Finding Textures in Adobe Illustrator

1. Introduction to Finding Textures in Adobe Illustrator: I'm Lissie and I'm an artist and surface pattern designer. Texture is a major theme for some artists and designers working in Adobe Illustrator. I have over 10 years of experience exploring this program from the angle of my traditional artwork. I have learned how to work with this vector medium to get my artwork feeling the way I wanted to feel. And I'm here to teach you what I've learned along the way. This class is part of a series and our design the classes so that you can take them all or each as a standalone class. The heart of this class is exploring, finding and keeping textures that we find out in the world. Here in this class, we will explore different ways of capturing textures. We find, discovered technical ways to vectorize these textures in a way that feels natural to us. And we will build a library right at the start to store all of our new assets. Some Adobe Illustrator knowledge is required and you starting know some fundamentals coming into this class. Remember nature and your surroundings, our storehouse of inspiration. You can bring in the textures that you find as another tool for this vector medium. Let's explore, learn, and play. See you inside. 2. Class Project: In this class, we will be inspired by textures and learn to think creatively about vector artwork. But first we'll be creating an Adobe Creative Cloud Library to store all of the textures that we come across or seek out. The project for this class is to create a vectorized texture to bring into your Adobe CC library. Submit your texture below and discuss your inspiration, your vectorizing process like what worked and what didn't. And if you apply it to a pattern or illustration, shows what you applied it to. I believe that in sharing our textures and process with each other, we can build up a community resource center below where we can share our ideas with each other. To submit a project, go to skillshare on your desktop, find the projects and resources tab, and click the Create Project button. Choose one of your textures are artworks to be the cover image. And the project title label your texture. And the project description describe your texture and any insight you found, the process of vectorizing it. And as a bonus to share with us several more textures and the arcs you applied them to press publish, to share your project, and then explore what other textures and artwork your classmates have shared. Ok We're set to go. 3. What is an Adobe CC Library?: Since we'll be spending the majority of this class collecting and vectorizing textures. I wanted to spend a little time showing you how I store all the textures that I find. We'll be looking at a feature in Adobe called the Adobe Creative Cloud library, otherwise known as a CC library. I most commonly refer to mine as a texture library because that's where I store all the vectorized textures that I've found are created. So what is an Adobe CC library? Adobe has created this really cool feature where you can store all of your assets in the Adobe Cloud. And you can access these assets across all Adobe products, including those on your iPhone and iPad. And by asset, Adobe's referring to something of value to you that you want to keep safe for another time. You can store a multitude of asset types in the library. You can store both raster and vector images, where vector images are stored as SVG files. You can also store Photoshop brushes, layered files, shapes, materials, and much more. For example, as a graphic designer, I would often log client brand colors here so that I could easily bring them into my Adobe fresco or other Adobe apps that were on my iPad. By the way, if you're on an iPad or tablet adobe app, look around for the Cloud icon - that indicates your libraries. It's important to note that not all assets that Adobe CC can hold, will apply to all applications. For example, Photoshop brushes stored in libraries can be opened in Adobe Fresco, which is really cool, but cannot be opened in Illustrator because it is a pixel based brush. Vector images or SVG files cannot be transferred as vectors to iPad AI as of yet. But you can open them as raster images. I personally do not apply a vectorized textures or work on the iPad in quite the same way as my desktop. So I don't mind. I keep my textures here on my desktop because I use them frequently within Adobe Illustrator. However, color palettes can be accessed both on iPad, Illustrator and Fresco, which is so nice. And most of what is stored in libraries is accessible anywhere, including an InDesign After Effects and other video editing applications. Now that we've covered some of the basics of the what and how libraries work. Let's create a library. Make sure you look below for the texture files I've created for you. See you have some textures to put in your library right away. 4. Creating an Adobe CC Library: Now that we've done a quick overview of what libraries are, let's get your Adobe CC library up and running. To get you going. I have vectorized some textures for you to open in Adobe Illustrator. The files are below under the projects and resources tab, and you are free to use them in your work. To find your libraries. Go to Window Libraries. This window will pop up and I keep my libraries docked in my right panel with my swatches. You can see that I have three main libraries that I keep. I've had more in the past, but these are the things that I am using most frequently right now. Let's just go ahead and create a new library. We will call it textures, since that's what we're doing in this class today. And you can see that an empty library has popped up where it says access your creative elements and every Adobe app, you can drag and drop your images here, add colors, character styles, or their creative elements from your file. Let's go ahead and go back to one of the libraries that I've populated. Here's my texture library and the hamburger menu. You always have a lot of options here. So always check out your hamburger menus. You can share your library. You can invite people to view your library, to edit the library or not. And that pops open in your Adobe CC app. You can search your library. So your library by a certain type or name. And you also have View Options. You can sort it as a list, but I prefer the grid. You can select and creating groups, which we will do is generally referring to a color that you want to add to your color library. You can select and delete anything. You can also right-click any of your assets to add a description to duplicate, to copy or move, or to edit. So I have a texture from an art print that I made and I want to drag it into my Adobe libraries. I've already vectorized it and expanded it. So I'm going to select it and it's a simple drag and drop. This is not a cotton linen, so I'm going to rename it to print texture. And they are sorted alphabetically, so it put it in its place. As you can see, a lot of my textures have this transparent background and some of them have a white background. What that means is that it just hasn't saved it as an SVG file, which means an automatically editable image, but there's a remedy for that. In fact, I would say that if you are going to drag out any of these textures, always press the Option key on a Mac or the Alt key on a PC when you're dragging out of your library. And it will make it automatically editable as the vector that you placed in your libraries as drag the texture out a different texture. And it is automatically eligible so I can add a color right away. So that the texture that I just placed it did not save it automatically as an SVG file. I wanted to show you this because it does this. Sometimes there's really no rhyme or reason. Most of the time my vectors will save as an SVG. And that's indicated by this transparent background. As you can see when I pulled this one out and I pushed the Option key, it came out as editable. I just do that as a general practice, but I'm going to drag this texture that I just placed in the library. It's already been vectorized or even expanded. And I drag it out, it should be editable. I'm not pushing the option key, I'm just dragging it out. And you can see that there's an x, it's been placed over it. That means that it's been imported back into Illustrator as a rasterized image. And it's wanting me to embed the file. Again, I did this purposefully so that you can see that if this happens, Let's make this a little bit smaller. It's perfectly fine because there's a solution. And it's, as I said, a push the option key when you drag this out. And it will be automatically vectorized and ready to go. So this one was pulled out without the option key, and this one was pulled out with the Option key. That's just the way that a good majority of the time it may save automatically as an SVG file, but not always. Hold the option key when you drag out anything from your library just to make sure that it's ready to go. The library is so simple to use. And as artists and designers, I know that we're always collecting things to use for later. This is a great place to put those things. Before we begin vectorizing textures by hand. A little bit later on, I want to introduce you to an app really quick called Adobe Capture. It's an app that works in sync with the libraries. And so I think it's appropriate that we take a look at it first so that we have that option. Knowing that I can go for a walk it, I can grab inspiration from anywhere that I go on. The app is yet another way, expressively, my creativity and collect things to use for my artwork. I'll see you there. Okay. 5. Introduction to Adobe Capture: Now that we have a library ready to go, I want to introduce you to an app that I frequently use when I find textures out in the world or in my immediate surroundings. Nature as a storehouse of inspiration and the treasures we find in our surroundings are something to be modeled with that. Adobe Capture as an app for your phone and tablet that has many capabilities, but is most useful in my opinion because all of them sink directly into your Adobe libraries. It also vectorizes impeccably. And for that reason I use it frequently if I'm not able to get a clean vector out of certain textures. First open Adobe Capture, you'll see quite a few options. Number 1, it starts with material, and this is actually something that's used in Adobe 3D prototyping apps. So it can be really useful for finding textures for surfaces and things like that. It's a great resource. Shapes is what I generally use to get textures. This vectorize anything that you capture, our Adobe Capture, we'll come right back to this. Colors is another way to get color palettes. So I'm dragging with my fingertips. And if for example, I bring in these chocks that I have on my desk, it will pick up the color pallets from there. And if you were to save this, it would save into your Adobe libraries under colors. It would automatically create a library for it. So you would not need to create an advance. You would just have a color library already situated there. There's also looks, which again is more like colors you can create. You can also create patterns in Adobe Capture. There's also an option to capture brushes. Now, I haven't played with this one as much, but I'm really interested to find out more of what it does. So let's go back to shapes. Under shapes, you have a threshold bar, so you can slide it all the way to the right. Sure, more detail. Or you can drag it all the way to the left to capture a more subtle texture. So let's go somewhere in the middle for the first round. What's funny about this is that this is what you see at first, but you're getting a more detail in the actual vector image than you think you were in the beginning. So tested out a couple of times and we'll go through a practical in the next lesson of a few different types of textures that I've captured. We could go ahead and save this, but I would like to try a more subtle textures and sets what I typically use in my own patterns. So I'm gonna go all the way to the left. That's something more what I'm looking for. Let's go ahead and save that. I press Save. You can see that it says saved to, so it will say your texture library, but I can click on that and I can choose textures, brushes, color palettes, et cetera. I'm going to choose texture library. You can see that it will save as an SVG and I'm going to name it cotton linen. And that will push it right into Adobe Illustrator. So mu and Adobe Illustrator. 6. Adobe Capture - A Practical: This is a quick practical where we grab a few captures and save them into the library. You can watch as I play around with the threshold and you can see how different types of textures pick up. Then we'll head right into Illustrator for some troubleshooting, making sure that our libraries are sinking and making sure that they're working as vectors. Here we go. - 7. Coming Back to Illustrator from Adobe Capture: As you've seen once you vectorize something in Adobe Capture, it automatically syncs to your libraries when you hit save. So here we are back in Adobe Illustrator and I've opened up my libraries. Going to click on my texture library. I can begin looking for my textures here. These textures are sorted alphabetically, so as you can see, some of them I haven't labeled, but I did label many of the textures that we just looked at. So here's a ceramic texture, the ceramic David's texture. And toward the bottom I have my table top texture. They're all here. Now, if you do not find them here, it's almost always because you've been logged out of your CC and your Adobe online account. This is not quite the same as your Cloud account that keeps your apps active. That's in the top bar. This is your online Adobe account. More specifically, you have special access to your assets and other features through your Adobe Online account. Go to Assets dot adobe.com slash files, and make sure you're logged into your account and your assets will begin singing again. If you'd like to keep a bit more organized, you can create a group and bring your Adobe Capture textures into that group. So I'll select the ceramic hold Shift ceramic dividends, and I'll create a new group from that selection, I will type Adobe Capture. And once I do that, I can drag and drop anything that I have done with Adobe Capture into that group. All right, We've covered Adobe Capture. It is such a useful tool and there's definitely much more you can do with this app. While Adobe Capture is a great way to store already vectorized textures, vectorizing textures ourselves in Illustrator is a whole different ballgame, and that's what we're going to do in the next lesson before applying what we found in our patterns and illustrations. I provided the photographs that I'm using down below in the projects and resources tab. So grab those Pullman to Illustrator and let's vectorize. 8. Vectorizing Textures: So we have a library and we spent a little bit of time in Adobe Capture, which is an app that captures textures for us, There's not a whole lot we have to do as far as vectorizing goes. I really want to look at vectorizing. I have different examples and I have different ways that I'm going to approach each of them and how I might apply them. I will be creating any repeats in this class because I have a whole class dedicated to making a texture into a seamless repeat. So we're going to be looking at what do I look for in an image? How do I use the Advanced panel and how might apply it? And of course, we're going to bring everything over into our library. So here I have an image of a terry cloth rag or towel. Generally in vectorizing, the darker and image or the more black that you can get will create a clearer image. But I would say that that's most applicable if you're drawing something or it's layers of your own artwork. I find that in photographs, a lot of times it's the shadows that create the biggest impact in vectorizing. So we're going to click on our image over to Image Trace. I always open my advanced panel. I must always start all of my textures with sketched art that goes for textures that are photographs or textures that are my own artwork, or something clean lines. I would probably go with black and white logo. If it was something like a watercolor, I would do a reduced color. But for textures, sketched art works really well as a starting point. Because this image was mostly white, the middle threshold is going to show up a blank image. But there are those shadows in there that could pick up if we up the threshold. So let's up into 204. And you can see the shadows created a very subtle texture. This texture is pretty evenly spaced, so this might make a really good repeat. Later on. I was pleasantly surprised with this texture. I was looking for something that might give it a little more of a hook Greg, or knitted kind of a feel. So this works really well. If I added paths, it would allow anything that I have to be just a little bit more detailed. I don't think that that's something that I want to hear because I do want to take care of my file. And around 42000 anchor points really isn't quite too much, at least for my computer to handle. I would say I really start to worry around a 100 thousand, especially if it's going to be repeated. But I would say keeping under 42000 is usually what I enforce them, they come back down. I just don't think it's quite necessary. And well, I usually pull the noise all the way down again just to add a little bit more detail. But I'm very happy with the way this turned out just by itself. And really what's working for us here are the subtle shadows that were in the texture of the rock already. So I'm gonna go ahead and expand this. I'm going to highlight this and pull it right into my library. I want to see what this might look like with a larger threshold. Let's go all the way up to 232. That is quite a terry cloth right there. I'm gonna push expand. I'm not going to mess with past or noise or anything else. I did click Ignore White, you can't see it now. But Ignore White was clicked and I'm going to drag it over into the texture library. I'm going to rename. Texture was fairly simple. Let's move on to more difficult. 9. Vectorizing Plaster as a Venetian Fresco: I've run into quite a few textures that have been difficult or nearly impossible to vectorize as far as I could tell in the beginning, the more I play with these and the more I play with the advanced panel, I've come to find that I can usually find something that will work for me. And many times these found textures are ones that I'm going to mask, overlay or create some sort of repeat. This is very different than trying to mimic my artwork with brushstrokes, pencil lines, or anything like that. So here's an interesting example of that and how is able to overcome it. I was wanting an illustration I had done to have a bit of, of the nation fresco look to it. Fresco is an ancient practice where artists ends would paint into wet plaster in sections to create murals. They're beautiful. Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel was a fresco and has a very washed semi brushstroke, semi concrete feel to it. So I began looking on stock photos for plaster or textured walls and I found this, but then a vectorized it and it didn't quite do exactly what I wanted it to do. I'll show you how I came to a really good compromise. Two different ways here in my class on creating textures actually went and bought actual plaster to recreate some sort of plaster stroke for myself. And as we talked about it in just the last lesson with the terry cloth, sometimes the subtle shadows or creating shadows with the materials can get us a little bit of what we're looking for. But just note, vector is different. There's not a lot of tonal quality and vectorized images meaning shadows and highlights and mixtures of color. So in this case, when I went to vectorize it, sometimes you have to click back in. So I clicked out and click back in because this wasn't popping up. I'm gonna go to my default sketched art. It always starts somewhere in the middle. And this is okay. This isn't a texture that would be easy to repeat. I'll tell you that an advance, just because they are heavier and lighter parts all the way throughout, but it would make a really good overlay. I'm upping the threshold now. I have another example for you after this. So wow, that looks like a lot of texture. Again, not something that I would easily repeat that I can really get on board with this if I had a shape that I wanted to mask a little bit of this, the lines of this texture do mimic a plaster stroke or a concrete stroke. So I could use this, although it wouldn't be widespread. This is already well over a 100 thousand. So I'll go ahead and tell you that what I'll probably do is take out certain sections of this texture, like this section here. And I'll probably take out a little bit of this section right here because it's pretty interesting. And I may get rid of the rest, or you could choose this section of this texture as well. I believe that for now until you that another solution that I found was actually going out and looking for a while. So I got out and I went driving and use my Adobe Capture to find something that maybe would work. And I came across a concrete wall that had cracks in it. And it really reminded me of some of those Italian fresco is that I'm talking about. And I thought for an illustration that might be really neat to have this kind of an overlay. And I really put intend it to be an overlay. So I'm gonna pull this out. I call it concrete. And you can see the difference between vectorizing here and Adobe Capture. To be captured has just a little bit of a different way of vectorizing I find. So it's useful to go out and use that app as well. This one, I added a little bit more threshold. So two very different approaches. I feel it, this one leaves a little bit of room for whatever is underneath it. You could use this one as an overlay as well, or you can mask it into a brushstroke of some kind to try to mimic that plaster. Look. Let's go ahead and put a square behind it. Going to send it to the back. Let's click this texture on top. Let's just make it white just to see what it would look like. And this one here, maybe to this color. Send it to the back. Grab my selection tool, and do just something very subtle. I mean, it looks like concrete. It's pretty incredible. On this side. Let's go ahead and grab sections of v's to pull into our library. I haven't expanded this yet, so I need to expand it. I'm going to go ahead and make a copy of this. I don't think that it will, so my computer down just yet. But I am going to start deleting a lot of these anchor points and paths. The first section that I want is right here. I'm going to grab my eraser tool, which for me is Shift E. I made that shortcut myself. And I think I've already made my eraser huge. It's gonna take a little bit of time to erase that many anchor points. It's going to erase around 26000 anchor points. Illustrator will only erase what it's selected. So I don't have to worry about accidentally erasing anything else. Let's zip through that. And now this side, I'm just going to do one big sweep. Because I really just want that one section for masking. And that erases 13 thousand points. Okay, I'm gonna grab my selection tool. Let's zoom in. I'm really quite happy with this mainly because a lot of times in Fresco, you can really only see these subtle brushstrokes and the concrete, and they really do look a lot like this. So I think that when it was vectorizing was picking up some of the shadows that were in the plaster strokes. And that just works really well. So I'm going to pull this into my texture library. I think because it was a stock photo, it's not going to automatically save it as an SVG file, but that's okay because I can just push Option. Let's rename this posture and it will move it where it needs to go. I'm going to pick up some more sections of this and pull it into my library. Now that I vectorize the plaster, I want to apply it in a way that I would normally apply it in my our work. In this case, I would use it as a mask. So I would have created the artwork already. I would have the illustration with the color separated, and I would have brought that our work in and apply texture to it later. So just for illustration purposes, literally, I have a brush stroke here and I'm going to create a few more brushstrokes and we'll apply that texture. I want to expand these, Expand Appearance. So now they are shapes and not strokes. I'm going to come over to my texture libraries and find this plaster texture and hold the Option key. And I'll try a couple of different things. I may apply it over the entire group, but I'm really liking how to image trace was able to pick up the direction of the strokes in the plaster. So I do want to try to play off of that a little bit. Let's try it as a whole pattern first. I'm going to send that to the back, going to lock it in place just for now and group these together. So I locked the texture and I'm grouping these brushstrokes. I'm going to make a copy and place one in the back. I will add a color to it. I added the color, but again, it's behind. So as you can see, I'm going to lock that in place because I don't want it to be masked. I'll put that back in, then I will right-click or control-click. I'll unlock the plaster texture. I've unlocked this back texture. I need to make this a compound object as well, because I want Illustrator to work with all of these strokes as one object. So Command 8, we'll do that. We'll highlight everything, and Command 7 will mask it. If I want to get back into that texture to change the color, for example, I will double-click in and we can make hit this darker color. I think they really didn't give it some sort of, I think they really did give it a concrete type of texture. We could also make this a little bit smaller. I'm going to undo and maybe make this just a tad smaller. And use it on a couple of his brushstroke just to see what it might look like. Again, I like that the direction of the plaster texture is going in the same direction as the brushstrokes. So I've already created a compound object there I can mask. And I think that translates very well. I'll undo it again because I want to try one more thing. Let's pull out that wall concrete texture that I created. I'm going to hold Option and just place it on the top. This has a little bit of a different look and feel. I want to bring this to the top and I'll select them and mask this as well. So this has a different look and feel, but actually does look like craft paint to me. Another way of doing this, like I said, is to actually create some sort of texture yourself, which I would definitely try. But again, the thing about vectors is that they are solid shapes. I feel like you really have to study the texture in terms of those shapes in order to get it to feel like you want it to feel. And this class, we're really just focused on the textures that we can find out on our own to bring in. 10. Vectorizing Linens and Making Woven Stripes: And the last two lessons, we were looking a little bit about how the shadows are really what's being picked up and a lot of the vectorizing when it comes to textures. I've tried vectorizing so many things. And I'll say that cotton and linen is one of them that I can never have enough of. And oddly enough, there are always unique. It's pretty amazing. What I want you to take away from this found textures class is, well, first, go out and explore and grab up what interests you or speaks to you. But more technically, when you're working with subtleties for photographs in vectorizing, it's the shadows that will likely pick up first. So if you're looking for something specific, look for something that has those tiny intricacies and shadow. Since vectors are solid shapes, those tiny shadows and highlights will turn into the shapes that will communicate the lines that nature creates with light. I go over this a bit more as a series progresses. I have two completely different linens here, and I have several more. And my library, I also grabbed up one with Adobe Capture. So let's look at these and then I'd like to apply it to a stripe. So let's vectorize these really quickly. Sketched art just on regular threshold. That's a little bit much for me, so I'm going to reduce the threshold a little bit. That looks more like it. That looks like something that I would use. You may prefer lighter, you may prefer darker for your work, but for mine, this works really well. So I'm going to expand that. This is a type of texture that I absolutely would make repeatable. What's going to make that difficult is it's a little bit heavier down here. So if I was going to repeat it out, probably cut it somewhere in the middle and use one or the other. That has been expanded. Let's do this second one. Sketched art, medium threshold. Again, a little too dark for me, but I can see that this piece of linen has a little bit of a crisscross pattern to it and pull the threshold down. I just got a little much 58. Let's see what it looks like. It's pull it up. 7594. A little too light. I find that a little goes a long way. That looks really good to me. I said this already, but when I'm working with my art mediums, a lot of times my paths and my noise and the advanced panel is what makes everything really look the way that I want it to. I don't find that's the case all the time in these larger format textures. But we can go ahead and look to see what more noise will do. And it really just doesn't do anything except add more anchor points. And for that matter, i'm, I just bring it up a little bit to reduce my anchor points. Okay, that's something I'm happy with. I'm going to expand this into my library just really quickly before we do the stripe, I'm going to show you one that I did with Adobe Capture. Going to hold option. This is the one that I did with Joby capture in the previous lesson. And it has a little bit of a different look and feel. This is the same piece of cotton linen. You can never have enough linen. Okay. I am going to delete this one and think I'm going to delete this one as well. I'm going to create a quick stripe over to my swatches M to pull up my rectangle tool. Let's make it this color. I'm going to hold Option and Shift. To pull it down. I'm going to push Command D to duplicate that action a couple of times. And then I'm going to pull this one down just slightly. Hold Option key. And it will create a little mid stripe. And then let's distribute those evenly. Okay, so I have this little stripe, we can give it a background. I'll make it this peachy color. Go back. Peachy orange color. Okay, So in order to make this look a little more woven as a linen, I'm actually going to create two copies of this. And again, in this class we're not doing any repeated textures in this case because this is heavier and this is lighter, I would create a repeat. I'm going to duplicate it. I'm going to use these as overlays. So I find that, I find that in woven pieces. A lot of times you can see both colors shining through because it's two threads that are crossing over each other in different ways to create a stripe, for example. So for this first texture, I want to overlay it onto the top of the stripe. And I'm going to give it the background color. It needs to be pulled all the way up to the top. Okay. That looks so pretty. And this one, I want to be the color of the stripe. And I'm going to send it to the back. And I'm gonna pull up one up. So there'll be just above the background layer. And you can see that we've created kind of a mock woven linen there, a little bit offset. I wouldn't want them to match. So I've offset them just slightly. And that is an example of a fabric or something that looks like a natural woven cloth. I really hope that you're able to get a little bit of insight and how to vectorize these textures. Or at least how to view them so that you can get more of the result that you're looking for. Again, a lot of these found textures are textures that I, and wanting to overlay or mask or pick apart. Or maybe even take a section and create a repeat out of. Rarely do I get a photograph that vectorizes evenly across the board except for maybe that terry cloth texture that I found. But that's okay because I can tailor it to my needs. Seeing results like this make me want to explore textures more than I hope that inspires you to explore textures more. Come in here and play with your advanced panel. If you found a texture that you just love and want to keep and use for another time, you have a library. Now, if you're trying to make something look like something which is often the case with me. Really study that image and see what you can do. Really look at the shadows and the light and see what you can pull out of that texture to make it work for you. I hope that was helpful. Let's wrap it up.