Drawing in Adobe Illustrator: How to Retain the Artist's Hand

1. Introduction: If you had a roomful of artists and gave each one of them a piece of paper and a pencil and asked them to draw flower, all those flowers would look different, right? That's because not only are they going to interpret a flower differently, they're also going to use their pencils differently. And that's something we call the hand of the artist, or the artist's hand. That refers to the unique way that artists use particular tools or techniques, like we each have our own identifiable handwriting. Now, when artists transition to working digitally, sometimes that hand of the artist can get lost. That's because Illustrator and other drawing programs make it so easy to make perfect curves and squares and circles. And while that might be faster and more convenient, sometimes the results can be art that's a little bit generic and impersonal. Hi, I'm Kris Ruff and I'm a surface designer. I've been lucky enough to have my artwork used on all kinds of different products. Some of my most popular artwork has been my line of dog and cat illustrations that I call Dogwood Street. They've appeared on ceramic things, and rugs, and stationery, and even shower curtains. I think part of their appeal is the loose, imperfect drawing style that I used when I make them. Now I draw all of them in Illustrator, but I've found ways to use Illustrator's tools that allow me to retain my artist's hand, in these characters and also in all of my work. In this class, I want to share those skills with you, so you too, can find out ways to really incorporate your own artist's hand in all of your work. Retaining the hand of the artist means that instead of drawing something that looks like this, I might draw it this way instead. Or instead of smooth simple flowers, I might leave some of the imperfections so that it looks more like this. In this class, I'll start by showing you all of Illustrator's drawing tools, and then I'll show you how to reset them so they're not quite so perfect. I'll show you how to make pressure sensitive brushes, and then I've got some exercises for you, to help you get used to using the tools with these new settings. And then I'll show you techniques that other artists use to help make their digital drawings look less digital. At the end of the class, you'll have all the tools and techniques and inspiration that you need to finish your project, which is to take these simple vector vegetable drawings, and turn them into something special. Now, you don't have to be a seasoned Illustrator user in order to take this class, but you will get more out of it if you know at least a little bit of Illustrator. I always strive to make things as simple, and easy as possible and I'll explain everything very clearly. It's more important that you bring to this class a mindset of wanting to play, wanting to loosen up, and wanting to have fun with your Illustrator drawings. It's going to be fun. Let's go get started. 2. What Makes Art Look Digital: You can almost always tell if a drawing has been made digitally. But what exactly makes art look digital? Well, there's a couple of telltale signs. They often are drawn with a uniform black outline. Sometimes a thick one like this or a thinner one like this one. The drawings are often made up with smooth lines and simple shapes. Flat color is another common characteristic. The color usually fills the outlines perfectly often. There's not a lot of detail in vector drawings or the details are just really simplified. And you'll see a lot of perfect geometric shapes and symmetry because it's so easy to do those things in illustrator. Now, this graphic vector style can look really appealing if it's done right. But a lot of times, especially with beginning digital artists, the drawing can look pretty stiff and impersonal. That's what we're trying to avoid as we go through the lessons. Keep these characteristics of digital art in mind. I'll show you ways to draw looser and less perfect. You can retain your artist's hand even in your digital drawings. 3. Adobe Illustrator's Drawing Tools: Let's just do a brief review of illustrators main drawing tools. They are the pen tool, the pencil tool, the brush tool, and the blob brush. Let's start with the pen. And that's up here as you probably know. The way you use it is you just click a point. Then as you pull away from it, you get a little leash that's going to preview where where the line is going to be. You click and you just keep clicking around to make your shape. Then to make closed shape, you go back to the beginning and your cursor gets this little on it and close the shape. If you want to make curves, you click rather than just going to the next point. You click and hold, and you'll get these little bezier handles that come out. Then you go to another spot, and again you get that little leash, but this time it's curved, it's going to preview where your curve is going to be. You click and you can start making more curves. In that way you can move around your shape again, when you get to the beginning, the cursor gets a little on it and you can close the shape. Now it doesn't have to be a closed shape, but pen tool isn't usually used for just an open stroke. But you can still make one like this. If you want to go from curves back to straight lines, all you got to do is click back on the last point. And now you can do straight lines again. Click and hold, and you go back to curves, click, and then just keep clicking and you get back to straight lines. If you want it to be an open shape like this, then you can just click on a tool in the tool bar and it will end that stroke. Let's move on to the pencil tool that is over here. Probably under the shape tool, it's a little bit more intuitive than the pen. You basically just click and hold and draw your shape. And the same with the curves, just an open outline you can make as well. For the brush that is over here, it works basically the same way as the pencil. You just click and hold and make your shape. You can make lovely curved shapes as well, or a big line. Now the blob brush is right underneath the paint brush right here. It works the same way you draw your shape. You can make a curved shape or a big line. Let's now talk about some of the details with these different tools. If you want to change a shape that you've made with the pen tool, you can use your direct selection tool and you can click on a point and move it. If you want to get rid of a point, you could click your delete key, but that will give you an open shape if that's not what you want. Instead you can click on the point you want to change. Then use the minus key on your keyboard. That will put a minus sign on your cursor and just click on the point to get rid of it. The opposite is true. If you want to add a point, click on the plus sign and click where you want the points. Then you can click A or go back up here. Now you can change those points. On curved lines, you have a couple of options. You can move the points just like we did before. You can also move these little handles back and forth to change the shape of the curve. You can also click between the points and change the curves that way. On the pencil tool, you can do the same thing. You select your object, move points and curves the same way we did before. Now, there's one other option with the pencil tool that is you can click on your object and then make sure you have the pencil tool chosen. You can click on that line and just redraw it. Now that is change that part of the path. You have to make sure to line up with your line again. If you don't, then it'll make a new line. I click, I hold it and I hook back up to the previous line. The same works with this. You can change part of the line like that. The brush works the same way. You have points that you can move, curve handles, you can change, you can redraw sections if you want. Now, for the blob brush, it works a little bit differently. If I click on my object and try to redraw, why did that happen? Well, if you look carefully and I'm going to go into preview mode, which is command Y, you'll see that over here we ended up with a single line. But over here the blob brush actually makes a vector shape. There isn't a single line. If I click on one of those, you can see I'm pulling just one side of that shape. Look at the other thing that happens when you use the blob brush here. I drew this line and I drew this shape when I did that over here and select my item, there it is. Here is my other line. Now over here, when I use the blob brush tool by select my shape, it takes everything. If I go into preview mode, you can see that that line that I made on top actually joined into the other shape. I can no longer separate those items. Those are the four main drawing tools. How do you know which one to use? Well, let's simplify things a little bit. When you use the pen tool, you tend to get very smooth or geometric shapes For this class, that's not the look that we're trying to make. We want to make something this a little bit more unique. We're not going to use the pen tool now. I never use the blob brush either for those reasons that I talked about here. We are going to take away the blob brush. Now we're down to the pencil tool and the brush tool in this class. In general, we'll use the pencil tool to make shapes and the brush tool to make lines. In the next lesson, I'll show you how to change the settings of these tools that'll make them more responsive and also less perfect. 4. Resetting Drawing Tools: Smooth, perfect lines are built into the DNA of Illustrator. But we want lines that look more like they were made by hand. We can make some changes to the tool settings that will help make that look. Let's start with the brush tool. If we go over to the icon, we can double click on it and we can find this set of tool options. The top one is the most important. It gives us a scale of making our lines very accurate versus very smooth. The default is right in the middle. Let me show you the differences here. We'll put it on smooth. And then I'm going to draw a circle and see how it changed as I let go. What if I draw a really jittery circle? It ends up looking almost as smooth as the first one. How about a raggedy line? You can see how much it alters it there. If we go in and do it on the middle one. Let's compare that. I draw a circle, didn't quite change it as much. How about a jittery circle? A jittery line. It still smooths that pretty much. Now, if we go in and have it all the way to the left on accurate, we'll do the same thing. Draw a circle, and draw jittery circle and a jittery line. There's still a subtle amount of smoothing there, but you can see how much more accurate, hence the name it is. When we move that smoothing all the way to the left, that's the biggest change we're going to make to our tools. I recommend that you always use it over here on accurate. There's one other change I suggest and that's under view. Make sure that any of the snaps check those because those can tend to move our lines in ways that we don't want as well. If they're off, then we have more control of our lines. Now we'll do the same thing for our pencil tool. The keyboard shortcut for that is N. I remember that by pencil. Which is silly, but it works for me. If I click on N, I get the pencil and I can go up here and double click. And we've got those same controls here. They basically work the same way, very smooth, it changes quite a bit in the middle and all the way to the left. Now there are some other changes we can make in the pencil tool, and we'll talk about those in an upcoming lesson. 5. Practice Drawing with New Settings: Are you ready to put pencil to paper, at least in the digital sense? Well, here is a brush practice sheet that you will find in the class resources. I want you to download it and give it a try. See how different it is using the brush tool. With the accuracy setting all the way to the left. Make sure you've got your brush tool and double click so that it's all the way to the left click. Okay, just give yourself a black line. Then make sure your layers palette is open. If it's not, you can go under a window layers. I want you to make a new layer by clicking down here. And then we're just going to lock the other layer so that we'll draw on this other layer and not affect the layer below. Now just start drawing. See what it feels like to draw on these lines when you don't have any smoothing going now. It's going to look different, of course, but that's okay. That's what we want. How did you do, how did you like that? It's different, isn't it? Let's turn off the eyeball on the lower layer and see what we've got. Obviously, this looks very different from what you're used to when you've got a lot of smoothing on. But it definitely looks more like it was made by hand. Which part was the hardest for me, It's always doing the vertical lines. You can see how terrible my vertical lines are. I can hear what you're saying through the computer screen. You're like, no, this looks terrible. I don't want to do it this way. Well, in the next I'm going to show you some ways that we can manipulate and do a little bannial smoothing on these things. And make some changes to make them look hand drawn but still professional. 6. Smooth and Refine your Drawings: Now let's go over some tools that you have available to revise and refine your drawings. Let's start over here with this grouping of tools. Usually what I do is just click right here and that tears off that group of tools. That you can put them right where you want so that they're really easy to access. The first one I want to talk about is this one, and that is the smooth tool. Now if you double click on it, you'll see that it has the same settings as on our other tools. So you can lightly smooth your artwork or you can make it very smooth. Usually, I leave it in this range. Let me show you how it works. You just click on a path, then you can just go over the parts that you want to refine. Let me turn off the lines and you can see a little bit better. You can see the parts that I go over. Every time I go over them, they get a little bit smoother. Obviously, if you have it on very smooth, it gets very smooth. But I usually use it in small doses, just in the areas that I think are a little bit too rough. Another thing that you have available here is the path eraser tool. I tend to make these little hooks when I'm drawing. This is a good way to get rid of those. Like down here, I'm clicking on each line and then getting rid of that end. Now there's actually two different kinds of erasers, I just showed you this one the path eraser tool. If I click on something and move across an area that will take out that area. There's another eraser tool and that's over here. It's similar, but let's say we have this shape and we fill it with black. If we select it and use this tool and erase an area, we've now created an open shape like that. Instead we could use this tool, select your item, and then do the same thing. And it just re draws that we maintain our closed shape. If you have a filled shape, this is definitely the better tool to use. Another tool you have available is this one in the end. And that's the join tool. To be honest. I don't use it very often because it's not very reliable. For example, I can click on this and just go back and forth on that, and that will join that, this one. On the other hand, the points aren't close enough together for it to join this one. Let's see if that works. It works on that one. It's a little bit finicky or fickle which lines it works on. For example, if I go over here like these to reconnect, if I use the join tool, it doesn't work there. A better way to do this thing is going back to just the pencil tool. Click on your line and just draw across it. Of course, you can just redraw areas if you want as well. Okay, that gives you some tools that you can work with now to revise your drawings a little bit. Now, use them as needed, but don't overdo it because you want to retain that hand drawn look. 7. Create Pressure-Sensitive Brushes: Let's make some pressure sensitive brushes. Now, if you haven't worked with them before, get ready for a light bulb moment, because it is the best way to retain the artist's hand in your work. To use them, you'll need a digital drawing tablet, but you don't need an expensive one or a large one, and you can buy them for under $100 or you can even buy them used. I get a lot of my technology that way. If you have a newer ipad, you can also use it as a drawing tablet. If you use the software like Sidecar or Astropad, you can turn it into a digital tablet as well. Let's go make some brushes. You'll need to have your brushes panel open, which is under Window Brushes. And make sure you've got your paint brush tool selected. Then over here, click on the three little lines. Click New Brush. It's the caligraphic brush we want. There's some choices in here. Let me start with the middle one, which is roundness. If you look up here, you can see how we're changing the brush. We can make it less round. If we change the angle now we can make a brush that's really similar to a caligraphic brush. Let's make it a little bit bigger so you can see it better. And click Okay, now we'll just go try that. That's a 20 point brush with fixed pressure, meaning there isn't any pressure sensitivity to it yet. Let's go back in and create another one. We'll use the same settings, but this time instead of fixed, we're going to make it pressure sensitive. We also need to define how much variation there is in the brush stroke. If we look up here right now, this is a preview of a 20 point brush. The light pressure will also be 20 and the heaviest pressure will also be 20. If we change that here, and we can go as high as whatever this number is here, make that 20. Now I look over here at the preview, and here's our 20 point brush. 20 plus 20 equals 40. If I press on it as hard as I can, it's going to be a 40 inch brush and it goes all the way to zero in this case, if I make it ten here, now you can see it goes from 20 point plus ten is 30 and minus ten would be ten. Our brush width would vary from ten point to 30 point. But let's go back and I want to show you at 20 Now I can make a line that's very small, medium pressure. And the heaviest pressure, of course, I can vary that as I go. That is the 20 point brush with pressure. And a 20 point variation, here it is, with only a ten point variation. Here is the lightest I can do and medium pressure and heaviest pressure. You can see it doesn't have as much variation as we had in the previous one. Let's go make one more same thing there, this time. Let me make it round so we're going to keep the roundness here. We're going to make it pressure and let's make it really big. So we're going to make a 60 point brush with a 60 variation. Again, you can see the preview here, we'll click Okay. I can still make a tiny line, it's a little harder to control. I can make a medium one, a little heavier and really heavy in one line. I can go from very small to very fat. When you get this much variation, it is a little bit hard to control, but it is cool. Some of the shapes you can make that is the 60 point brush with pressure and a 60 point variation. Now one thing that's really cool about brushes and illustrator is if I want to go back now and use this brush, I don't have to go find it over here. I can just select a line now it automatically loads that brush into my tool. Or if I want to go back to this one now, that's really handy. I wish that, like procreate had that so that you didn't have to constantly remember which brush you had. Now there's one other option I want to show you. If we go back in, click New brush calligraphic. One thing that's fun to do is choose random. Now the widths will change. Let's make this a little bit bigger so we can see it better. Click Okay. Now just using my mouse, I can make a small line. I really don't know what the next line is going to be. It gets bigger then it can get really smaller again. Now, it doesn't have a lot of uses, except sometimes I use it when I want dots in the background. If I just click, I get different size dots. That's the 30 point brush with a random setting and 30 point variation that gives you some ideas how these different brushes work. There isn't any good ones or bad ones, it's just all what you like to work with. Experiment with the different ones, and figure out which one suits your hand the best. 8. Get Inspired!: All right, this lesson is all about inspiration. But first, let's step back and remember the problem we're trying to solve. We want to move away from drawing with smooth lines and shapes that give off a generic vibe that's so common when people draw an illustrator. These dogs are a great example of that. The good news is, it isn't hard to make drawings more personal, and there's so many ways that you can accomplish it. For example, just look at these animals. They look a lot like the ones on the left with some subtle differences. They have a variation of line quality. Sometimes they're thick, sometimes they're thin. And the lines don't go all the way around all the shapes perfectly. We get some breaks in the lines and also the colors are applied differently. On the left, it's like draw within the lines, right, the color is applied a lot looser. The overall effect is more energy, more spontaneity, and more personality. These drawings even take those concepts a step further. These are even less perfect. There's even more contrast of thick and thin lines. There's more breaks, there's more imperfection. You don't have to be perfect. Isn't that great when you don't have to be perfect and it's a good thing you can just see how much personality these cats have. It starts to blur the line between. Were these drawn on the computer or were they drawn on paper? Which is one of the results of showing your artist's hand in your work. Then when we change gears and go back to a typical illustrator drawing, you can see the difference compare the one on the left with this one. You can definitely see the artist's hand in this one. It's almost like they wanted to draw a really expressive line and it just happened to be in the shape of a flower. They don't make any attempt to show us all the details or to be perfect in their linework. Same story. Here we've got a very expressive line. We can see the hand of the artist. The color is applied imperfectly. We retain the sketchy feel of the drawings. Now that sketchy, haphazard look is not the only way to get an expressive line. Look how graceful and elegant these drawings look. They also have thicks and thins, but notice the outlines don't go around everything. The artist has given us just enough information to help us understand what the gesture or the pose of the model is and then leaves it to us to fill in the blanks. This one has a similar technique where we just have enough lines to show the gesture, the pose of these bears. But notice what a different feeling it has. That one was very graceful and elegant. This one is much more playful. And that's because of the really exaggerated chunky lines. Gives us a playful, more childlike look in this one, some of the items don't have outlines at all. Instead, shapes are used to define the parts of the drawing. And then the lines are just used to fill in some details that's employed here too. Here the chickens don't have any outlines. The lines are just used to add in little details of the feathers and the feet and the eyes. Just those little tiny things that it helps to fill in the blanks. This one, there's no outlines on the flowers at all, they're just pops of color. And we get just the briefest lines here and there to give the idea of the stems. The result is they have a lot more energy than you can get from the typical illustrator drawing. Now this one does have some outlines here and there, and they're pretty chunky, but that fits in with the playful, childlike quality of this. For the most part, shapes are used to outline the animals with lines to indicate just little details and textures on the animals. Some places are a little bit more smooth like around here, but others you can definitely see the hand of the artist in these lines in this mushroom. Now I wanted to point out that all three of these use the idea of lines just to define details, but you can use that technique in many different ways and you can see what a different feel these different drawings have. So far, just about everything I've shown you has been very organic, like florals and animals. Is it possible to capture the artist's hands in something more three D with very hard edges? Well, of course, let's look at a couple examples. Here's some drawings of appliances in a typical illustrator vector style. Here something completely different. What a difference it makes when you use illustrators pressure sensitive brushes and turn off the smoothing, It made it possible to turn these little appliances into whimsical little drawings, almost like whimsical little characters. Or here's a whole city full of geometric shapes and three dimensionality. But this artist resisted the temptation to use illustrators rectangle tools or make really smooth geometric lines, and the result is a really warm and inviting image. Here's a different take on architecture. Now this one breaks some of the rules. It has outlines around everything, and it's using a uniform line all the way through it, but the artist's hand comes through in how these are drawn. Again, there's no geometric shapes. Everything is hand drawn. There's lots of curves and like slopes in the roof and no attempt to make straight lines straight. How about these fun examples? Remember those really, really crooked lines that you did in the exercise a couple of lessons ago? Well, look at how fun they look here. That's what I'm trying to get across, is to let go of the smooth, perfect things and just have fun with your drawings. Now here's a much simpler version of some three D objects. Again, it breaks the rules with lots of outlines and a single uniform line, but the artist's hand comes through in the way these are drawn. In most cases, the line work is very fine. There's no perfect geometry, and things like the picture in the front have a nice perspective to them. On the other hand, here's some organic things that are drawn in a more almost geometric style. The lines here are quite a bit smoother, but there is some subtle thick and thin going on, But it's really got its own style. You can tell that this is like the artist's signature style where tomatoes are almost geometric. And there's an egg plant in there that also has quite geometric lines. It really draws you in. It has great interest. Now this one has a more architectural, buttoned up look to it. Still, it has no perfect lines in it. But I wanted to show you that you don't have to have that whimsy that so many of these drawings have had. Here's another style that you can use to bring in the artist's hand for something that's more three dimensional. This looks like somebody is sketching an actual sandwich that's in front of them. But notice how personal all of those strokes feel. You really get the idea that you're looking at a real sketch from somebody's sketchbook. And similar here, but again a very different style. This one is much fatter lines, almost as if it was drawn in a sketchbook using a Sharpie marker. But again, I want to show you that you don't have to have the whimsical style. These are more serious drawings, just like a regular artist would do. There's one more style that I want to touch on, and that's this one. What we have here is a very delicate botanical style drawing. The artist's hand isn't shown with expressive lines or lack of outlines. Instead it comes through in the craftsmanship of the drawing. If we look at the close up on the right, notice how each bud and leaf is individual and the artist renders it in great detail, that detail and that craftsmanship is what elevates this drawing way above a standard vector drawing. The same is true for this one. This is another example as well. I hope you now have some more ideas of what you can do with illustrators drawing tools. I've tried to show you a huge range of styles because I don't want to suggest that one way of drawing is better than another. With one exception, I hope that now you're able to see that these are really just bland vector drawings that now you'll be inspired to do something else to explore and find your own unique style. 9. Start a Digital Sketchbook: Now it's your turn. You've learned how to use the tools and seen the possibilities, Now you have a blank page. How do you begin? What should you draw? Think about giving a crayon and a piece of paper to a child. They rarely stop to consider what to draw. I want you to bring that into this lesson. Don't think about the result or focus on what will sell, or what's trending, or mood boards or color palettes or anything else. At the beginning of this class, I told you that black lines were one of the giveaways to digital art. Ironically, now I'm going to suggest that's where you start, but in a different way. No more generic lines. Create much more interesting lines. Just explore them. Use your imagination and let the process itself inspire you. Look at the lines you're creating, and start to see things appear in your lines. Let scribbled lines become shaggy dogs. Or if a drawing turns into a robot, draw more robots. Make really bad art. Lots of it. Try lots of different styles and techniques. Feel which ones resonate with you. At first, it's all going to feel hard, but that's true of any new medium or techniques you learn. Push past that frustration because there's good stuff on the other side, I believe in the process and I believe in you. What you've been looking at are pages from the beginnings of my own personal digital sketchbook. I encourage you to develop a digital sketchbook too. Just label a folder on your computer as sketchbook and then when you fill up a page, don't throw it out, just save it as sketchbook and then add the date. Doing that's not only going to create a record of your growth, but also gives you a valuable resource. Next time when you're faced with a blank page, you don't have to start with a blank page. You can go back through your digital sketchbook and pluck little pieces out that you want to develop further. Because sometimes we don't see the merit of something we've drawn until later. That happens to me all the time here. I'll go back through my sketchbook and go, hey, I remember that little flower that I do, I want to develop that, or I like the way this line looks. I'm going to see what I can do with that. Let me show you some examples from my own personal experience. This was really just a warm up, but I like this part of it and I wondered what it would look like if I made the loops going the other way on the inside. I liked that better. I had this light bulb moment thinking, hey, this would make a fun sheep, and I didn't sit down to make sheep. The inspiration came from the process of making those marks, actually ended up licensing it for quilting fabric. Then when I needed some ideas for holiday art, which is not my favorite thing to do, I turned it into this. Now a betting company saw it and liked it, but their policy is always they can't license something that's been licensed before. I offered to make them a variation of it that they ended up using on betting. That's a really good example of what can come from those simple spontaneous digital sketchbook drawings. Here's another example, just simple scribbles. And I was thinking they looked a little bit like writing and turned them into this repeat pattern that then got used on swim trunks and quilting fabric. This was an interesting example. I, I don't know, drawing lines and some of them started to look like animals. And then I was doing other animals and I don't know this scary cat creature, but I really liked this little bear. This drawing literally sat in my digital sketchbook for years and I always came back to the, I'm like, I wonder if what I could do with that. And then another time that I needed some ideas for holiday, I thought maybe I could turn them into a polar bear. And I took the idea of the sheep and added mittens and hats and scarves and stuff to them. Here's another example of a sketchbook page. You could almost see my feelings about this. Oh, I really don't want to do Christmas art, What can I do? But when I made these little rainy deer, I thought, oh, maybe there's something to that. Then I drew a whole bunch of variations of them and they end up being used on table linens and ceramics. I hope that gives you some ideas about how you can capitalize on the drawings in your digital sketchbook. Now, obviously, not every page in your sketchbook is going to end up licensed on a product. And of course, your sketchbook is going to look completely different from mine. I tend to use very organic shapes. If you draw with straight shapes, that's great too. The point of this lesson is to loosen up and let go of the idea that everything you do in your sketchbook needs to be sellable or needs to be polished. Any of that stuff, just let go of that and just draw because people can see your joy. If you're enjoying the process, that will show through and that is your best asset. That is your secret sauce. 10. More Pencil Settings: All right, now we're going to switch gears back to the pencil tool. Remember I told you there was some other settings that we wanted to look at. Well, let's go through those now. The pencil tool is N on your keyboard, and then we'll go double click over here to get to the settings. We've already talked about this and I recommend keeping it on accurate. But let's go through a couple of these here. The first one is the most important for me. When you use your pencil tool, you make a shape and you end up with a black line. Now, what if I put a green fill on it? Now you would expect that you make that shape and it would fill with green. But it's not. It took me forever to figure out why that is. Well, it's this silly setting in here. Why default isn't to have that filled? I have no idea, But I always make sure that that one is checked. When I draw a new shape, it will automatically be filled with that green. I rarely use stroke on the pencil tool. Let me turn that off now. If I wanted to make some leaves, I could just very quickly make them and they're automatically filled. That's a huge timesaver. If we go back in here, this is an important one too, right now. By default it says keep selected. What does that mean? That means when I make a shape stays highlighted. Every time I make a shape that one stays highlighted. Now that's good because I can just automatically refine it or change it. And I don't have to go back and reselect it. I can keep changing that line. Now, let's say I want to make a branch with a bunch of leaves on it. I go like that, that now I want to move just this one leaf, but I can't. I've got a whole pile of them right there to avoid your shapes being hooked together like that. I always keep this unchecked. Every time I make a leaf not highlighted anymore, I could make another one right next to it. I could make another one right here. And then when I go back, these are all still separate units. Then one other option is this one, whether or not you want your paths to close when you get near the end of them, you can see this better if I go into preview mode, which is command Y. Now when I draw a line right now, the cursor has that star on it. When I get it close to the end, it changes into an O. That means it's going to automatically close that shape. Let me do that again. You watch for the O and it's going to close it. Now, if it's too far away, it won't close it. I actually prefer them not to close because sometimes it feels like it's doing something that I might not want. I usually unclick that they do not close. No matter how close I get down to the bottom, see that's still an open path. There's definitely pros and cons to that one. You can try them both and see which one you like to work with. Those are the main points with pencil tool. Now obviously you can use all of these tools over here. Remember when we tore that off and brought it over here? If I want to smooth this line, I can click on the smooth tool. First, check how smooth it's going to be. I can go in and clean up little parts of that drawing. Now, one other thing I want to mention. That line had a lot of points. Let me draw another one. If I make a jittery line, look how many points this has, sometimes that's okay, because it gives you that handmade look. But if your drawing is starting to get way too many points, one thing you can do is to go to object path simplify. If we click on these little three lines over here, we'll get some more options in here. If we make this all the way here, it'll be how we started out, the way we drew it ahead, 57 points and now it's already dropped a couple points. But you can see as we move this one, that changes a lot and how many lines are on our stroke. It also makes it smoother, just be aware of that. We can click on this and it'll show us the original lines so we can see how much differences going to be. This one, you can experiment with two where the points between them are smoother or have sharper corners. That's good to know about two. I've mentioned a couple times that I don't generally use the pencil tool for strokes or for outlines, but that doesn't mean you can't. Let's go over a couple of things if you want to use your pencil. Four strokes, obviously it works just like the brush tool. The default in general is a one point stroke, which you can see down here. That's why you see this just small line showing up in a lot of vector art. Obviously, we can change that. If I select my line, we can make it a much wider line, it gets a little bit more graphic. If we do something with lots of very sharp angles like this, you can see that it can get a little crazy when you have a thick line like that. You do have some control over your strokes. Right down here, the big one is, this corner here. I've got my shape selected. I'm going to hide the lines over here. I can click on Round Join. Now those lines are rounded. We can also use this one, which gets a little cut off lines, but that works a lot of times better than this one. You can also change the ends of the line. If I choose this one, go over here, that's the caps, right now it's on this one, we can make a round end, and that makes these ends rounded or they can be squared off. Let's say we draw a shape. In this case, I want this to be a closed shape, so I'm going to just draw over that edge. The blue is the line that I drew right now. This stroke, I've got a nine point stroke on here. It's equally on that side of the line and this side of the line. And we can actually change that. Down here is where it says a line stroke. Right now it's a line stroke to the center. But let me make a copy of it. We'll change this one to align the stroke to the inside. Now all of the stroke is on the inside of that line. We can also align it all the way on the outside. It's not something that I use all that often, but sometimes it comes in really handy. I wanted to make sure you knew about that too. Let's look at a couple other features. I've got two circles here. One is drawn with the pencil tool and one with the brush tool. I'm going to select them both and hide the guides command H. Let's go look at some fun features. If we go under effect, distort and transform. There's a couple of fun options in here. There's pucker and bloat. If we move towards pucker, parts of the drawing starts to be pulled in. Then if I go the other way, Bloat starts to push out parts of the drawing. It almost starts to look like a flower. That's a fun thing to know about. Then there's also roughen which can give you an interesting line here. It looks a little bit like pucker and bloat, but if we make this really small, like 1% and smooth, the line down here now starts to be interesting. Then if we make this really big, you can, it gets to be an interesting line, especially over here in the thicker areas, it gives it a nice texture. We also have this option and it has a little bit different effect. This lesson got a little bit longer than I anticipated. Let's just do a really quick review. We talked about in the settings, checking the box that says fill new pencil strokes. Whenever we draw a shape, it'll be automatically filled, unchecking, keep selected. That way we're sure that each shape that we draw will be a separate individual unit. We talked about the pros and cons of clicking on close paths. Then I reminded you about tearing off this set of tools so that you can use them to smooth and refine your paths. We talked about using simplify in case you have way too many points in your path for strokes. We talked about using corners down here to change the way angles look on your strokes. Then we looked at pucker and bloat for some fun effects. And also the rough and filter and that can give you a nice textured look to your lines. In the next lesson, we'll put it all together and actually do some drawing. 11. Putting It All Together: So we've gone through a huge amount of information in this class about drawing tools, how to reset them, about drawing with lines and shapes. And how to hopefully become more comfortable with the imperfection of the artist's hand. This listen is going to be a real world demo of how to put it all together. How to combine the brush and pencil tools and smoothing editing and working it all together to get to a finished product. I'm going to start with drawing with just the pencil tool. We're going to draw with just shapes because that's a fun way to work. I'll just start, I'm going to just draw a little stem with a little leaf on the end and then just draw some other leaves. Not worry about all the details at this point. Just get in the general layout. Then let's maybe add some little berries. I'll go get a red. Just draw some simple circles. Now let's add some different colors. I'm going to go pick a different green for some of the leaves. Then once I've decided on one, I can use my Eyedropper tool that's just on your keyboard. And then I just click it on the color. I want it to be on to the new color. Then let's make a second little stem in the same way, right away. I know I want that to be the darker green. Then I'll go back to my pencil tool and draw more leaves. As I'm working here, I keep my left hand on the keyboard. Hart cuts so that my right hand can just focus on drawing and make it all go very smoothly. We'll add some berries again. This time I'm for speed, I'm just making them in green. And then I'll go back later. Select both of them and use my eye dropper to make them red. Same way with the leaves. I'll pick a couple of them by using Shift Click. Click on the color I want them to be. Now let's say I'm not really happy with that green and I want to change all of them at once. I can click on one of them and go up to select same fill color. That chooses everything that has that same fill color. Then I can just change them all universally. Now there's another way to do that. I can go up and use the magic wand tool, then I just click on the one I want and see all of them that had that same color will get filled. I'm going to turn off the guides so I can see it a little better and choose a different green. I want something a little bit darker now. It's a matter of just looking at things and cleaning them up a little bit. The nice thing about working this way is everything is separate. I can just adjust things very easily. If I want to rotate one of them, I click on it. Again, my hands are on the keyboard. I just click R for rotate on the keyboard. And then click this little point and rotate it because it'll pivot around that spot and I want it to rotate around the stem. Then this one I want to make a little smaller. I can click and redraw on something if I want. And I'll just go in and start cleaning things up with these berries. I'm just going to redraw that open edge here. I don't like the end of this. I'll click on it and redraw that little bit. I want this to line up a little bit better. We'll just go through and make those little edits. Now when I'm ready to do my smoothing, I'll go back over here and click on this and tear off that set of tools. What I usually do is on my keyboard, I have my fingers on command A, which is select all. I hit command A and then choose the little spot that I want to smooth. Then I click on command A again and go find another place that needs some smoothing. In that way, it works very quickly. And you'll notice when I start smoothing one object, the rest of them are unselected. And that's why each time I go back to select a and I know that when I start smoothing, it's only going to smooth on that particular object that I started smoothing on. So I'm just going to go through and do a little bit of smoothing. And sometimes if there's something more I want to change, I can go back and use my minus key on the keyboard and click on a point or two that I don't want. And then I can go back to smoothing and just proceed in that way. So once your hands get the idea of the keyboard shortcuts, you can really work pretty quickly. There you go. I think that's my final product. Now let's look at a workflow where we start with a pencil, but then add some brush strokes in there to help add details to our drawing. We're going to make a dog this time. I'm going to speed things up here so you can just see how it goes. As I mentioned before, I really like using the pencil tool and just starting with shapes instead of outlines. It just feels like it's easier to revise the shapes so that you can get exactly the shape that you want. Then let's give him a little black nose and an eye, then let's give him a mouth. No, I don't like that one. Let's get rid of that. Let's use the brush tool now. Okay, that brush I think is a little bit too fat. Let's go and make a new brush. Let's make it a small brush, five point with a five point variation, and then try that. All right? I like that a lot better. Then let's add some other little details like we saw in some of the line quality examples a couple of lessons ago. And we'll give him a little collar, sometimes it takes a couple tries to get what you want. We'll give him some little spikes on his collar and a little tag. Let's make a little water bowl for him, then let's add a little bit more color. I'm going to go back to my pencil tool and I'll just follow roughly along the collar and also around the bowl, obviously we need those to go in back of the black lines. I'm going to shift, click and grab all of them and the dog's body. Then I'm going to right click and click on send to back. Let's add a little bit of water to his bowl then we'll want that one line in front of it. We go again to arrange bring to front. Then I'm just going to go in and clean up things a little bit. Redraw that line a little bit and use the erase tool. Do some more little cleaning up. There's our little dog. Now let's do it the opposite. Let's start with the paint brush tool and we're just going to draw another sprig like we did in the first example. I've got a pressure sensitive brush here so I can get an interesting line. Then we're going to open our layers palette and add another layer. And put that layer underneath our outlines. Now we'll draw on that one so that it'll automatically be underneath the lines. That's where we want it. I'll switch back to my pencil tool and just make some green shapes. You can see how when the color doesn't perfectly fit the shapes, it gives it a little bit more energy and shows the artists hand. Then when I'm ready to do some smoothing, I'll hit command A and just go around and do some clean up with the smoothing tool here. I'm going to get rid of that little end and re, draw a little bit and go over the rest of it. Then I can add some color like before. I'll shift click on some of the different shapes, change it to a different color green, and add some berries again. Now we're going to want these berries on top of the black line. We can shift, click on all of them, then go over to the layers panel. And they're on layer four right now. Take the little blue dot and move it up to layer three, and now they will be above the black lines. Then we'll just clean those up a little bit too. Then one last thing, This black outline seems a little bit too strong. Then go back over to the magic wand tool and click on one of the outlines so that you highlight everything that has that same stroke color. Let's go pick a different color, like a dark green. It goes with the artwork better. That's our final drawing. It's very loose and none of these are meant to be great works of art. But I just wanted to show you those different ways that you can work between the paintbrush tool and the pencil. 12. Bonus Exercise and Project: Before we dive into your project, here's a little warm up exercise. I want you to look through your portfolio and choose a drawing or motif that you think has that typical vector look like this tomato, or you can use this tomato. I'll put it into the class resources. Then think about all the line quality examples that you've seen in this class. Then ask yourself, how can I make this drawing more interesting? Then just try some things. Keep asking yourself, what what if I made the lines thicker look already that looks more interesting and has a much more graphic feel? What if I edit the lines so that they're less perfect, they don't surround the object all the way, they're a little bit broken up. And I could also add some more leaves in the background to give it a little bit more depth. What if I added more outlines and not all of them were black. I could add some red ones and some green ones. Or what if I used a pressure sensitive brush and gave it a much more expressive line and then added a stylized shadow onto it? What about instead of outlines? I just did some sketchy lines around it. What if I skip the outlines altogether and give it more 3D quality to it? What if now I add some outlines back in and give it a really like a sketchbook feel. Or what if I think about tomatoes in a more abstract way. Use the basic shapes and give them some expressive lines. Now this exercise could just go on and on. I'm sure you'll come up with lots of other ideas for your drawing too. I don't think all of these drawings are successful. This isn't like an evolution from bad to good, but each iteration gave me new ideas about how to approach the drawing in a different way. If you do this often enough, you'll start to realize, hey, I really like working in a graphic way or in a sketchbook way. You'll find how you really like to work. That's really going to help you find your signature style. Once you finish the warm up exercise, your project is to take one of these vegetables, or all of them, If you feel really ambitious and turn them into something special, like we did with the tomato, these drawings will be available in the resources of the class. You can try each of the variations I showed you with the tomato or come up with ideas of your own. Don't feel like you need to keep the same shape or colors that are shown here. Just be creative and really make it your own. I'd love if you'd post your finished veggies on the class page. When you're done with them. It would be so fun to create a whole gallery or garden of unique veggie drawings. If you look at the class description page, you'll see a link where you can post your projects. I hope you've enjoyed this class. I do have a favor to ask. I'd love it if you could write a review of the class that helps me out a lot. Helps me to know what resonates with people and what things I can work on for future classes to make better. If you'd like to do that, you can just go to the class page and click on Reviews. And then look for the blue bar that says leave a review. If you'd like to know about future classes, you can follow me here on skill share, or even better, get on my mailing list. When you do that, I'll send you my list ten ways to draw an illustrator. It's great for inspiration and also reminders of what we covered in this class. You'll find a link in the class description or you can go to my website, KrisRuff.com In the meantime, I hope you have a lot of fun drawing an illustrator. 13. One More Thing...: Hello. Hi again. I'm popping back in to let you know that I'm now available for one on one coaching sessions. So if you like this class and would like to work with me individually, you can now do so by booking a session right from my skill share profile page. I offer two kinds of sessions. The first one is a 1 hour portfolio review where we'll look at your surface designs. I'll let you know some strengths and areas to focus on, and you'll get the opportunity to ask any questions you'd like about art licensing or the surface design industry. Now I know it can feel intimidating to show your work to somebody, but it's so smart to get professional feedback. All the artists that I've worked with have felt energized and ready to move forward after our sessions. I also offer a 30 minute Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop instruction session. If you're struggling with any aspect of the software, I can help. We can walk through tools, I can demonstrate techniques and workflows that are going to help solve your issues. So whether you're looking for a one time session or an ongoing opportunity for feedback on your work, coaching is such a great investment in your career, unlike some of the expensive online courses that are available, coaching doesn't have a fixed curriculum, so I can give you exactly the information and guidance that you need exactly when you need it. I hope you consider coaching. I would love to work with you and I can't wait to meet you and support you and guide you on your creative journey. You can learn more about my coaching sessions at chrisrug.com slash CoachE.