From Sketch to Vector Illustration - Abstract Portrait

1. Introduction Abstract portrait : Do you want to get good at creating awesome vector illustrations using Adobe Illustrator? Well, you came to the right place. This time, we will be creating colorful, slightly abstract portraits, using a variety of simple geometric and organic floral shapes. This time can be applied to all kinds of illustrations, and it allows us to experiment with unusual funky color themes. I want these illustrations to be dynamic, vibrant, and playful. I also want to add some interesting textures to contrast the clean and sharp vector outlines. Whether you are an aspiring illustrator, digital artist, graphic designer, photographer, marketer, or simply someone with a passion for visual or storytelling, Mastering Illustrator provides you with the tools to turn your ideas into stunning vector art. I will be guiding you through every step of the process from the initial sketch to the final touches, giving you a comprehensive understanding of Adobe Illustrator's incredible tools and features. This course is perfect for you if you are new to illustrator, or if you are self taught and aiming to get more confident and effective using it. I am Martin Perine, a certified OB professional and instructor with a design background spanning over two decades. Throughout my career, I've collaborated with renowned clients such as Disney, Mattel, Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon, and BBC. Leveraging this extensive experience, I have carefully crafted this course to help you navigate OB illustrator like a seasoned professional. I am not just teaching Illustrator. I am empowering you to express yourself, tell your story and create illustrations that resonate with your unique style. This is your chance to create work that is truly personal and worthy of your professional creative portfolio. You can follow along and replicate my illustrations, or you can use the workflows and techniques I show you and create something completely different and unique. There are at least two additional compositions you can choose besides the one I am using in my examples. And roll now and let the fun begin. Your creative adventure with Illustrator starts here. 2. Portrait of a man - Illustrator on the iPad - Basics: Case you have an iPad, and you want to practice using AOB Illustrator on the iPad. This is the perfect project for it. You can start laying out all the shapes using the iPad and then move on to refine them later on the desktop. Now, most of the workflow I'm going to still do on the desktop, because I know most users would prefer to work there. However, for those who prefer to use the iPad, I'm going to show you a couple of useful techniques in this video. If you're not planing to use the iPad, you can just skip this completely and move on to the next lesson. Now, first thing, what you need to do is still start on the desktop version because you will have to save a Cloud document. That's the easiest way to then being able to open it on your iPad. So what you need to do is once you have the file open on your desktop, which, in this case, should be called guy Start AI file. Just go to the Fine menu and choose Save S. And then here at the bottom, you should have the Save Cloud document option. Once you click on that, you just have to give it a name. I'm going to call it Guy Start, and then let's save it. And the way you can tell that this is now saved as a Cloud document is that it shows a little Cloud icon here in the document tab. But also, the file format is now instead of AI, it's AI C. So Illustrator Cloud. I switched over to the iPad now. I have an Apple pencil in my hand. And first of all, I'm going to tap on your files here on the left side. And immediately, the most recently saved cloud document should show up there. So there's the guy start. I'm just going to select this, and it will download it first onto the iPad. So it might take a little bit longer than usually to open it. There we go, we have our layers the same way set up as on the desktop. So we have the sketch layer, which is set to multiply. That way we can see what we are doing even while we are drawing underneath it on the illustration layer. I make sure that is selected here. One of the most important thing to remember when you work on the iPad compared to the desktop is that you have limited options here. So it's a more streamlined workflow to quickly create shapes. And usually I would prefer to use the iPad for these type of more organic illustrations, where I want to be a bit more artistic and less rigid or restricted with my lines. So this is a perfect style and project to experiment with the iPad if you haven't tried illustrator on it yet. Now, the drawing tools that we have available here are the Pen tool. Then we have these additional drawing tools. If you tap and hold on them, you can choose the pencil, the blob brush, and the paint brush. Then we also have the eraser. And that's pretty much it. So the most common tools we still have here that we wouldn't normally use on the desktop, maybe apart from the curvature tool. But I'm going to show you what I find the most effective way of working with the iPad and what I feel to be the most intuitive. So this is actually the blob brush tool. I'm going to select that. And I normally work with the basic round preset, which I selected here. Here at the bottom of the toolbar, we have additional options. So if you tap on the last icon at the bottom, you can adjust the angle, the roundness, and even options like whether you want to have the edges tapered or not. So by default, I'm just going to show you quickly, it's going to draw shapes like this. And of course, the thickness can be adjusted here, so I'm just going to drag that up, so I can draw thicker lines like these. But as you can see the beginning and end points are always tapered or they are shrinking in size. So that's something you can turn off here. If you uncheck that, now it's going to have the same thickness. But don't get confused, you can still use pen pressure when this feature is disabled. So I can draw in different pressure and vary the thickness of the brush. Of course, that's again something you can turn off if you don't want to use it. That's the pressure dynamics. Once you turn that off, it's going to be disabled. But whenever these features are turned on, there's even more options for them. So there's little arrows. If you tap on that, you can even adjust how the tapering you want to work, how long you want them to be and you can also adjust the pressure dynamics. So that's also a setting for it there. So you can really customize this tool, the way you prefer to work with it. And let's not forget also a very important setting, the smoothing, which is the icon here, just below the size. This is essentially how the pencil tool accuracy works on the desktop, so you can make it much more smoother, which means it will create less anchor points, but it won't be as accurate, or if you keep it lower, then it's going to look very similar to the way you are drawing. I like to keep this around ten. But I can show you if it's set to one, which is the lowest value. I can draw and it's going to create much more anchor points. So if I select this, we can see how this looks. And compare to this, if I go back to the block brush, and I increase the smoothing all the way up. When I draw, one thing that you will notice that it's going to be a bit slower, so it's going to take time to render. That's because there's a smoothing going on. But you can compare the two. Generally, there's less anchor points. But to be honest, I like to keep the smoothing quite low. Mainly because I don't want my lines to be delayed. So I am going to just delete all of these shapes. Select them all, and there's this little floating task bar or tool bar here at the bottom. Here we can just choose delete. And going back to the tool, once again, I'm going to reduce this down. Let's just say, maybe even go down to four or five. Yeah, I want it to be fast. For me, that's more important. Now, I'm going to reduce the size. Let me see. Yeah, something like that looks good. And I am also going to change the color that I'm drawing with. Now the good news is that because I already had the switches set up on the desktop version of this file, they also been transferred here to the Cloud version of the document. So we already have these colors. And for instance, this is the color that I wanted to use for the hair, beard, and mustache, and eyebrows. So I already have that one selected. And let's just see how it looks. Yeah. Works well. Now, let's start with the moustache. I'm just going to zoom a little bit closer here. And I'm going to start drawing over this. Let's try to close it off here. And the good thing is that if you keep drawing over with the same tool, in this case, it is the blob brush, it's automatically going to join them together. So this is going to end up being a single object. And that is because we are using this setting, so let me just jump back here. Again, from the brush settings, the merge brush strokes is an option that's owned by D f, and you should definitely keep that on. 3. Portrait of a man - Illustrator on the iPad - Additional techniques: Reason I like to use this tool, and the reason why I said it's quite effective is that you only need to draw the outline of your shape and then use the direct selection tool, which is the second tool in the toolbar, select one of the anchor points in the center part, press the delete option, and then delete again, we'll delete that whole inside path. So it's not a compound path anymore, it's just an individual path on the outside. So we created a field shape very quickly. And then one additional thing you need to do is to simplify this path. But for this, make sure that you make a selection of the hose shape, or one easy technique to make sure that all the anchor points are selected is to switch to the path selection tool, click on the object. And then switch to the direct selection tool. So as you can see now, all of the anchor points are selected. So with this, I can tap on this option here, which is the simplify path. If I just tap on that, it will reduce the amount of anchor points, and if you want, you can tap it a couple of times until it's going to get to a point that it can't further simplify it anymore. This point, of course, you can still go in and manually refine any of these details. But on the iPad, this is not something that I prefer to do. It's just a little bit too fiddly. I prefer to do that on the desktop. So at this point, I would just move on to the next shape, and let's just draw quickly this part of the moustache. Again, I'm just trying to feel what works best here, something like that. Select the whole shape, then use the direct selection tool, select one of those inside parts, delete twice. And again, simplify and simplify, and that looks quite good. Now, let's just do one more shape. I'm going to draw the beer. And you can see why I like this tool because I feel like I can work in a very organic way. I can then go back quickly and simplify things. One other the thing that I sometimes use is the eraser tool. If I just select the eraser tool, I can very quickly refine some edges that I didn't like. So that detail there, I can just like that. And let's just take a look at this, click away. So we very quickly created these shapes. And maybe one more important thing that I wanted to show you is how to create clipping masks on the iPad because it's slightly different. So we don't have the draw inside mode that makes it quite convenient to create them on the desktop. Here, what you need to do is to have two shapes to begin with. So I'm just going to draw another shape quickly, maybe with a different color. So let's just say I want to have something like this inside the beard. So I will just close this off and then do the same technique as before, delete. This is a shape I would like to have showing inside that beard outline or object that I created. First, I have to make sure that the beard is selected. And then using this icon here, which is called stacking order. With this, I can very quickly drag it up or below the existing shapes, especially when you have a lot of objects. This is going to make things much easier, so you can quickly access the stacking order, which, of course, by the way, you can also access from the layer spanel, so you can still drag things up and down here if you want to. But now that we have these two shapes, I can just select both of them together. And while they are selected, we have to tap on this option here on the right. And choose make clipping mask. And of course, the object on top is going to be turned into the mask. And unfortunately, you will have to reapply the color on it because by default, it's removed. So we have to go and select that shape, and then we can apply our field color on it. And now we have our clipping group created for us. So what that means is that if we continue to draw inside this group, everything that we draw is going to end up being masked out automatically. So let's just test this out with the different color. I'm just going to deselect these. Change my color to this and then use the blob brush tool again and let's draw another shape like that and then delete the inner parts. I have to do is to drop it inside this clipping group here in the layer spanel. I have to start dragging this and drop it in there. It doesn't matter where it goes. The clipping path will be activated anyway. But of course, if I want to have these two overlapping, and let's just say I want this teal or turquoise color to be below the pink one, I can just drag it all the way underneath there, and I can still move it around and find the best place for it. So Alo working on the iPad can be faster and more effective. In some cases, like when it comes to working with clipping masks, I find it easier to work on the desktop. Thanks to the draw inside mode. Finally, there is one more important thing to remember when you work on the iPad that you don't necessarily have to save your work because it happens automatically as long as you are connected to the Internet. So you can just tap here on the document name on the top, and it should tell you when it was saved last time. So if it's not saved already, you can just tap on save now, but it seems like it's automatically saved. And I can also see a little green tick on the bottom right corner of the thumbnail, which means that it's up to date, and it's stored in the cloud. And that means if I switch back to the desk of where I am at the moment, I can see it showing up right here with the shapes that we created on the iPad. And I can check that we have definitely that clipping group that we created and we can zoom closer as well. Yeah, just like I said, everything is there, so I can just continue working here. And what I like to do whenever I want to involve the iPad in project is that I prefer to start drawing there quickly the shapes that I need and then do all the refinements and texturing and all the rest of the workflow on the desktop. I very rarely go back and forth. But that's an advantage of Cloud documents that. There is the option to do that if you want to. So now that you've seen this, it's completely up to you, whether you want to continue using the iPad for most of the project, or whether you prefer to follow along with me using the desktop version. 4. Portrait of a man - Main shapes for the head: For this abstract portray illustration, I would like to keep things as loose and as artistic as possible. So just to try to break out of the usual clean vector look that we would normally get in a OB illustrator. So I have my sketch ready here, and I'm going to start using the pencil tool, and I'm using a styles, a pen tablet. But if you want, of course, you can follow along with mouse as well. These are the settings I'm using for the pencil tool. So I keep it more accurate this time, and I keep these options on. So I can edit my paths as I'm drawing them. And you can see that in this file, when you're starting, there's already a couple of custom brushes that I added, which we will be using for this project. If you are interested on how to create custom brushes, you can watch those videos in the getting started chapter. Now, let me start with one of the main shapes that we will be using here and that is going to be the head. But maybe let's start with the neck. So I can just draw the neck quickly. That can be shape on its own. Something like that. Here at the bottom, if I want, I can stay closer to the edge just by redrawing that section. Again, I can redraw it one more time, and that is looking good already. I'm going to start already applying the field colors that I had in mind, and this is going to be the main skin tone that I would like to use. Now let's draw the next larger shape. This time, I'm just going to go somewhere here in the middle. Maybe we can go over this way like that. And I know that I'm going to have the beard, so I'm not going to worry about those edges, but here, I want to follow along this fairly closely and then come up and then close it. Again, I'm using the same field color. Then let's just draw quickly the beard. For this, I'm going to draw it like that. I will probably have some sharp corners just to make the abstract look a bit more prominent. And then come up here, close it off. This one is going to be this darker color, and then let's draw the eyebrows and the mustache. Let's just start maybe with the moustache. It can be two shapes just to have a bit of gap in the middle. Like that. On side. Let's seem a little bit closer. Let's draw the other side. There it is. Okay. And let's draw the eyebrows. It's a very fun and simple technique. So you should be able to follow along easily and also just have fun in general with this. I just forgot to color that. Okay. Now, let's draw the hair. So the hair can be probably one big shape. Just going to start drawing out here. Still using the pencil go up around and down and then up again. Now here, just going to move my canvas up a bit and maybe redraw this section, draw it down a bit further out, something like that, and then come up. And then draw these details. And down and then close it. Let's add the color. Yeah, that is looking good. Now let's add the ear. I'm just going to draw this shape out like this starting here, go and then go out this way and then go up here. And again, we will use this color. And then maybe we can just move the beard down. By having it selected, I'm going to use the eraser tool that's shift E, and then just erase back from it a bit, bringing it down a bit more like that. I'm already going to add some detail here on the ear just so we can see it better. I'm using again the pencil tool, and then let's just add this color. Now we can draw some details for the nose. I will actually draw the highlights for the face. For this, I am going to draw up a shape like this. Maybe we can come down here and then near the nose. We want to define the nose with the highlight. And then we can actually just draw a single line here or even down this way. Going behind the lips. And then and then around the nose again and then close it off this way. Maybe I just redraw this section here a bit. Okay. And this is going to be white, which we want to keep behind everything, just simply on top of the face. I mean, the skin tones. So all the additional details that we edit so far can be on top of it. So that is going to be our highlight. Now just to make things easier to see. I am going to draw the sunglasses. So for this, I am going to use another color. Let's just use again, the pencil tool. Draw this out this way. Over it, and then I'm going to assign this red color to it. Now we can try to use a stroke this time. So if I increase the stroke thickness and also keep the stroke inside this shape, I think it's going to work quite well. Yeah, I can actually use that here, and then I'm going to draw another shape like this. Trying to follow my sketch closely. And maybe we can just redraw this section here at the bottom, drag it up a bit. I actually can go down a bit further. Yeah, something like that. And the top section can be evened out a bit more from here to there. Yes. Now, this detail actually will need to go behind the white outline of the nose. So I will probably just draw another shape on top of this just to make things easier. So I will try to draw that outline. Come down connecting to this other shape. And go up, and I can just use the same feel color, the cream color that we have here. And let's add some other details connecting the sunglasses. Like that one and another one here. And just for more visual interest, I think I'm going to change the color on these two. So this and this can be using a different stroke color, maybe this bright cyan color, and these ones actually can go behind the other ones, so I'm just going to put them behind. This one can go behind there. Yeah, that is starting to look more interesting. Now, I also want these glasses to have a feel color. I'm going to use the dark purple that we used on the hair. That's our darkest color in the composition. And the thickness of these lines, I will probably reduce a bit, so I will go back, reduce them down to 30 points. I think that's a little bit better. They were just a little bit too thick before. Now, for the nostrils, I am going to draw again the shapes with the pencil tool as one here, and there's other one. That. I'm not sure what colors I'm going to use in the end, but for now this works, and I'm going to also draw the lips. I'm just going to draw it from one single shape. Again, keeping things more abstract, like that and just fill it in. At this point, I will also start adding some additional shapes just to make things a little bit more abstract again, like this one, and maybe we can select the face, the outline of the face, and draw inside that. So using the draw inside mode, I'm going to draw another shape. Here. Let's just start up there. And we can start introducing another color, which I want to use prominently, this yellow fiel. And I just realize that this white color, the main shape could actually be placed into the same clipping mask that I just created. So I'm going to put it in there in the same clipping group just to make things a little bit more tidy. And it actually can go underneath the yellow one. Like that. Now continuing to draw inside here. I'm going to use the pencil tool again. Let's just draw another shape coming up maybe this way and down and then close it up. This can be red. It's essentially like shading, what I'm doing here. I will also do some shading here. I actually want to use the red on this side of the face. I feel like it would look really nice. But for that, I am going to change temporarily the nostrils to the darkest color that we have. So We don't want any stroke, just feel like that, and maybe redraw this a little bit. Yeah, something like that. 5. Portrait of a man - Smaller details for the head: I'm going to draw a shape here for shading the nose and also behind the nose. I want to have a shading going down this way and then go up around here and then down again, or maybe here, at the end, we can just close it off like that. Let's try to draw this line a bit closer. Yeah, something like this. So let's see how this looks in red feel. Mm hmm. I'm just going to erase back a little bit from this nose detail here. That's the one outside of the clipping mask. I just want to fix that. And then this shape here is inside the clipping mask. Yeah, it's starting to look better. But now we have to separate somehow the sun glasses. So what I'm going to do here is to copy this shape that we already created, Commando Control C, and then Commando Control F to paste it in. And then I'm going to use the scissors tool. And I will cut it off here and there. And then this top section, we don't need only this bottom one. And what I'm going to do is to select this shape that we created earlier. And I would like to be able to separate colors on this stroke. And we could use a gradient on the stroke, but that would be more of a soft transition. Instead, what I would like to do is to have maybe a yellow color running along the edge here and also different colors running on the top. So essentially, I would like to be able to draw things inside that stroke and use it as a clipping mask. The way you can do this is by going to the object menu and expanding disappearance. That's going to turn the strokes into shapes as well. So if we look at this in the layer spanel, we will have a compound path for the stroke that was originally the stroke. And then behind it, we have the field shape as well as a separate path. So what I'm going to do here, first is to ungroup these commando Control Shift G, That way, I can select them individually. And once I have the outline selected, which is now field shape, I'm going to go into draw inside. And then here, I can just use the pencil tool and paint over the section, which I want to change in color. So this part, I would like to have it in yellow. And that's how simple it is to introduce different colors. I will probably have another shape, maybe draw over this section here as well. Just trying to create contrast and interest. There it is another interesting detail. I can turn off the draw inside mode and maybe just draw over the actual glasses themselves as well, just to create something more like a reflection type of effect using the same red color, and maybe some more on this side. Red, and that may be another red detail here, like that. Let's take a look at this from a distance. This one, maybe we can make a little bit wider, even stretch it away from here, something like that. And this one can also maybe go a little bit higher. Like that. I'm just going to redraw this quickly, make it a bit thicker, like this. And even this one here, I can make it maybe following this outline here or at least staying close to that. And even this one, I think I can make it slightly thicker. Redrawing it or just redrawing it completely from scratch. This. Okay. So that's getting more interesting. Now, let me do the same thing here on the left side. I will again select that shape, expand the appearance, and then we can ungroup it, commando Control Shift G, select the compound path, set the draw inside mode on. And then I'm going to use the pencil tool and draw a shape quickly. Fill this in with yellow. We can also maybe add a bit of yellow up here, just a tiny bit, and then deselect the draw inside mode. And maybe just draw another yellow shape around here. And this one, maybe we can set back a bit to go just in front of the darker details like that. Let's just add some more yellow detail, maybe down here at the bottom. I can go maybe around here. So that's like the chin detail. Set it to yellow, send it back to there. I'm going to select the beard and just redraw a little bit of detail here. I wanted this to be a bit more sharp, this section. Then I'm going to draw another shape here. We can also introduce a new color, a color that I wanted to use. Can just have a bit of detail of that. This steel color. I'm just using the arrange keyboard shortcuts that these bring to front, send to back and bring forward, send backward. So these are the keyboard shortcuts I'm using. Of course, you can also do this from the leer spanle, and drag objects up and down if you want. I just like to work this way. It's a bit faster. So I'm going to draw another shape here. That's part of the beard. Maybe we can also add some more detail in this clipping mask that we created earlier. So I just have to make sure I click on the edge of it and then go down in the layer spell and will select the clipping mask itself and choose draw inside to be able to continue drawing in there. So I will have another red detail added here. Just like that. That looks good. While we have this detail selected, so this is the face. I can also draw another shape, maybe a yellow one on this side. So let's just go down the sharp angle. That's like the cheek bone detail. I'm trying to emphasize here, and this I was meant to place in here, so I'm just going to drop it in the right group, that clipping group, can draw another teal detail on this side. Just introduce more of that color. Maybe you can add a little bit of yellow around here, the side of the nose. I will also add an earring detail. That can be maybe white. And then maybe another line here. Still using the pencil tool, that can be this dark detail. And maybe we can still go back to that clipping mask, select it and draw inside again, using the pencil tool. Maybe I can add a bit of the darkest detail here, just a shading. A little bit of that there. And now let's just add also some details on the hair. So for this, I'm going to use this as my outline, set the draw inside mode on. And I'm just going to draw some random shapes here, and we'll fill it in with yellow. Something like that. And that's yellow. Looks quite cool. I will turn off the draw inside more now. I will also add some details on the neck. So I will going to select that and choose draw inside. Using the pencil tool again, I will just draw maybe a bit of shading here with the darkest detail, which is purple. Maybe we can add a bit more here. And then we can also draw some of the red details just coming up here. This is essentially also shading. So I'm using these as shading. I will probably set it behind the others, and then draw another shape. Considering this also a shading detail. Set it behind the other one, can have maybe a bit of the yellow as well here. You can see I'm very loose with these shapes. So I'm not worried too much about that outline. I want to keep things very organic and simple. So this can go also behind these other details. And then one more shape in the same clipping mask. I'm just going to draw it up here. And like that. Also, I want this to be red. And then we can turn off this draw inside mode and select the other main shape that we created, also clipping mask. So select that and draw inside. And I'm just going to add a little bit more of that red detail running up this way. Again, it's the cheek bone that I would like to emphasize. Let's just try it again, maybe running down here, and then a sharp angle down that way. Let's see how this looks. Yeah, I like this. One thing that I wanted to change is for the year to be higher than the detail that runs behind it. That just makes more sense like that. Now let's just take a quick look what we achieved so far without the sketch, and also a turn off the draw inside mode temporarily. So, yeah, it's looking good. You can still recognize the face, but I want to keep things very loose, and I think it's working quite nicely, especially once we start adding all the textures. But for now, I just want to get all the large shapes in place. So we got this far having most of the details I wanted to on the face. And now we can move on to adding more of the background details or the environment. 6. Portrait of a man - Background and floral details: So moving on, I will probably select everything that we created so far and group them together. So this is going to be called the head. And it's just going to make it easier to move things around. I will actually lock this as well, and I will bring the sketch back just so we can see what we need. And first of all, I'm going to add the big square here in the background. I will probably come all the way down somewhere around here. And this I actually want it to be yellow. I am going to work on a background layer now, so I just create a new layer, call it background. And I might merge these together later, but for now, just makes it easier to have things created automatically behind the other detail, the head that we already created. Continuing to working on this layer. I am going to also draw another shape using the pencil tool. I would like to have some white details still showing up here or this cream color that we use. And that's just going to give a little bit more contrast in certain areas. So something like that. And then it's time to draw some of these floral details, which is more like a decoration, but it's going to work quite nicely. We have that teal color that we can use for this and then running up here as well. Create another detail, fill it in. And then we can draw maybe another just shape running around here to keep the abstraction going. I'm going to use pink for this. We'll just move this slightly over like that. And let's just add some more teal details here on the left side. I will draw maybe one large shape that runs down here, goes behind the ears, and then can come up here. Come up and close it off. Yeah, that looks quite nice. Let's just draw another shape here just to break up this square that we created in the background. Again, just another abstract shape for this, I use this pink. Maybe I can use the eraser tool just erase from the top. That's a good way of creating sharp corners quickly. I like to have sharp straight edges varied with the organic curve details. So that just again, add some more contrast and interest. Now, let's just draw maybe one more larger shape down here. Just going to keep this very simple, just like a big blob again using teal. And then let's just add some final floral elements down here as well. I'm going to build this up from single shapes filled with the dark color. I keep this very abstract as well. Let's draw this here. And a good advice is not to get stuck on small details at this stage. So until you see things coming together nicely and the colors working well together, there's no point of refining any of the shapes too much. Of course, you can get them closer to what you imagined by redrawing them with the pencil tool. But I wouldn't recommend wasting too much time finessing small details at this stage. For that, we will have time later to come back and adjust things. But something like this here, I can see already that we have a little bit strange ending on this shape. And also, I can just move this out a bit separated from the other shapes. And maybe this one can come higher slightly. Like that. This one can come closer and maybe use the pencil tool a bit here. Refine it. Yeah, that is looking quite nice. And I intentionally going beyond the edges of that square that we created in the background. And I will even just distort it a bit, so use the direct selection tool. I don't want it to be so perfect. So I select individual points and just skew it a bit by moving it in different directions. So again, that adds a bit more randomness and wonkiness to it. Now we need another detail that should go in the other layers. I'm going to lock the background layer, and we can just check how this looks. So this is what we added there. It's coming together nicely. I will have the layer with the head selected. And then I'm going to use the pencil tool again, have the sketch turned on. And I'm going to draw a big shape for the clothes like a jacket that he's wearing. And I can draw this in front of the existing shape. Come up here, go down and then draw a line there. Now one thing you can do is if you want to keep things straight again, instead of relying on the pencil tool, you can just use the eraser tool. So here I wanted to have a little bit of separation like that. But then at the bottom, I can switch to the as shift E, and I hold down alt option key and cut off the bottom edge like that. This base color, I'm actually going to use the same yellow as we used before, and I will redraw this section here slightly. I want it to be closer to the original sketch, like that. But while this shape is selected, I'm going to use the draw inside mode, and I will start adding some shapes here. First, let me draw a large shape running down here. And go around this whole area. This is going to be set to pink. Then maybe we can have a darker detail like that shading that we already created running down here, something like that. That's the darkest color. And then we can maybe also have some red on top of this. Maybe even some red here at the bottom. And then I'm going to add some of the cream colors as well for further interest, just go down here, go up L et's set this to cream. And I can see a little bit of detail there showing up, so I'm just going to adjust this. So that detail disappears. The same thing I can see here. So the outline of this path, I would drag up a bit that just refines the edges a bit for us. Now, whenever you select shapes outside of a clipping group, you have to always go back, select the outline and then choose draw inside again to be able to continue drawing there. So here, what I imagined is to have a few more of these cream color details running around. Something like that. I just drew a big shape here. Similarly to the hair, I try to keep this abstract. Something like that. Okay, Let's see how this looks. And then on top of this, I will just have a few more additional details like this dark shadow detail. And maybe also have a bit of that teal color that we used before, the brighter one, more like the cyan or turquoise. And that looks colorful enough. Let's just turn off the drawing side more to be able to better judge this. And also the sketch I will turn off, and I call this one jacket, this group. So we can just check better what we've done. That's the jacket, and that's the background. And of course, that's the head that we created, which is right there. And the good news is that we have all the main shapes in place. Now it's about adding the finesse and refinement to make this look even more organic and make it look more like traditional media or at least mixed media. 7. Portrait of a man - Adding texture with Brush strokes: One of the first things that I like to do before I move any further is to simplify shapes a bit. So I'm going to select everything. I have all the details unlocked, and I'm going to use the path simplify option. So we can check what happens. If we click on this option here, we can even see a little bit more of the settings and more of the information. Like, originally, we have 1061 anchor points. By default with the auto simplify, it reduces it down to 774. We want to go even lower. We can go maybe down almost to half the amount, 590. And a cool thing that you can do is to show the original path. So if I turn this on and off, we can compare how much change is actually happening, and not much noticeable change happens. But what we can also do is click, click away, and to be able to actually see what's changing. You want to also hide the edges, so go to the view menu. And choose hide edges. So when you do that, you can zoom closer and go back and forth time just using dodo do do, and we can see what happens. I definitely like the updated version. Not much has changed for this particular style. Accuracy is not that important, so can definitely save some space and make the illustrator file faster at this stage, because what we are going to introduce now is going to make it slower. So we will introduce a lot of small details. And the main parts that we work with should be as simple as possible. Now, one other thing that I like to do at this stage is to zoom closer and really try to identify any shapes that just doesn't work or has small little errors in them. And one thing that I can spot here straightaway is this shape. Just remember to go back to the view menu and choose show edges to be able to see what you're selecting. So in this case, I have that object selected, and I can just use maybe the Blob Brush tool as Shift B, and just very quickly paint over that part in the middle. And then maybe have this outline selected with the direct selection tool. And I have a keyboard shortcut for the simplify option. It's F five for me. I can maybe even go down a bit more on this. And there's also the smooth option. I can just smooth out the edges a bit. That's also a keyboard shortcut. I'm using F four for that, but it's in the object, my new path smooth. I use this almost on all of my projects. So that looks much better already. And now quickly, let's just select this outline as well. The ear. I'm going to just paint over it quickly with the blob brush, fill in that detail. And then we can just select this part here and simplify it, and then smooth it out as well a little bit. That. Looks already much better. Same thing I'm going to do here. I'm going to use the block brush tool and just refine the top edge of it a bit, then simplify this and then smooth it out as well. Like that. So it's still kept as organic as the original, but just much more simplified. So here with this shape, what we can do again is maybe even use the pencil to just to draw over that edge. The other edge I actually like the way it looks, and then just this shape one more time, I'm going to run simplify on it. So yeah, that can make it much more simpler. Okay. And then there's one more little detail here. Just going to use the eraser tool, chop that off, like that. And let's click away. And then maybe one more little detail here that stands out to me the outline of this shape. We have a little bit of crooked detail here. We can just redraw this with the pencil tool. And something like that looks already much better. Okay, so now that we refined everything and we simplified these details, it's now time to start using the brushes. Now, if you don't have the brushes panel open, just go to the window menu and choose brushes. And I have a couple of different brushes here. But first of all, I would like to introduce maybe some textural detail on the background. So what I will do is to use the brush tornel that's B on the keyboard. And then let's try maybe using this brush first. And I'm going to set the color for this brighter teal or turquoise. And I'm just going to draw a line down here. Let's just draw maybe even a longer one. Now, whenever you use these art brushes, you can increase their thickness by increasing the stroke size, something like that, and I'm just going to change the color. That looks good. But I wanted this to be behind the jacket. So right there. And now I can use the direct selection tool and just drag it out a bit more if I wanted to come over this area here. This actually can go in the background now that I'm thinking about it, so I can just drag it down into the background layer. So that way it goes behind the head as well. Then maybe we can also introduce one more of the same down here. Just drag it down. That looks good as well. We can also draw something up here, another detail. And this can actually go all the way in the background. Maybe just in between those shapes. So the white detail is not covered by it. But this one I'm going to set to a different color. Maybe we can use this pink or this one or even the red. Let's just see which one works better. I quite like that red. We can of course still move these points around so drag that down a bit. And maybe we can also reduce the thickness if we wanted to. So if I go down to one point, it's going to be a bit thinner, and we can control it, maybe a bit better. Something like that. Just drag it down here. Maybe curve it a bit more. I really like working with textured brushes like these. They really add some more interest in the illustration very quickly. And we can actually use it on smaller areas as well. Like even on the glasses. If you recall, we used a clipping mask for them, so I can go back into that clipping mask. And draw inside. And then we can just use maybe a yellow brush. And this time I'm going to use one of these other brushes, and I just draw over it. Let's just select that brush again, maybe this one, and then use yellow on it. And then we can maybe reduce the thickness on this to 0.5 points, something like that. And then we can drag it out. We make sure it goes all the way. So details like that can look interesting. We can also turn off the drawing mode now and maybe draw one additional detail. Here, let's again, assign another brush to this and set this in front of the other shapes. And I'm going to use this, but with a smaller thickness, something like that. Let's drag it out a bit more. Really looks like a brush stroke. Maybe we can use this pink color on it. Okay, and zoom out. And sometimes if you created a brush detail that you like, you can just use the brush tool and draw a few more of that while you have that selected. So this just saves you time. So for instance, here, I can quickly add a bit more detail. Maybe we can have some more of this detail running up here, just to add more interest to the hair. And then I can switch my brush, maybe increase the width and just draw another larger detail here with red And if we want this, it can even be added inside like this. I think that looks good. It could even go beyond the edge slightly just to make it more interesting. And I just noticed that this detail, I think would work better if it came down a bit more here, maybe even more. Don't want that pin to show up here. So redrawing the edge up to there and then come down. That's it. 8. Portrait of a man - Adding texture to the edges: Then just to maybe make the background also more interesting. I'm just going to have another shape at it, maybe down here with this detail or maybe even this other one and just set it to white like that, and we can make this thicker and not that thick, maybe five points. Might be still a little bit too much, three. Yeah, it looks better, and we just want this to be going all the way in the back, so we can just align it here, make it seem like that circle that is created on the top, is continuing further down and creating this shape where it's a bit more textured. Okay. Something like that. And now I just noticed that this little detail here feels like almost a continuation of that line in the background, and I don't want this to be confused with the head, so I'm going to just drag this one down and separate it. So that would have been a tangent that I created there, which I wanted to fix. Then finally, another thing that you can do to make things more interesting is to introduce brushes on the edges of objects. For instance, here in the background, we have this big yellow square, and this is the brush which I set up as a pattern brush that we can use for this purpose. So if I click on this, it's going to be assigned to the edge of the shape, but I'm going to use the same color as the field color, so it's yellow on yellow. And I can just show you from the appearance panel, there's the pattern brush applied. I can turn it off, turn it back on. And the way it's set up is that depending on the weight that you use on the stroke, it's going to extend further outside of the original shape, or if you reduce the weight, it's going to stay closer, of course. Now, whenever you use pattern brushes on strokes, one thing that you can do is to change the alignment, so it will always be set to center. That's just a limitation you have to keep in mind. I actually prefer the texture quality of this when it's set to one point. I think that's when it looks best. So even from a distance, we can see it. But sometimes if you draw a shape that you want it in a specific place, like if we look at our sketch, we wanted that shape to be a little bit smaller. In these cases, what you can do is to just go to the object menu and choose path, offset path. And then you can say maybe minus ten or minus five. And that way you can make the shape smaller. But whenever you use offset path, you have to remember that there is always a duplicate created when you use this feature, so you have to delete the larger shape to be able to actually see what you done with that effect. So there's our new shape, which is smaller in size. But together with the stroke and the pattern brush on it, it's actually filling up the shape that we wanted originally. I can turn off the sketch now just so it doesn't get in the way. I will apply the same technique on a few other shapes. Like this outline, I definitely think would benefit from this effect. I just quickly select the same stroke color, and then from the drop down here, we can just apply the brush, and that is looking good. However, there's a little bit of break here. Just see all around the other details are looking fine. Here. I'm not 100% sure why this is happening. Maybe if we add a little bit of roundness that's going to fix it. Yeah, using the corner git. Sometimes if you have strange outlines, it might not work as well. And we can actually introduce this on these floral details as well. Since they are the same color, we could even group these together and even that shape there, even using compound path. So command or Control eight. That becomes a single shape. The only thing you have to pay attention to is if the objects are overlapping, there will be an issue there. So maybe instead of compound path, I'm just going to group these together. That's command or Control G. And then while the group is selected, I'm going to assign the same color on the stroke. As what we have here already. And if you see these strange shapes appearing around the corners, that is because you most likely need to simplify the parts or maybe just use the corner widgets on them and just round them down a bit. So this can happen when there's very sharp details created. Most of them disappeared, but there's still some issues. So I'm just going to use the simplify option from the path menu Um, or maybe smooth. Let's try smoothing them down, going to increase this value, and there you go. It's fixed it already. So we can just click away and it's done. Now, let's just add the same effect maybe on the beard and the hair. Those are two larger details as well. So I'm just going to select the outline of the hair. And the beard, maybe also the moustache. And then we can add the same stroke color as the field color and then apply the brush on them and just reduce the size to 0.5, or maybe even to 025, so it stays closer. And we can see that it's been applied well on the moustache and the beard. Maybe there is a little of artifact going on here, just going to smooth out this shape a bit. Hey beats the other one. Yeah. That's better. I want to have a bit of separation between the two, so I just move them apart. Like this. And for the hair, it seemed like it didn't apply it. So let me try this again. And I can see why it is not showing up because it is actually a clipping path. So if you want to use this effect on a clipping path, what you actually need to do is to duplicate the path itself. So in this case, I'm going to use the clipping path. Alter option, click and drag it out, and then immediately starting to show up, it's best to put it underneath the other object. And then we can decide on the thickness of the effect. But this time, I actually like the way it looks, and it even creates a little bit of gap there. Now, once again, if this is something that you want to avoid, you can, of course, use offset path. So we can go into path, offset path, and we can decide how far we want to go in, maybe minus four. We'll be enough this time. Let's click Okay. And then we just delete the duplicate. And this is actually turned out to be too small, so we can increase the thickness of the stroke. And now we have that nice effect around the edges. So that is looking quite nice. I like the way it turned out. And it's completely up to you whether you want to apply this to all of the shapes or just keep some shapes the way they are, having more of the crisp clean edge. And then there is a good contrast between the clean shapes and the more organic shape. I'm going to do maybe as a final step is to just draw a few more shapes inside the lips. So I'm going to set a draw inside on that and using the brush tool, I will maybe use this shape or this brush here and maybe use yellow on it like that, or maybe we can use pink as well. Just draw over it again and almost like building up a little bit of a fact here. Going to use maybe the steel as well. That's also quite a cool little technique. You can combine multiple colors with the same brush or even different brushes, if you want to. And that way you can build up a bit more detail and the fact on a certain area. Okay, so I hope you like this technique. If you want to see another composition created in this style, I have another portrait, which you can follow along. And in that one, since I already showed you the whole process here, I'm working a little bit faster but using the same techniques. 9. Portrait of a woman - Main shapes: First of all, I'm going to draw the outline or the silhouette of the face. For this, I'm using the pencil tool and with the settings to have it editable, so it keeps it a single line. If you don't have the setup already, just double click on the pencil tool in the toolbar and choose keep selected and edit selected parts options. And as you can see, I'm just drawing over the details. I will just rotate my view a bit, and then drawing this way because I'm using a stylus. It's just easier to do it in certain angles. And here, it doesn't really matter how I finish off the path because that section won't be visible. And I'm happy with the way this looks, so I'm going to continue drawing a new path now for the eyebrows. I just draw the silhouette again with the pencil tool, and I try to keep things nice and organic. Here is the other eyebrow. Ream a bit closer, draw over it. And I just go beyond the edges because of course, we can cut these off with the shape builder tool. So if I select all the parts so far I created, I can hold down the old key and subtract those shapes. Now I can just select the two eyebrows and press shift X to switch the stroke and feel colors. And then I'm using a bit of the simplify option to have less anchor points on the shapes that I created. There's a few lines I'm going to add around the lips and the nose. I'm not going to draw all the lines that I created in my sketch, certain parts of it. And then I will use shading later to define these forms more. So I don't want everything to have outlines around it. I'm drawing a few more lines around the eyes. Again, trying to create completely filled shapes. Just trying to emphasize the most important details with my lines. Like this one can be a bit thicker. I drew an outline for it, and I'm going to adjust it later on. Let's just draw another shape here for the eyelid, the upper eyelid, and I feel like that is looking quite good already. Now it's time to draw the neck. Once more, I just extend beyond the lines that I need, and then I will be able to cut off what's not necessary. But we can come back to that later. Now, here I'm using the pencol to draw these lines for the shape outside. Then switching back to the pencil, again, I'm using additional lines for the hair a bit better. And then just adding a few more lines for the shapes in the background. There's another shape there, which I am going to turn into a field shape later on. But for now, I'm just trying to get these larger shapes in first. And I'm doing pretty much everything with the pencil tool here. I like to work with the pencil tool when I want to keep things more organic. And then, as you can see, sometimes I switch to the pen tool to draw some additional details, like these sharp straight lines. It's definitely easier to do with the pen tool. There is another bigger shape there on the top, which I want to lay down, and now that's also in place. We can probably also add this other line here, another diagonal line that runs down, which will be important, so we can actually connect this into this other shape that we have. Okay. So I feel like that's already starting to give us the structure. Maybe here on the right side, we need this other shape as well, which we can actually combine with this more organic detail. And I'm switching back and forth between the pencil and the pen tool, depending on which one is easier to work with. And I can also refine some of these details, just to match my sketch a bit better. And I don't want to have too much messy anchor points. So sometimes I like to have them tied it up. I just use the eraser tool there and connected the two anchor points. So that's also connected. This time, I'm going to use the blob brush tool because I need to create a field shape, and I feel like this works better this way. So I'm just going to paint in these details for the hair. This is more like a shading detail, but I feel like it's good to establish this in the beginning and draw over this section here. Now select these two and simplify them with the path object path simplify option. Then with the eraser tool, I just delete some parts of it. Like that, make some parts of it more sharp because that's one thing about the blob brush tool that you end up having everything very soft and rounded if you use it. And then it's always good to add some angles on it, just to have a bit more contrast for the shape. And now we're just going to do the same thing here again. Another detail. I'm again, the blob brush tool. Then I will smooth it and simplify it. And then using the eraser tool, I can add some angles back on it. That looks better. Now we can draw the details. We have the iris, and then we have the other detail. Again, I'm using the eraser tool to cut off the parts that I don't need. I don't need to be very accurate here because we can always adjust these at a later point. And then I'm just going to select these lines that I created earlier, and I want to adjust their settings a bit. So I'm going to set them to this non uniform shape, also increase the stroke size on them, so they are more noticeable. So I'm using the shape builder to cut off any lines that we won't need. And I'm also merging some of these shapes together, which will make it easier later to colorize them. Like this one here, I want to have as a single shape. That's why I use the shape builder to connect them to each other. Moving on. We will also use the shape builder tool to remove some of these details that we don't need, like these lines right here at the bottom. I'm just going to use older option key, quickly subtract the ones that I don't need. These overshoot details, I can just remove one by one. And now it's time to merge some of these details together. I just paint over the shapes. I'm just painting over this part here. I'm connecting these two shapes, and then filling in that section. And this is going to be a single shape, so it can always be refined later with the eraser tool on the top, and I feel like it looks quite good already and then join it together with the other big shape. Using the shape builder tool. We can use also a bit of simplify or smooth on it, and now it's time to move on and work a little bit on the face. So I apply the skin color and then also start adding some of the colors for these other shapes. So I'm introducing the additional colors I prepared in my swatches panel. Another bigger shape, which I'm going to fill in with the color I wanted to use. Now, for this other shape, I'm going to use the blue color that we have in our switches. We can decide this later, but for now, I'm just going to keep it blue. And then we have a shape here that we don't actually need. I can remove that. We will have to add a few more lines to define details like the eyes. So for this, I'm going to use white color, which we don't have actually in the switches panel, so I just created it. And I'm going to use the pen tool to draw over the area where I want the eye to be, the white of the eye. I'm going to use the white fill for it. Here's the penol. I'm drawing over it, and going down, following the shape. And then again, fill it in with white and make sure it ends up in the right place. So underneath those darker details, we can check without the sketch, and we are getting there slowly. So let's keep moving. I am going to add the reflection on the eyes. So there's a bit of a yellow here, and a bit of a yellow on the other side. We will refine these later. 10. Portrait of a woman - Smaller shapes: And then I also want to have some yellow details just below the eyes. Consider this similar to shading. Just try to keep it a bit more abstract. It's not necessarily makeup. It's more like just decorative details. But the way I'm drawing these shapes is that I'm trying to define the form or structure of the face. So I'm adding it in the areas where I know that there would be darker shaded details. But instead of using the skin tone, I like to use these additional colors that we introduced in our color palette. Now let's draw the lips as well. It's time to have the lips in place. I'm using the blob brush again for this and I filled it in. And I'm just using the eraser tool to refine the edges a bit more. Now, moving on, we can start drawing the additional shapes that we need. In this case, I'm going to use again the pencil tool, draw the leaf that we have here on the top, and make sure it's connected and then fill it in. I'm going to erase from it a bit and maybe use simplify or smooth to make it more organic. And then we can also use the pen tool. Sometimes it might be faster to use that for these type of shapes, so we can have nice straight corner points while still having these nicely curved details. And again, I can just move this behind the other shape or even delete it, if I want to. With the shape builder tool. And now we can just add another shape in here, maybe just to follow the sketch. Some shapes in front, some shapes behind always helps to add some depth and interest. Yeah, we have these organic details on the right side. Now I'm using the pen tool to define the hair line here on the top. This is actually going to be a larger shape, so I'm going to draw over all of these details here and then follow along this outline that we have in the sketch. Like this. And then let's just fill this in with a color and place it underneath the other details that we already had there. And then moving on, I switch back to the blob brush tool and just paint over a bit of this area here. I want to use the same color that I will be using for the hair color. So this is the base color of the hair. And just using the eraser tool again and the smooth feature, I create the shape that I need. And just cpting really with the combination of these tools, the shape that I want to end up with. I keep judging what shape works pass as I move along. So I don't always strictly follow the sketch. And then now we just need to use the pen tool again. Draw over the hair details. And then after filling them in with the colors I wanted to use, I just extend one of these shapes with the blob brush tool. I just want to make it a bit more filled in. Again, some shapes here for the neck. I'm using the blow brush tool once again, and then with the shape builder, I cut off any excess details that I don't need. The shape definitely needs some tidying up. I'm using the smooth feature on it first, then the shape builder to delete the parts that I don't need. And now we can just refine a bit the bottom of the hair as well with the eraser tool. I just cut back a bit from it. And then we can just add a little bit more details with the block brush tool. Just going to make sure that this needs to stay behind the other detail. And once we're done with it, I make sure it's set to the back. And I'm just using the ser tool here on the bottom as well. And yeah, the hair detail is coming together nicely. Now let's draw another shape here and I'm going to fill this in and place in the background. I felt like this would help to keep things together. Felt like it helps a little bit the balance of the illustration. And I actually created a new color swatch for this, and I will use it also on the left side. Now moving on. I'm going to use the blob brush tool and just fill in some details around the nose. And this is going to be later refined with the shading technique using a special brush. I'm just preparing the shape for it. So I really just concentrating on the outline of this shape for now. After I use the block brush, I always like to smooth out the shape and simplify it as well. Now here's a couple of additional shapes we will need around the eyes. I want to define the eyelids a bit better as well. For this, I'm using the pantol, and I'm just trying to fit this shape under the eyebrow and also go a little bit below the eyeball. So it's the upper eyelid and the lower eyelid. That I would like to define with this shape. Make sure it is set in the right location underneath the additional details we already have. And I'm doing the same thing here on the right side, but with the blob brush tool this time, I simplify this shape a bit, and then with the eraser, I just cut off the section that I don't need. Something like that. It's starting to look closer to what I had in mind. Just extend that shape a bit more to the right. And I feel like This shape can go underneath the yellow, so the yellow can be on top or move the yellow also behind the bit, covering up less details. And then just adjusting these shapes a bit more with the pencil tool, just refining the outline. Also, this shape should be coming a bit lower. So again, moving it down with the pencil tool, adjusting that path, and starting to come together around the eyes. There's still more details that we need to introduce. I'm just going to emphasize this line a bit more, add a bit more red detail on it. Extend it like this. And we can also introduce some floating details around the composition. I will add more of these later on. Now it's time to do the ear. I'm just using the pen tool and trying to define the line that I will need for the ear and just using the width tool as well to increase the thickness on one side. Then let's just add a few more geometric shapes here on the face, just for additional interest and abstraction or stylization. I will again use this yellow color that we had before Here's another shape. I'm going to add, here, I'm going to introduce the blue that we have already in the background. These are just more high light colors. Here's another shape. I'm going to add. This one will be a little bit bigger. I will again go over the cheekbone area. So this defines the cheekbone quite well, but instead again of using color that's similar to the skin tone, I'm utilizing these vibrant colors, highlight colors that we already started using in the composition. This helps to stylize the composition, make it more intriguing. I'm just adding a few triangles, floating triangles in the background. Since we have these triangular sharp shapes already in the composition, I feel like again, it's good to repeat these in a subtle way, have some of them floating around in the background. And this is looking closer to what I had in mind. Maybe I'm going to add another shape here. Again, have another blue color just to have a bit more interesting detail there and feel like that looks good already. Now it's time to create a shape for the neck. Just going to make sure it's a closed shape, and then we can fill it in with yellow, and then we can just keep this there for. I'm going to add some shading on this later. Maybe we can already start doing this. I'm just going to use the draw inside and add a bit more red colors here. I'm trying to keep these inside, the original shape, simplify it a bit, y, that looks already more interesting. 11. Portrait of a woman - Details and textures: Now, that's add another shape up here. Again, it's just one of those small floating details. Maybe this can be white. I might refine this later with more details. And then I will add some highlights on the nose as well with the white color. Maybe on the lips as well. These are more like reflections, but in a very abstract and simplified way, a few more on the hair as well. Just like this. I can simplify it, and then we can move on and just work a bit more on some additional small details around the nose. This is like a shadow under the nose again, instead of using the skin tone, I'm going to use the yellow color, maybe add another shape here below the lips as well. Just very subtle hints of shading in an abstract way. Let's not forget these leaves that we wanted to add here on the left side according to the sketch. I'm going to draw a few of these shapes quickly with the pen tool. We have a few of these plays down here. And then Just keep drawing them one by one, and then we can decide in terms of arrangement, whether we want them above everything, or we want them to be blended in a bit more. Like with the shape builder, we can cut some sections off. So some details comes in front, some goes behind. I'm trying to create this interesting interaction between these elements, which establishes depth and connects all the elements together visually. So here again, another detail. And let's just draw these as well quickly. One of the leaf again with the pen tool, and then we have another one. Don't have to follow the sketch perfectly. I can always be a bit of creative freedom here. Can draw over it. Roughly following the original shapes. Just a few more, here's another one. And then we just need one more in between these other two leaves. Repositioning this a bit. And then one last one here. This is actually the only shape now that was missing from the sketch, the original sketch. Now everything should be in place. So we can check it without the sketch, and this is coming together really nicely. These leaves on the left side were really needed. I'm just going to cut into some of them to make them a bit more interesting using the razor tool. I select them and then cut a few details in. But yeah, you can see how those green leaves on the left side really helped to bring everything together. It fills in that emptiness that we had on the left side. It establishes more balance as well. And now it's time to add some shading details. I'm going to use the art brushes, these custom brushes that I used already in other projects. These are already ready in the document if you start out or you can bring them in from the brushes template that we have. And I define the shape within which I want to see the texture. And I can also move these around until I'm happy with the result. I was using the draw inside technique, which is the shift the shortcut, if you press that twice, you can access it. Here, I already have the lips, but I'm going to remove the fill color, and instead, I again use the draw inside technique using these brushes. I just paint over it. And I want to keep it loose on one edge, while the other side, the top part of the lips is a bit more defined. Now I'm going to select the face, and again, use a draw inside technique and use the same brush to create another shading detail around the cheek bone on the right side. And then once you have brush stroke that you like, you can of course, use the selection tool, move it around and refine it. I'm going to just add a few more here on the top, shading on the forehead. It's almost like the hair is bleeding into the skin details. Now we can move on and do the same thing on the neck, as well. I would like to have some white details bleeding in here. So it's almost as if the illustration is fading out. So the background white color is bleeding into these shapes. Now I'm using the magic one to select all the leaves. So by clicking on them, it selects all the objects with the same color. It's a very quick and easy technique. I would like these to also bleed into the background. So I have them all selected, and I'm going to group them together with Command or Control G. And once they are a group within the opacity options, I add a opacity mask. And by turning off the clip option and selecting the opacity mask, we will be able to paint inside the transparency of this group. So if I now use the same brush that we used before these art brushes, but with a black color, which I'm just adding to the switches, with this, I will be able to hide details from this group. So I can just start painting, and you can see it's almost as if I'm erasing from the leaves. This is a very, very useful technique. I use it often when I try to integrate some elements, and again, add some more interest into composition. Make it feel a bit more organic, have some texture in it, and don't forget to get out of the opacity mask when you are ready. And now moving on, I'm going to do the same thing here on the nose, what we've done with the lips. I'm just going to extend this shape a bit dragging up the anchor points. And then I'm going to hide the feel colors, use the draw inside technique, and use the same brush that we had before to define this with this texture. Shading, but again, the bottom edge of the nose is filling completely, and the top it's just fading into the skin tones. Now, the highlights on the nose, I'm going to quickly recreate with more of an artistic brush, instead of using the original very solid shape that I had there. This again, just adds a little bit more textural detail. And like I was planning before, I also refine the highlights on the eyes. Using the eraser tool, I just cut into those shapes. And then I'm just using the same brush and add some additional refinements and details along the edges of some of these shapes. So I keep the shapes there, but just drawing around them, just to make them a little bit more interesting. And I'm going to also add some additional details, more of this texture brush around the edge of the hair in a couple of places. So I'm going to change the color of this to the same color as the hair and align it around the edges. I can use the anchor points to refine the angle of it. And this looks quite good. Let's just use this again in another position. And align it. Again, that creates a nice edge detail. We can also use some brush details on this darker detail. So the shaded part of the hair. Again, we can align it around the edges. And just one more shape that I'm going to add here around the eye, just to extend that red detail using the pen tool. I just set it up, make sure it goes in the right place behind the dark details and in front of the yellow part. And then there's only a few additional refinements I added after this, so we can see before and after before and after, that just brought things together even more. 12. Conclusion: Well done for finishing this course. I hope you had just as much fun going through it as I had recording it. And of course, don't forget about the class project. Because remember, practice makes perfect. I can't wait to see your work, so make sure to submit it. And in case you like this course, and you would like to learn more from me, then there's plenty of other courses that you can find here. Go ahead check them out now. I can't wait to meet you in the next one.