjust. I'll move these over, making sure my handles are still pointing at each other and maintaining a straight line as well. Zoom out to see how that looks and that looks a lot better. We're going to move on to R. Make sure my Direct Selection Tool is up. Grab the Smooth Tool. Now some thing's coming up here. I would rather have a sharper corner to mimic the sharp corner of this. I don't love the dots, super rounded. So I am going to manipulate that using the Direct Selection tool. I'm going to use my handles to create a corner. I'm going to move my anchor point up to where I want my corner to be. This is where I want my corner to make that sharp 90 degree angle. I'm going to grab this handle and pointed straight down, and I'm going to grab this handle and I'm going to pull this down to my point. You might have to go back and fix some stuff around that, but now we have a nice corner. So you could do that, once again for every corner you have. I don't usually because it can be until it looks a little bit to perfect and a little bit too fixed. So I usually leave a little bit of imperfection in my lettering, which also just makes life easier too. Let's continue working with this. Several things about this or not what I want. Once again, I'm going to create another corner here. Going to pull this up to where I want my corner to be, move this bottom handled down and then this handle down as well. This is another situation where I feel like this anchor point just isn't needed. I'm going to grab the delete anchor point tool, and we're just going to delete him because we don't need him. Creating a corner down here is going to be the same process. You just play around with which handle needs to be pointing straight, and which handle needs to actually come down close to that point. This handle is huge. I'm going to move this anchor point up here and then bring this handled down to create my straight line. Bring this all the way down here to make my corner point that up. Bringing this in and straighten this handle out so it points somewhat at it's neighbors on either side. Once again, you could continue to do this all day long. You could do the same for this, but we're just learning or playing around. So let's go ahead and move on. Smooth this out. It looks pretty good. This is an instance where this is a point here, and I don't want it to be a point, I want it to be round. So we are doing the opposite of a corner here. You're going to bring an anchor point down until you see that rounded look start to appear. I'm going to make a straight line with my handles going horizontally. Then you're going to bring this one down too, and that's going to give you that rounded look. That was fast and easy, I'm going to continue smoothing out my S. So it's another example of deleting a point that just does not need to be there. Delete. Up here I'm going to pull this anchor point up so that we get a better look from this as well. Now we're ready to move on to the H. Select that, and then zoom in, grab my Smooth tool. Press once. That looks pretty good. I could corner these out, I guess if I want to. I don't like how round that is. So once again, same process, figure out where you want your corner to be and then use those handles to create it. You could continue doing that for every single edge here. I'm going to do that and I'll speed this up. It will rate enough that I just did not labor over every detail. You can't. You would go nuts. If you want to do that, that's the look that you're going for. Awesome, but that's not the look that I'm going for, so we're going to go ahead and call this done. I'm just going to grab this. We can just leave it right here. Now, we're going to move on to fude. This is going to be a little bit different because all of this is connected. When we grab our direct selection tool, so many points along this path, I mean so many. If we click Smooth once, we might lose a lot of good detail. It's going to reduce our paths a little bit too much. This is an instance where I just don't love how digitized it looks. They just took it a little bit too far. This is an instance where I would really just drag my smooth tool around and I would work with it myself during the same process that you just saw for the previous word that we worked on. I'm just going to drag this over the path and then continue until I was happy with it. I've got some more uses for the shape builder tool. Now, this one, remember you have to have your selection tool selected to use the shape builder tool. We're just going to close these gaps right here. While we're here, I'll go ahead and start working on fixing this a little bit. I'm going to round this up a little bit by using those handles. Same here, we're going to round this up. We're going to have to zoom in to find that other handle. There's a lot going on here. Many points that we don't need. Here's my handle though. We're just going to move him and we're going to grab our delete anchor point and delete him. But that's moved things a little bit too far. I'm going to grab my direct selection tool and just move this point over. We'll see how that looks. Looks a lot better. Make sure handles are pointing at each other. Something that's bothering me a little bit about this is, I know where my thick downstrokes are supposed to be and where my thin upstrokes are supposed to be. This area right here would not be a thin upstroke. It looks the same thickness as this over here and that could be my fault from how I lettered it but we have the power to change it. I'm going to turn this into a thin upstroke. How I'm going to do that is I'm going to move this point a little bit more below this center point here. We're going to use handles. Point them at each other to give a good smooth line. Then we can even move these down too. I think we're going to have to add an anchor point somewhere in here because, there's not enough going on between this point and this point for us to really manipulate this properly. I'm going to hold down on my delete anchor point. I'm going to grab the add anchor point. This is exactly what it sounds like. We are going to just add an anchor point. Pick a spot along the path and a pick right in the middle of this point and this point, and I'm going to click, and it's going to create us a new anchor point. I can grab this with my direct selection tool, and then we can manipulate it just like we can our other points. It's really easy. We're going to call that good, because like I said, we can sit here and mess with it all day, but we don't have all day. We're not doing that. That is pretty much how I would go about digitizing this, of course, it's not perfect. You have seen how you would be able to make it perfect if you sat here and played with it for long enough. Now, I'm going to just quickly enlarge this and zoom in and just see if there is things that I want to change. I don't think they are. I might just smooth out some of these here. Let's grab our smooth tool and just click around the inside of this O needs a little bit of work. In the next lesson, we'll put more finishing touches on this. We will recolor our artwork, we will add a background, and I'll show you how to adjust things within the artwork to make it a little bit more special. I'll see you there. 7. Lesson 6: Add Color and Other Touches: In this lesson, we're ready to recolor our artwork. I'm going to be focusing specifically on this, you are so capable, artwork because there's a lot of potential here and we can even add some finishing touches to it to make it feel a little bit more social. You might notice here in the swatches panel that my color palette that was here is gone. All you have to do is click, you can hold Shift and you can select multiple at once and then hit the "Garbage can" to delete them. I'm going to leave my, no fill, which is transparent, white and black there and then I'm going to create a brand new color palette from my picture that I brought in from Procreate. This is just a drawing that I did and I really like the colors and I want to make a swatch folder of colors from this drawing. I'm going to go ahead and embed this and I just place it in using File and Place and then selected the artwork. To create my palette, I'm going to use the rectangle tool or you can press "M" on your keyboard. Very easy tool to use, you just drag and you can make a rectangle or if you hit the "Shift" key it will be a perfect square. So I'm going to create a square, you just release that. Right now, the fill is set to none I'm just going to change that to white so we can see what we're working with. Grab my selection tool and I'm going to make a duplicate. I'm going to make actually nine or eight duplicates of this square to have nine squares altogether for my color palette. An easy way to duplicate an object is to select it, hold down your Option or Alt key and then drag and release before you let up the option key and it will duplicate it. I'm going to take a step back and show you again if you hold down Option key and the Shift key, it will keep it perfectly in line with it. So if you want to move it perfectly below or perfectly to the side, hold down the Shift key. I can also grab this image and then press "Command D" and it will duplicate. There are several ways to really quickly duplicate an image or an object, which is really cool. I'm going to grab all these and I'm going to hold down Option and Shift and drag, and then select all these and then I can do the same thing or I can Command D and now I have nine squares. To bring colors from this picture over into the squares, I'm going to use the eyedropper tool. Select my first square, grab the eyedropper tool, and from there we can hover over various parts of the image and start grabbing colors. I'm just going to pick out several colors. If you're close to getting a color you like but you're not quite there, let's say I like this color but I want to change it up just a little bit, you can double-click over here and you have the capability of moving around anywhere you want. You can also scroll up through here, I mean, there's a lot you can do. This is also where if you have this CMYK code or the HEX code which is this number right here, you can actually manually type in to get an exact color code, which is super handy. I'm going to click "Cancel" because I like this color as it is. I'm happy with this color palette and now I want to turn it into a swatch folder here. I'm going to select all of this, and I'm going to press this folder right here that will turn it into a new color group. You can name this whatever you want, I'm going to name it color group. Well, I'll name it, capable palette. Then we can just delete these now because we have our swatch folder right here. From within this swatch folder, we can just click on something and pick a color and it will change it there. Now, this swatch folder it'll be saved within this document here, but it won't be persistent across all documents in Illustrator in order to save your palate so that it can be usable on other documents, just go down to the swatch libraries and then you click "Save swatches" give it a name, save it where it prompts you to save it, and then when you're ready to find it again, you will click this button "User defined" and then your palate name will appear right there. That's really easy way to do that. I want to create a brand new art board or actually, I'm just going to take all this off the art board and we're going to edit this one to fit our needs. I'm thinking I want to do an eight by 10 prints, so I'm just going to change the orientation and we will use the art board tool to move it down. What you just saw is that, since this artwork is technically on the art board, when you use the onboard tool it also takes anything with it that's on the art board. So I'll have to manually move this out of the way. Since this is going to be a full colored print, I want to start by creating a full color background for it and this is where layers is going to come in. I'm going to start a new layer by clicking this little Create new layer folder right here, and I want to drag this layer below. This layer currently has all my artwork on it, so I'm going to double-click and rename this, artwork. Then click this one, and it's going to be called, background, because I want our background color to be on that layer. Why I would want the background color to be on another layer, is just to get it out of the way. So I'm going to use the rectangle tool to drop a square in here, it is filled it up with black, but we can just change. That's probably the color I want to go with. You can see my little tan background is appearing on this layer, I'm just going to lock it so that we can't touch it, we can't move it, it's not going to get in our way and our work is above, and we can just easily work with it here. I like to start with the background first because when I'm coloring this, I can see what's going to look good against the background and for me, I always like to have a really light color as my background. That's just part of my specific design process. I'm first going to scale this up a little bit and I want to make sure that this is aligned properly on art board. So I'm going to align it using the aligned tools. Those are just right up here or you can go up to Window and align and the panel will pop up. But since this is grouped together, I can go ahead and make sure this is choosing to align to the art board, and then I can horizontally align and vertically align. That looks pretty good to me. I might rotate this around a little bit. It doesn't really look visually centered, it looks maybe like there's a little less room on this side even if that's not actually true, it's more important for us to see with our eyes, but it looks centered. Just know that it is if that makes sense, it's just like one of those weird design things. I'm going to go ahead and ungroup this. Whenever you're aligning, make sure that your object is grouped because if I didn't have it grouped, this is what would happen. Very important to have your objects grouped. Another thing that you can do just while we're talking about aligning, if you've got two objects that you want to be perfectly aligned with one another, and you don't necessarily want them to be aligned to the art board because what will happen if it's aligned to the art board, is it's going to find the center of the art board. But, you're happy with where this one is. You want this one to be perfectly aligned with this one. You would select both objects and then double-click on the object that is staying in place. This will be your key object. Now, if we go up here, it says align to key object. Because since you clicked this twice and this extra blue line is around it, this is your key object. Then you can horizontally aligned that or make it perfectly align. That's a little tip about aligning, that's also super helpful. I'm happy with this being ungrouped now that it's aligned because I'm going to recolor it and I'm just going to actually group all of my words together after I make some minor adjustments. Just moving some things around. I'm going to group this word together. I'm going to select all of these at once using my shift key. Well now, I'm not ready to do that yet because I'm going to group this and group this, but I don't like this too guys. I'm going to delete them, and we're going to duplicate this one. I'm much happier with how that looks. Let's group those now. I already know I want these to be the same dark colors, so I'm just going to grab all of those and recolor them. From here on out, it is your design choice. Don't be limited to making everything one solid color, you can alternate colors. Every other letter could be a different color if you wanted and your imagination can really go nuts with this part of it, for sure. One fun thing to do in Illustrator that's so easy is to make one of your words have the appearance of shadow. I'm going to duplicate the word, Capable, and we'll make this one that will be on the bottom our gray shadow and then we can pull this one that we duplicated since it's on top. We can pull that above and position it just so there it looks like it has a little shadow underneath it and wherever you place it, is wherever the shadow is going to come out of. That's really cool and easy thing to do in Illustrator to give your lettering a little fun look. Another thing that you can do is to add a little geometric elements. I'm going to draw out a quick rectangle with our rectangle tool. Let's use this color that we haven't used. We can give this an effect to make it look like it has a hand-drawn feel, even though it doesn't by going up to Effect, Distort and Transform, Roughen. You're going to preview it, so we're going to be able to see what's going on. I don't love all that detail. I usually take the detail down and then take my person down to like one or two percent. We can up the detail a little bit. Now I think that looks really cute and because this is an effect, we have to expand it just like we had to after we came out of image trace. You select the object, go up to Object and expand appearance and it will outline it just like any other object. When I place that behind the word Are. I'm going to place Are in front of this box though, by right-clicking and arranging, bringing it to front and then we can move this behind. Then I also want to move this one above too, so arrange that, bring it to front, and then I'm going to use the direct selection tool to manipulate this a little bit more. The last thing I'm going to show you is how to create a faded outline that covers your whole entire artwork because this is an effect that I see people do all the time and it looks so cool. It is super trendy right now. I'm going to show you how to do that. This requires a couple extra steps but once you do it, a couple of times, you'll get the hang of it and it's super easy. Make sure that this whole entire thing is grouped together. Once again, you just select all of it and then Command+G if it's not grouped, going to create a duplicate. Select it and hold down your Alt or option key and just drag it to the side. We're going to mess with this duplicated version. First, I'm going to make everything the same color. Let's just go ahead and make it white. It doesn't matter that this is all white. It's going to make sense. We are also going to give this a stroke. I'm going to take my fill and I'm going to click and drag and release it into this stroke area. You can't really see it. But there's now an outside stroke, this little line that's been added to your entire artwork. We're going to increase the stroke to about 10. I would say, 14 maybe. This is where it gets fun, I think. I'm going to go up to Window and we're going to grab our Stroke panel, and makes sure that all of your settings are set to round, and that your stroke is aligning to the outside. Now we see that there's like a really crisp, clean outline. But, we're not out of the woods yet, we have to do a couple of other things. Going to go up to Object and Expand. This is now turned everything into one object, but it's all grouped together. We could use our shape builder tool and actually drag through all these shapes to connect them and it would take us absolutely forever, pr you can go to your Pathfinder tool, which can also be accessed by a Window and Pathfinder; mine's already checked. You think, you can with this selected, press this button which is divide, so it's going to separate all of our little objects. You won't see anything happen, but trust me they're separated. Then you're going to press this Command which is Unite. Unite made everything into one smooth object. Know, that was a lot of steps. But, it's just a really cool effect. You can place it over top of your artwork, and now we need to send our outline to the back. Remember, we right-click and then Arrange, Send to Back. Now we haven't really cool outline around our piece. If you can't get it perfectly aligned, remember that you can select both of these, double-click your white outline to make it your key object, and we can perfectly center it. I think that looks really good and don't you feel so professional that you created this in Illustrator? I think you do. In the next lesson, we're going ahead and learn how to save out our artwork and we can even make a desktop background with this. See you in the next lesson. 8. Lesson 7: Save Your Files: In this final lesson, we will save our artwork as a print file and then we can save it also as a desktop background to show you how it would work to save out something for screens as opposed to you for print. Since we set up our file in inches in the first place and added the bleed, it's pretty much good to go. The only thing to note about the bleed is that your background color should extend all the way to that bleed line, but anything that you want to appear in your final artwork should not be in the bleed. Since we've done that here, we're good to go. A tip that I have is just to ask your printer, what bleed they prefer and how they set up their files? That way, you will know how to do it to maximize your artwork. I usually just send my stuff to Staples, and they have a quarter inch bleed, so that's a good rule of thumb there. We're ready to just save this out. We only have one artboard, but if you were to have two, I can show you how to only save the artwork from the artboard that you're actually focusing on. You're going to go up to File and Export As. I'm going to save it as a PNG. Actually I'm going to use JPEG because I think that's a little more standard. Then if you had more than one artboard, you would choose to use artboard and you would type in whichever artboard you're focusing on and it would be the number that's out here beside whatever artboard. If you had 10 and you wanted to print artboard number 10, you would just type in, 10. Then we're going to click "Export", and from here you get to choose some more details about how your file is saved. If you're saving it for print, CMYK is perfect for that. I always increase my file size to be pretty large. Then if 300 PPI is not selected, go ahead and select that. Then once you click "Okay", it will save your artwork to your desktop or wherever you chose it to be saved. If you wanted to save this as a PDF, you would go to File and Save As. This is going to give you an option of saving it as a PDF. If you have, let's say 10 artboards, you would save this as a PDF and it would be a 10 page PDF, one page for every artboard. That's actually how I create my workbooks. That's maybe a future Skillshare class that we can have talking about creating a usable workbook. But that's really easy as well. Now I want to show you how I set up my logo file to be saved as a transparent background, which is a PNG. You can use it as a watermark or you can really place any lettered element that's a PNG on top of another photograph for a really cool effect. I've got this new document set up, and this is size, in pixels, 1,000 by 1,000 pixels. It's a perfect square. I pulled my logo into the file and I'm just placing it as large as it will go, within the square, and making sure that it is properly aligned in the middle of the artboard. To export this and save it as a PNG, I'm going to go to File, Export, and then I usually do Save for Web when it comes to saving as a PNG because I can ensure that I've got this nice transparent background. I'm going to go up here and select PNG-24. From here, you can also size your artboard up if you need a larger or a smaller one. Let's say you don't need one that's this large, you can just take this percentage down or even lower. Even you wouldn't want one that's small, or you can double it if you need it for something really big, and then just click "Save". Then when you want to pull in your PNG, you can place it just like you would a normal photograph and embed it into your file, place it where you want it to be, or you can open up your file, which is normally what I do. I will just copy and paste my logo into the file, size it down, holding the "Shift" key, and then place it where it needs to go. In this case, I would probably recolor it to be white. Just remember that you can do a lot of things within Illustrator. You can place transparent lettering files on top of photographs and save them via Illustrator. You can have your logo file open to place as a watermark on lots of things. There are a ton of options. Now, let's say that you wanted to create a new document and we can set it up in pixels because we want to make a desktop background, for instance. I'm going to go up to File, New. It's all ready got my 1,920 by 1,080 pixel artboard setup in the proper orientation, which is perfect, no bleed. If you need to change yours around to that, go ahead and do that now, and then click "Create". Now, we need to copy our artwork over. I'm just going to unlock the background here, so I can access my background and I'm just going to lasso, select everything, and you can press "Command C" or you can go up to Edit and Copy. Now, go into your new document and you can press "Command V" or Edit and Paste. I'm going to zoom out. I want to leave this small in the center. All I'm going to be doing is extending our background out. You can put it on a separate layer if you want, but we're not really doing much with this. Go ahead and call that done, because for my desktop background, I want my design to be pretty small in the center. For this one, I'm going to go ahead and Export As. Then you can once again do a JPEG and you can use artboard, it's going to select that first artboard that you have and then it will save it to your desktop. We can give it a name, Capable, and then you would click "Export". Then you would be able to make this your desktop background, or e-mail it to somebody else to make it theirs, or create one also that is suitable for your phone. That's a really easy saving process. Now, if you still are wanting more, I've got bonus lessons on digitizing simple illustrations to add to your lettered artworks. I will see you there, but if you're done for today, I really hope you'll be posting your project that you created through our class on Skillshare so that I can see it and everyone else can see it as well. I hope you've enjoyed this class. I have certainly enjoyed putting it together for you and I'm so excited to see what you make. 9. BONUS: Digitize Simple Illustrations: I'm so excited to share this bonus lesson with you, but I have to admit it feels a little bit like cheating because this is so easy that it doesn't feel like I'm teaching you anything new, but I just want to show you my trick for digitizing some illustrations. I work a ton with flowers in my work. That's what I wanted to show you today. A bunch of you all love flowers, just like me. The trick with digitizing this kind of illustration. For this example flowers, is all in how you prep your drawing before you bring it to illustrator. I think that it's best to create your elements, all the elements in your flower independently of one another. That might seem really complicated, but I promise it's not if you know basically what you want your flower to look like. Sometimes it's easier to deconstruct it and to create all the elements separately. I've got my blooms here, and here I've got some stems and some leaves, I've got details, and I've got some other things that I can use to create a couple of really cool florals, and I've got lots of options as well. I've also got a couple of versions of the word bloom here so we can make a really quick print. Then I've got a brand new color palette selected. I'm going to be image tracing both of these using sketched art, just like we learned to do with lettering. This just came straight from Procreate, but it is the same idea as pen and paper, just like when we lettered, and remember, you can go back to the lesson where we're smoothing out and perfecting our letters. You can use the shape builder tool if you're using pen and paper and you're finding there's a lot of white space and you want to close that space up really quickly. I'm going to go ahead and just select this first one and image trace it with sketched art, and expand this. Let's go ahead and ungroup, and pretty much everything can be ungrouped. I'm going to group this little set and this little set as well because I want those to stay together, but other than that we're good, and then I'm going to do the same to this one. Now we're ready to start putting our flowers together. You can go ahead and create a color background if you want. I think I will wait on this one, and I'm just going to start grabbing elements. I want this one to be pink. Picking out a stem for it, can enlarge. I've got a couple of greens to choose from. I want this to be larger than my stem and in front. So I'm going to right click, arrange, bring to front. Now we need to pick out a center for this flower. I'm going to grab this right here, this was my intention when I drew this out, and I want to make this gold and I also want to bring it to the front. Since it's selected, we can right-click, bring to front, just like that. You've got your first flower and then you can select all and group it together. You can even duplicate it, go into isolation mode and change the color. Let's change it to this one right here. We can change this stem if we want, and now we've got two flowers, and if we want to make these a little bit more different, we can right-click, transform, reflect, and then we can reflect these so that they are opposites. We could even do a super cute pattern this way as well. If we wanted to even double-click, go in isolation mode, change this yet again. So right there, I could totally make the cutest pattern ever by just making a couple duplicates and changing things around, that didn't take me any time. I think that's a really great thing about Illustrator, is that once you learn the controls and you learn your way around it, you can really do things at lightning speed and it is awesome. I'm going to just select this and move it to the side, and I'll go ahead and speed this up. You can watch me put together some more florals. I don't think I'm going to use any of these, but I'm really happy with how that looks. I think it looks super cute and I could play with it forever and keep going until I had something that I absolutely loved. I would go ahead and save it out and I would be ready to get it printed and framed. Actually I think I'm going to create some sort of really cute pattern with all of this. I hope you enjoyed this really simple lesson and you feel so surprised at how easy it is and excited to move forward and do some illustrating of your own.