Transcripts
1. Intro: I want to know my
favorite way to make motifs for
repeating patterns. I draw simple illustrations in procreate and then vectorize
them in Adobe Illustrator. This process sets my
patterns up for success. My name is Jenna Blackburn, and I'm a surface designer and illustrator in
Detroit, Michigan. The patterns I've created
using this procreate to Adobe Illustrator method have been licensed on many products, including fabric, baby
clothes, diapers, and puzzles. In this class, we
will pick a theme, fill a procreate canvas with
simple illustrations on that theme using
specific techniques that will make the
vectorizing process easier. Then I'll walk you
through my process for vectorizing those motifs
in Adobe Illustrator. When motifs are vector, it means they are made up
of points and curves and can be enlarged indefinitely
without losing quality. This class is for those who
want to be able to vectorize simple motifs drawn and
procreate to be used as is, or to potentially make repeating
patterns with later on, a basic understanding of Adobe Illustrator and
procreate are required. If you aren't already
familiar with procreate, go check out my class called a Beginner's Guide to Procreate Digital Illustration
on the Ipad. To get up and running quickly, people are always asking me how I vectorize my
procreate drawings. So I'm excited to show you how easy it can be.
Let's get started.
2. Class Orientation: In this class, I'm going
to teach you how to draw simple motifs and
procreate and then factorize them in
Adobe Illustrator. For this class, you will need an ipad with the most recent
version of procreate, as well as an Apple pencil. You will also need
a desktop computer with Adobe Illustrator. In this class, I'm
going to be using a special procreate
brush that I've made that is a monoline brush, meaning it is always the same
width and has clean edges. Using this brush makes it
easier to vectorize my motifs. If you want to use
that brush as well, you can download it for free at Jenna Blackburn.com
slash procreate. A basic understanding of Adobe Illustrator and procreate are required for this class. If you aren't already
familiar with procreate, go check out my class called a Beginner's Guide to Procreate Digital
Illustration on the Ipad to get up and running quickly to create our class project. First I'm going to walk
you through how to pick a theme and fill a
procreate canvas with illustrations based
on that theme using specific techniques that will
make vectorizing easier. Then we will vectorize
those illustrations in Adobe Illustrator using
layers and image trace. When your illustrations
are complete, upload them to the projects tab. I'd love to see what you create. In the next lesson, we'll
pick a theme for our project.
3. Pick a Theme: Let's start by picking a
theme for our project. When I'm creating a
repeating pattern, I like to start by picking
a subject or theme. It could be as broad as
a season or holiday, or it could be as specific
as one type of flower. After I pick a topic, I like to brainstorm all
the different elements that I could draw
with that topic. For instance, for this
Halloween pattern, I drew all the different
Halloween items I could think of before I moved on to the repeat stage for
this garden critters pattern, I filled my artboard
with various bugs and flowers so that when
I got to my computer, I would have lots of options. Now it's time to pick a
theme for your own project. You might pick a
season, a type of food, a type of animal, or
flower, or a holiday. After you pick your theme, you may want to gather
some reference photos. Depending on your
drawing process, remember to pick
royalty free images. The theme that I've chosen
for my project is fruit. In the next lesson, I'll draw fruit illustrations
in procreate to show how I separate things into layers to make
factorizing easy.
4. Draw Motifs in Procreate: In this lesson,
I'm going to fill my procreate canvas with as
many illustrations as I can, using techniques that will
make vectorizing easier. Okay, let's start by
making a new canvas. I'm going to click on
the plus sign up here. I'm going to use a 3,000
by 3,000 pixel canvas. Just because I found that that's a good size when I'm creating elements that I then want to vectorize in
Adobe Illustrator. I've already got a preset here. If you don't already have that, you can click on the plus
sign up here and type in 3,000 by 3,000
pixels and create. Since I've chosen fruit
for my repeating pattern, I'm going to fill this canvas with a bunch of different
fruit illustrations. So that when I take this
into Adobe Illustrator, I have some different options
to make my pattern with. I'm going to start by
drawing some cherries. I'm going to choose
this red color. I'm using my Jenna
Blackburn procreate brush. I'm just going to go up
here and I'm going to put red down for the cherries. Now I want to draw the stems and I want them to be
a different color. I'm going to make a new layer when I'm drawing in procreate. To take these elements
into Adobe Illustrator, I want to make sure I
don't lay any color on top of another color. I'll
show you what I mean. I'm going to draw
the stems in black. I've made a new layer on
top of this first layer, so that when I draw these
stems, let me do that again. They won't merge
with the red below. When I take them into
Adobe Illustrator, they will be easy to vectorize because they
are separate things. You can see they're separate. So I can vectorize the black
separate from the red and then recolor it in Adobe
Illustrator pretty easily. Then I want to make
some little highlights. I can do that on layer two, even though I'm choosing
a different color. I'm going to choose
white because it's not going to
touch the black. I'm just going to put them right here on the
sides like this. Now when I vectorize all of this because
it's not touching, it's going to be really
easy to recolor. Then I want to draw some
leaves on the cherries. I'm going to make another layer, because these are going to
go on top of the black. I'm going to make a third layer
and choose a green color. Then I can come
in here and I can draw the leaves like this. I'd probably come in here and
clean this up a little bit, but you can also do some cleaning up once you
get into Illustrator. But I do like to make it pretty clean here and procreate First, I don't use any
texture in my work. I don't have rough edges, so that makes it very
easy to vectorize. My style just lends itself very well to vectorizing
in Illustrator. Now I want to draw a banana. What I'm going to do is I'm
going to start on layer one, like I did with the cherries, and I'm going to pick yellow. And I'm going to
draw the banana. I don't need the bananas to be on a different layer
from the cherries. I just need to make sure that as I'm building up
each piece of fruit, I'm using separate
layers to do that. Okay, so there's the
yellow part of the banana. And then I'll go to layer two to draw this black
lined on the center. Yeah, that's pretty good. Then I'm going to
draw a strawberry. And I'll start on
layer one again, and I'll draw the red
part of the strawberry. And then I'll go to layer
two to draw the stem. I always like to
make sure I'm using the same brush to
erase as I am to draw. So that as I'm racing, the edges are consistent with
the lines that I've drawn. So I've always got the same
brush selected for my eraser. And then I want to draw some extra lines on
top of this green part. I'm going to go to layer three. I'm going to choose a
darker green color. I'm going to add the
lines like this. Then I want to draw seeds. It's not going to touch
either of the greens. I could do it on either
layer two or three, but I'll just do it on
three just to be safe, in case I touch the
light green here. But I'm just going to
add a few seeds here. That looks pretty good.
Now, some blueberries to go back to layer one, choose a blue color. Draw my blueberries. I could make these
a perfect circle if I wanted to by
holding my finger down. But I like when it's a
little bit irregular, sometimes I'll use that
function and sometimes I'll just try to make it
as best as I can. It has a little
bit of character. Then if I want to
fill all of them, I can just click on
Continue Filling, and then click on all
of them like that. And then click on Color
Drop again to cancel that. Okay, and then I want to draw some extra parts
on here like this. I'll go on layer two for that. Now I want to draw
a water melon. And for this water melon, I'm going to show you a
trick that I like to use. I'm going to start by making the red part
of the water melon. Now if I want to add the
green rind inside of the red, I can go to layer one. Click on that, hit Select. Then everything that I draw, I'll go up to layer two. Everything I draw on
layer two will fit inside of whatever is
drawn on layer one. Now I can easily
making sure I'm on layer two because I don't want to merge with the red part. I want it to be separate. I can come in here and add
the green rind and it will line up with the edge of the red part that I've
already made on layer one. You could also use a
clipping mask for this, but that makes it more difficult when you bring it into Adobe
Illustrator to vectorize. I don't recommend that method. I like this method best. Okay, that looks pretty good. Now I'll click on this
arrow to de select. You can now see that if
I move layer two around, that green part is
separate from the red. And that's exactly
how we want it. Now I want to draw the seeds, and I could do
that on layer two, but I'll do it on layer
three just to be safe. So I'm going to come in
here and draw the seeds. I'd probably spend some
more time fine tuning this if I had all day to do it. But I don't want to spend
a lot of time on that right now for the
sake of this class. Okay, I'm going to
draw one more thing. I'm going to draw a lemon. I'm going to, I go back to layer one and I pick
this yellow color, and I'm going to
draw this lemon. Oh, okay. That's going
to need a little bit of love over here there. I usually draw a lot more
slowly and carefully, but I'm trying to go a little bit more quickly
so that you don't have to watch me draw
for hours and hours. Okay, that's not bad. And then I want to draw some leaves. So I'll go up to layer two, draw my leaves, make that a little bit thicker so that you can't
see the yellow back there. When you see just a
little bit of yellow, it looks kind of like a mistake. I just want to make it look a
little bit more deliberate. Then I'll go up to
layer three and I'll draw some lines on top. It's a little too thick, make it a little bit thinner. Then I want to draw
some white circles. And I can do that on
either layer two or three because it's
not going to be touching any part of the leaves. But I'll just do
it on layer three. Okay, this looks pretty good. I might spend some more
time cleaning this up, but at this point, there's
still some space in here. If I knew I was going
to be making a pattern, I would probably
come in here and draw a couple more strawberries, maybe a couple more pieces of
watermelon, another lemon. Just so that when I get
into Adobe Illustrator, I have lots of options. I might even draw
some more leaves, maybe some little circles. Let's go ahead and
do that right now. I might draw some more elements that are already
being used on here. Just so that when I'm
assembling my pattern, I have options to
fill in spaces. It's nice to have
some extra pieces. Drop one more of those
just to have it. Then another strawberry,
maybe some more blueberries, maybe some more seeds. It's good to just fill
the canvas I found and maybe even some little elements that don't necessarily relate exactly to the illustration, but I might want them to fill
in spaces in the pattern. Sometimes I'll just
come in here and draw lots of different
little shapes. Maybe some open seeds. I never know what I'm
going to want until I get in there and start
assembling the pattern. I like to have lots of options. Maybe I'll draw another cherry. I'm going to select all
of the layers by pulling them to the right and then coming up to the selection tool. And I'm going to move this
over just a little bit. I have a little bit
more space over here, and I'm going to
draw another cherry, that it's just one
cherry with a stem. Let's see, I have
the black lines and the highlight On layer two, I'll keep it consistent. Then layer three has
the leaves on this one. I will use that
to draw that one. Then maybe I'll draw a few
more of these types of leaves just to have those. I can make different
arrangements like this if I want
around the cherries. When I get into
making the pattern, that's how I go about this. I just try to fill it with as many different things
as I can think of. Now, go ahead and fill your canvas with illustrations
based on your theme. And keep in mind, if you can keep it to just a few layers, it's going to make it easier in the next part when
we vectorize things, If you have 20 layers, it's still totally doable. It's just going to take
a little bit more time. If you can keep it like three
layers like we have here, this is going to be so easy. But the main thing
is you don't want to draw elements that are on top of each other
on the same layer. If I had drawn this
black line for this banana on the same layer as the yellow part
of the banana. When we take this
into Illustrator, it's going to be just
one flattened shape and it's just going to
end up being a big blob. We want to make sure that
they're on separate layers. You can see the black
part of the banana, not on the same layer as the
yellow part of the banana. If we look at the
layers that I have here, the bottom layer, layer one, has some of the
base color for the elements. Layer two has the
next layer of detail, and then layer three has
the next layer of detail. On top of that, I don't have any strategy for
naming the layers. I don't put all the
leaves on one layer and whatever it for me, I just keep in mind what's on the very bottom and make sure that when I want to draw
something on top of that, I put it on the next layer
above that and so forth. So yeah, just make sure you keep things on separate layers
as you're drawing them. And you will be good to go join me in the next lesson
where I'll show you how to prepare and export
your ap procreate file so that it's ready to bring
into Adobe Illustrator.
5. Export Procreate File: In this lesson, I'll walk you through how to put the
finishing touches on your procreate file so that it's ready for
Adobe Illustrator. The first thing I want to
do is export a PN G of the color elements
that we have here so that we can reference it when we're in Adobe Illustrator. I'm going to go up
to the Actions menu. Go to Share, and then
choose PNG or J. Peg. Doesn't really matter,
but I like PNGs and save it to your
desktop computer. You can airdrop it
if you have a Mac, or you can E mail it to yourself
if it's not a big file. Or you can save it to drop
box if you have Dropbox. And then you can open it in
Dropbox on your computer. That's the first
thing we want to do. Then the next thing I
want to do is go out to the gallery and swipe left
to duplicate your file. We're going to change
everything to black and white. And I don't want to mess my original file up,
so I made a copy. And now I'm going
to go into that copy and I'm going to turn everything to black
because that's going to make the vectorizing
process a lot easier. Make sure you have black
selected in your color palette. Then click on one of your
layers and hit Alpha Lock. And then click again
and say Fill Layer. Now it's filled
everything on that layer with black because we have
black selected up here. And I'm going to
do that again with layer two, alpha lock. Then click again, fill layer. And then we'll do
that with layer one alpha lock, fill layer. Now we still have
our three layers, but everything is black
and we're going to vectorize it and then recolor
it in Adobe Illustrator. Now go up to the Actions menu, Share, and choose a PSD. A PSD is a Photoshop
file that will retain the layers from your procreate
file if you export a PSD. When we open it in
Adobe Illustrator, our layers that we've made
will still be layers. It won't flatten
into just one image. When you save a P
and G or a Jpeg, there are no layers anymore
and it's just flattened. But when you save a PSD, it will still have the layers. Export a PSD and save it
to your desktop computer. So you can air drop
it if you have a Mac, you can E mail it to yourself
if it's not too big, or you can save
it to Dropbox and then open it in Dropbox
on your computer. Join me in the next lesson, where I'll show you my steps for vectorizing your illustrations
in Adobe Illustrator.
6. Vectorize in Adobe Illustrator: In this lesson, I will
show you how to vectorize your procreate motifs in Adobe Illustrator
on the desktop. Okay, so now I'm on
my desktop computer and I've got my PNG in color, and I've got my PSD all in
black. And I'm ready to go. What I'm going to
do is I'm going to drag the black PSD into
Adobe Illustrator. I want to make sure
that I have convert layers to objects checked here. If you choose flatten
layers to a single image, this next part is
not going to work. Make sure you have
convert layers to objects and then click okay. Now if you go to
the layers panel, you can see the layers
that we made in procreate are still separated
into three separate layers. This is going to make this
next part really easy. What I like to do now is
change the color mode to CMYK just because I like
working in CMYK better. When I'm recoloring things, go up to file Document
Color mode CMYK. And then I'm going to take
this PNG on my desktop, the color one, and
I'm going to drag it into Adobe Illustrator. I'm going to put it
right next to this one so that I can look at
it for this next part. And I'm going to drag it up
to layer three. Click on it. Then you'll see in
the layers panel, this blue box that
indicates that I've selected this art and I can
drag it up to layer three. Then what I'm going
to do is I'm going to hide layer one and layer two. And we're going
to start with the top layer and work our way down. I'm going to click on this
artwork here on layer three. Then I'm going to open up
the image trace panel here. If you don't have
this available, you can go up to Window and then Image Trace and
make sure that's selected. And then you'll have this option over here in your toolbar. Then you can pick a preset, usually black and white, logo is pretty good for me. Then see how it looks. You might want to adjust
some of these settings. You might want to turn
the threshold up or down. You'll see as you
adjust the settings, your artwork will
get better or worse. Threshold, if it's
down really low, pulls a little bit less of your drawing into the equation. If you turn it up, you'll see everything gets a
little bit thicker, it pulls in a little
bit more information. You can adjust the
paths, the corners. Then if you find some settings that work
really well for your artwork, you can save your preset so that you can use
it over and over. I have a preset that I've
saved called Procreate. I think this is basically
just what we just did, the black and white logo. And then I turn the threshold
up to 164 and then pads. I think these are all
the default settings. Make sure ignore
white is checked. Right now what it'll
do is it'll make another shape for the white background and we
don't need that. Make sure ignore
white is checked. Then once you find some
settings that you like, you can save that preset so that it's easy
to come back to. Because my artwork is very
simple and very smooth. I don't have to mess with
these settings very much, but depending on what
your artwork looks like, you might have to spend a
little bit more time in here. Fine tuning image trace settings to get your artwork to look exactly how you want to. But I'm pretty happy with this. I can also click on
the E here to see what the original drawing
looked like compared to what the image trace result looks like when I hold it down. Right now we're seeing
the original drawing. And now when I unclick, we're seeing the tracing result that was pretty similar.
I like this result. I'm going to click Expand, then I'm going to group, because automatically
these are all one group as you see
as I drag them around. I'm going to hit Shift Command
on my keyboard to ungroup. Or if you're on a PC, it
would be shift control G. You can also go up to
object and ungroup here. Now you can see they're all separate pieces,
which is what we want. Now for the fun part, I get to recolor everything. I have my favorite colors
saved in my library here. I'm going to use that for now just to make this a
little bit quicker. These leaves are green. Holding shift, I can
select all the leaves and click on them and then
choose this light green color. This right here is the darker
green. I'll select that. Then all of these seeds
are yellow. Then the. Lines are the darker green. These are white. And
these are black. That's good. Okay, now we
can go to the next layer. I'll turn on layer two, and then I'll click on
the artwork on layer two. When I click right here, I'm
selecting that whole piece. And then I'll go
back to Image Trace. Then I'll click my Preset.
Looks pretty good. I'll click Expand,
and then I'll click Group Shift Command on a Mac
or Shift Control on a PC. Then using the selection tool, they can come in and
change all these colors. Again, that's black,
so that's fine. These are white. These
are supposed to be black. This should be the darker green. Then these leaves
are the light green. If you need to lock the
top layer, layer three, so that it's easier to grab the pieces you're
currently recoloring, you can come in here and
press this lock button. And now I can't
accidentally grab the parts that have already
been colored on layer three. Right now, I could select these leaves very easily
without accidentally selecting these lines that makes sense and make that the lighter green. Then I will turn on layer
one and do it all again. Go to Image Trace. Sometimes you have to click off and click back on it again for the settings to
come up and expand. And then again shift command on a Mac or shift control
on a PC to group. Then I'll just go ahead and lock layer two just to
make it a little bit easier. And I'll select red cherries. I'm holding down
shift so that I can click and select multiples. Change the banana,
change the strawberry, change the lemon watermelon. These are just some
extra elements. They can be whatever color,
I'll make them blue. I'm going to change
this blue color. I want it to be a little bit
more similar to this one. I really like that. Okay, that looks pretty good. Now here we are. We have all of the elements vectorized
and recolored. I'm going to go into
my layers panel here, unlock everything. Then we can move everything to one layer and then start
grouping elements together. I'm going to select
all of the strawberry, and you can see it has selected all the pieces from all
the different layers. And I'm going to hit
command G to group them or control on a PC. Now it's moved all the
elements to layer one. Now if I try to move this, it moves as one piece.
That's what we want. And I'll select the
banana command G, select all the parts
of the strawberry. I've accidentally
selected this leaf, so I can hold down shift and
click on it to select it. And then command G to group
that, group this cherry. I'm going to group each
blueberry separately, just so that I can move them. I'm not going to
group these elements. I guess I could. I can
always ungroup them. Accidentally
selected this shift, click on it to deselect it. Group this watermelon. I'm going to group
this whole lemon. And then I'll group
these leaves together. As I was grouping,
everything was moving up, You can see in
these little boxes, some things are on layer one, some things are on layer two. If you want to move
everything to one layer, you can select
everything and then drag these boxes all up
to layer three. Now everything's
on one layer and you could delete these
layers if you want. And now everything's on one layer and you are
ready to make a pattern. Join me in the next
lesson where I show you how to clean up your motifs.
7. Cleaning Up Your Motifs: In this lesson, I'll show you how to clean up
your illustrations. When you use image trace to vectorize procreate
illustrations, sometimes you do have to come in and clean things
up a little bit. I like to do that in
a few different ways. I want to select
just the blue part. I'm going to choose the direct selection tool and then
I'm going to go up to object path and simplify. And you can see, brought it
down to only three points, it's already a little bit cleaner just by getting
rid of some of the points. Then you can move
the slider around to make even less
points or even more. Maybe you want a
few more points and it tells you how many
points are being used. That's all the
original points if you drag it all the
way to the right. And then you can simplify, that looks pretty
good right there, three points going up to
object path and then simplify. That is a really easy way
to get rid of some points. You can select multiple things. You could do that with all of the illustrations on this
page if you wanted to. Another way to simplify is to select the path that
you want to simplify. And then go over to the smooth tool which is
underneath the Shaper tool. Here it deselected it. Now I'll hit command
on my keyboard. Or if you're on a PC, it would be control to get
the arrow back temporarily, so I can reselect this. Then when I take my
thumb off of command, I have the smooth tool
back and I can just drag it along here and
smooth it out that way. Then if I want to
get the arrow back to select say, this blueberry, I just hit Command on a Mac or Control on
a PC and I'll get the arrow back
temporarily to select the next part and then
I can smooth that out. Then the third way that I like to simplify things is
just by deleting points. If I use the direct
selection tool here and I click on
this watermelon, you can see that there's quite a few points making up
this edge of the watermelon. If I click on the pen tool here, I can just hover over some of the points and you'll see
the minus sign comes up. And I can just get
rid of a few of the points just by getting
rid of a few of them. That cleaned it up right there. And then I'll hit the
space bar to move to the next shape I
want to clean up. I'll hit Command to get the
arrow tool back temporarily. And then I can come in here
and delete a few points. Click on command
to get the arrow so that I can drag
out these handles. I'm holding down
command and then I'm letting go of command to
get the pen tool back. I'm just moving
around right now, these handles are separated. An easy way to
clean up a shape is to hold down option
on your keyboard. And you'll get this tool and you can get the handles back to
being combined like this. That automatically makes
it a little bit smoother than if the handles
were separated. This looks like a good spot
to use the smooth tool. I'll come in with the smooth
tool and just clean it up. Something like this.
I like to clean up. This is a very weird
edge right here. I'll take the pen
tool and I'll hit Option to get this tool. And then maybe I'll hit command to get the arrow back and move some of these
nodes around like this. It's really nice if you know
the keyboard shortcuts to do these things because
then you can just move around really quickly like this. That's much better. I like to go in and do some cleanup before I
start making my pattern. Once you're done
cleaning up all of your illustrations,
you're ready to go. Everything is grouped,
everything is cleaned up. And you can use these elements to make
your repeating pattern.
8. Conclusion: Congratulations on
completing this class. I hope you now feel
confident transferring your procreate illustrations
into Adobe Illustrator. If you'd like to get a copy of my custom procreate brush that I used to
create my artwork, you can download it at Jenna Blackburn.com
slash procreate. If you have any questions, you can ask them on the
discussions page of the class. And if you like this class, hit the follow button by my name and please
leave a review. I'd love to hear what
you think of the class. Finally, I'd love
for you to share your completed
illustrations here on the class project tab. I can't wait to see
what you create.
Genna Blackburn, Surface Designer & Illustrator
