From Sketch to Vector Illustration - On the Beach

1. Introduction On the Beach : Do you want to get good at creating awesome vector illustrations using Adobe Illustrator? Well, you came to the right place. I wanted to capture a serene, inviting scenery and decided to go for a tropical beach. To make the illustration more relatable, I needed a person in it, and I a surfer studying the waves. To add some visual interest, I also introduced some textures by using the grain effect in Illustrator. And at the end of my workflow, I demonstrate how to use it in various ways. Whether you are an aspiring illustrator, digital artist, graphic designer, photographer, marketer, or simply someone with a passion for visual 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 Pervic, a certified LOB 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, Nilodeon, and BBC. Leveraging this extensive experience, I have carefully crafted this course to help you navigate AOB 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 word flows and techniques I show you and create something completely different than 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. Drawing the surfer's body: With most of my illustrations, I like to concentrate on the most exciting detail. And in this case, that's clearly the subject of the illustration, this girl who's just going surfing. So I am going to start with her. But I think the hair is going to be the trickiest part to nail. So I'm going to actually start with the upper body and then maybe the surf board itself. So let's get started. I'm going to use the pentel because I want this illustration to be very clean. And also just smooth curves all around. So I don't want to have lots of little details, and I feel like the pantal is the best for this. So I'm going to draw one shape here for the upper body. Let's start creating this first curve. Now, one thing that you can do is if you already want to create a curve, you know that this point here is going to be a curve, instead of just clicking first and then only start click and dragging in the next anchor point. What you can do is to click and drag already, even though you haven't created the shape yet, this will set up already the angle of your curve. So if I decide to go down this way, you can see it's already set up the right way for us. That's useful, and it will help us at the end as well when we close the shape off. So I will just come down here and then let's maybe create a sharp corner there by clicking one more time on the anchor point, create another curve up here. And I'm just going to come out here and then come up and click and drag. Click and drag. And then finally, if I just click and drag here. I just update that direction handle that we defined in the beginning. So that's one shape that we will need. I'm just going to change the color to this darker color because I would like to add some shadows. And for this, I will actually use the draw inside mode. So I select this shape, choose draw inside. And then still using the panel. I'm just going to start out here. You can drag. And what I want to do here is to define the sleeve and come out there, and then just fill in this area here at the bottom completely. So that's going to be this, and I'm just going to have to select that color again. So you can see we have the sleeve there already. And I will turn off the draw inside now because I will draw behind this shape to draw the other sleeve. That's just going to be a simple shape like this. And I'll send this behind the other one. Command left square bracket. And we can actually also already draw the arm. I'm just going to come down here and draw this. Again, it's going to be just a simple silhouette like that. Send it behind as well just like before. And then we also have another shape here for the neck of this swimsuit. Something like that. Send it behind other shape. And by the way, if you keep drawing things behind an object, so you want to keep things always going behind. There's also a drawing mode for that. So that's the second one here. You can always select that. If you keep drawing stuff that you want to go behind like now, if I select that, and I draw maybe something here starting from this point coming down. And then I'm just going to create this detail. And I changed the color to the skin tone that I wanted to use. You can see this automatically ended up going behind this initial shape that we created. All right. Now, let's draw the hand. So for this, I'm going to start drawing from here and maybe come up to this corner like that and come down. And this can be done with a single curve like this. Let's keep going down. And sometimes what I like to do is to just simplify some shapes. So instead of me drawing all the fingers, I'm just going to keep this simplified, and I will come back and add the details later. I just like to get the main shapes in place first to be able to better judge what I'm doing. So that's looking good, and this actually should be in front, so I will set the drawing back normally, and I'll bring this up here. Yeah, is looking good. Now, of course, together with the sketch, we have a little bit more indication of what is going to happen here. But like I said, we will come back and add some more details later. Now I'm going to draw the pants or the trouser. So for this, I start from this corner point here. I come down, create the shape, and I will actually keep this smooth coming down. We can have a sharp corner here, then I create curve down there and come up And then go down again, sharp curve or sharp corner curve line, and then come up here and maybe have a little bit more curve on this side like this. Okay, that's looking good. Let's close this off. Set this to the dark color and send it all the way to the back. Yeah. That's looking good. Now let's draw the surfboard. For the surfboard, we can do a very simple technique. I'm going to click and drag here at this point and already set up my direction handle to be tangent to the curve. Then I come up here, click and drag and drag it out as well in that direction. And I can change the color of this maybe to red just so we can see what we are doing and then use the commando Control key to adjust this other handle. Now, before I move on, I will use the altar option key and drag this point down, again, set up that tangent direction handle, which will allow us to create this next curve. And one thing that I don't want is when I connect to this point here is to mess up that initial direction handle that we created there. So I just show you this what happens. If I click and drag here, you can see that both sides of the direction handle is getting adjusted. So if you want to avoid this, just hold down the alter option key, and then clicking and dragging will only affect the new side of this curve. So I can adjust that, and it's already looking perfect. Just a useful little technique with the pen tool to draw curves, where you have obviously two curve segments next to each other, but they are interrupted on both sides with these sharp corners. Now, if you want to round these up, of course, we can use the corner widget, add a little bit of roundness there and a bit more roundness on the other side. For that to work, you have to make sure you only select one side. So use the direct selection tool that way you don't see that corner rigid, and when you're adjusting this, the other side is not affected. I like to use the corner rigids because they allow me to go back and remove them. So anytime I want to turn them back into sharp corners, I can do that. So it's a really good non destructive way of editing your parts. This looks really good. But I will put this behind everything else that I created so far, maybe apart from this hand, which is supposed to be going behind. So you can use the layers panel, drag things up and down or just use the keyboard shortcuts for arranging objects. I'm not even going to call these out. These are the ones I'm using, so the bring to front, send to back, or move them one step upward down with these shortcuts. So I use these all the time. I'm not going to mention it. So I'm going to continue drawing here. Let's just go down and draw the legs. Again, using the pen tool. We can come this way. I will actually use a clipping mask at the end to have all the shapes that come outside of the canvas or artboard to be adjusted and kept inside it. So I'm not worried about that at this time. I will send this back as well. And let's just change the color to pink just so we can see what we are doing. That looks good. Now Let's move here. A nice little curve, curve down, straight line. Then go up. We'll add a little bit of curve here, a little bit of curve there, and then close it, send it to the back, and that's looking good. Let's take a look at this without the sketch. Yeah. I quite like how everything is coming together. 3. Adding gradients and shading: Now for the surfboard, I might already apply a gradient because that's what I wanted to create here. So what you can do is use the gradient panel if you don't see that, go to the window menu and choose gradient. And then I'm going to choose that gradient there and make sure that it's applied to the field color and not the stroke. And what you can do is to press G on the keyboard to be able to see your gradient annotator. And I like to change things here, so I will double click on this color. Change the color to red. And on this side, I will use the yellow or orange color. And now we can just rotate this gradient and then drag it down to the angle that I wanted to have here. Yeah, looks good. Now, if you want to have a more abrupt transition. So in case, for instance, I wanted the left side of the surfboard to be the red color and the right side to be orange or yellow. What you can also do is to set up new points in the gradient. So I can add another point here and set this up also being the same red, and then set another point up here. So you just click underneath that gradient line and then set up that again to be the other yellow color that we had there. And then I can just move this up here. So these two points get very close to each other. And this is actually not even a real gradient. So if we turn off the sketch, you can see this, It's not even a real gradient, but I still like to do this sometimes, having a single object, and instead of creating two separate objects to define the yellow part and the red part. This way it's still one object, and I have very fine controls over where I want the colors to change. So the body is the one that is hiding the transition. If I were to move this shape away, we can still see that there is a little bit of gradient there's just hidden away. So this is a clever little technique that I like to use sometimes. Now, what I would like to also do is to have this shape selected. And I actually wanted to have a shadow cast on this. So for this, I'm going to draw inside. So this is turning into a clipping mask. And I'm just going to draw a big ellipse. So for this, I can just draw this big ellipse here, holding down the space bar, I can move it around. When I let the space bar go, I can adjust it, and I'm going to fill it in with this darker red color. And now, when you only need one side of a shape, a quick way to get rid of any unwanted parts is to shift to the eraser tool, that's shift E. Then hold down the altar option key and delete the parts that you don't need. So I will delete this, and I will delete that. So that way, we only have the shadows in these places, so in between the legs and on that side. Now, I would like to also add some shading on the legs. So I'm going to select them now. Turn off draw inside or press Shift D, select the legs, and then press shift d twice or again, use the draw mold tocals here in the toolbar. Now that we have this one selected, I'm going to actually use the pen tool here. Let's just draw this down. I'm going to do the shading here, and then just close this in and then fill it in with this darker color. So I'm not going to use the same dark color as that one. I'm using this color, which is actually used on the surfboard. That looks good, and maybe let's add a highlight as well on this side, that can run all the way down. It doesn't have to follow exactly the outline of the leg. So I intentionally create a separate path, come up and then fill it in with white. Now, this will only show properly once we have colors behind. But just so you can see it, I'm going to turn this off now, and maybe we can already create our background layer, which will be useful in this case. Let's just create that. And then on that background layer, I can just fill in the sea already now. Again, this shape can go all the way out here for now. And let's just fill this in with the sea color. So that's the feel. And yeah, that looks good. So we can see without the sketch. That's the highlight we created, but we can always come back, make adjustments to it, maybe make it a bit narrower. Here on the top, it can be a little bit wider. Yeah, just like that. That looks good. Let's turn off the draw inside, select this other shape, and let's repeat this. So I will draw inside this side. I'm going to use the pan tool, and let's just draw down this segment here. I'm just drawing the shading first. So that's going to be this color. And then command click away, so I can start a new line, and I'm going to draw down this way. Try to make it look similar to the other side, like that. And then set it to White field. And then we can come back and adjust his an goes a bit can go even closer, like that. Maybe here on the top, we can drag it out a bit wider. Okay, that looks good, obviously, I have a source of light in my head. I imagined it coming from the right side. So that's consistent. We have the highlights here, shadows there. Again, the shadow is cast in this way. The shadows again are cast on that side. So that's again something that you have to decide on at the beginning and try to be consistent. For the surfboard, I also would like to make some changes. I'm going to look my background color for now or background layer just so it doesn't get in the way. I go back into draw normal first and select the surfboard. And this is already a clipping group because we created the shading earlier on. So I'm going to just select that clipping path and go back to draw inside. So we are revisiting this shape. And I am going to draw with the pen tool. So I'm going to draw a shape up here following the edge of the surfboard. Like that, and then go all the way here like this. Now let's close this around like that. I'm going to set this to white fill, or maybe let's use this other color just so we can see it better. Let's turn off the sketch, so we can judge it. Now, I will definitely use white on this, but maybe we can use a gradient instead. So for the shape that we created, I'm going to assign a gradient. And by default, it goes back to the previously used gradient. So if I use my gradient annotator, there's G on the keyboard, I can see exactly what's happening here. Now I want to change this first stop to be white. And I actually want this also to have an angle. So let's just drag this up here. You have to click when you see this cursor, so closer to this end of the gradient, you can drag it. I think it's only working on the right side of the gradient when you are using a linear gradient, so always go close to the right side, and then you get that cursor option. And when you're happy, you can obviously reposition this, drag it further to the left, or further to the right I have this white color set up here, and I will drag this gradient off. So just drag it away that removes it, and I can drag this one away as well. And this other gradient, I want to be yellow. So transitioning from white to yellow. And maybe we can set up an additional gradient. Here at the end, I'm going to add one more. I will click on that, and let's just use this dark red as well. So that way, we have three colors that we are transitioning between. The white can come a bit further down. That looks good. So it starts off as a bright highlight. And again, I'm going to go back to my background layer just so we have something here that we can see. I will actually duplicate this shape commando Control C and then Comando Control F, and then the one below. We'll just extend up to here, and I will fill this with that's going to be a sky color. So now we can see how this highlight is looking on the surfboard, but I will come back and use the direct selection tool to move these points around the bit. So I want this to be thinner. Really just want the edge of it to be highlighted. Just like that. Drag it down a bit. Maybe this can come a bit this way. And then drag this one up here. Okay. That looks quite good. Maybe let's just drag this up a bit more. Yeah, finish off there, and drag this out as well a bit more. Maybe this can come high again just to make it very thin. Yeah. That looks good. Now, we will introduce some noise later on to create some extra texture. But for now, I'm happy with the way this looks. 4. Drawing the head and hair details: I actually wanted to also have another highlight created here for this shape. So I'm going to go back to that clip group, and I'm going to select the clipping group itself. And by the way, this is also something to keep in mind when you start using Jaw inside and you start creating clipping masks that if you have already a clipping mask, you won't just be able to quickly select it by clicking anywhere on it. So like this shape here and this shape are both clipping masks. And as you can see if I just click on them, I can't select them directly. While, for instance, this one, which is just a normal object or the hand, I can easily select. The legs are clipping masks or clipping groups. So again, I can only select them by clicking on their outlines. So that's just something to keep in mind. Again, this shape, I had to click on the outline. And actually, from the layers panel, I can select directly the clipping mask itself, and then choose draw inside from the toolbar, and then use an ellipse. And I actually wanted this to be something like this. So this section here, want to be yellow. And the good thing is that we can actually put this underneath the shading. So this way, we still have the shading visible, but this high light that we added here on the top can be now easily adjusted. So I can drag it up a bit, maybe drag it out this way, drag that one down as well. Then we get that curve that I was looking for. So her right shoulder is in the sun, and that's just looking brighter. I'm going to go back to draw normal. And now it's probably time to draw the head. So I'm going to draw first the neck. This is just a simple shape. Going down like that. And the base color of this is going to be pink. F now, I'm going to turn off the background color just to make it easier to draw this. Send it all the way to the back. And then let's use draw inside on this again. For clipping mask, I will use the pen tool and set up the shading this way. So I want to be dark section. I'll set this to the darkest color that we have, and then I'm going to draw a white outline here for the highlight or rim light. And then maybe I would draw another line running down here, which is going to be the darker red, and this can go underneath the shading. Now, the white outline will only show once we have the background, but we will see that later. Now let's draw the face. For this, I'm going to start drawing up here, create the jaw. And we can actually zoom a little bit closer. Come up here. I'm going to use an outline for this just so we can see better what we are doing. And I noticed that we started drawing this inside the clipping mass. I'm going to go back to draw normal because this is supposed to be drawn outside. So we can draw this. I just copy pasted in this detail. So we have the nose detail coming out here. I'm planning to draw this all with a single line. Going up like that. We won't actually see the eye, so I will draw that later. It's not looking that great yet, but I will add more detail on it later. I'm just going to keep this simple And I will set this one to also be pink, the field, nose stroke needed. And then I'm going to use draw inside. And then we will just draw a white rectangle here. Set the field to white. Let's just bring back our background so we can see what we are doing. And then I'll draw another shape for the nose. I just want this to be shaded. Like that. I was using the pento I will use this darker red. And maybe we should have also a highlight here for the jaw line. For this, I'm going to use the pentle once more and just come and run down here along the edge and fill it in with the darker red color. Like that. Can I adjust this a bit? Does I have to be perfectly following the edge. Something like that. It's hard to see it at this point. We can see it without the sketch. And maybe let's just adjust things a little bit here, have a little bit more roundness there. And also, I will go back to the actual outline of this clipping mask, and I will round the chin down a bit. Like that. Okay. Now once we have the hair, it will make more sense what we are doing here. So let's start drawing the hair details. So for the hair, I imagine this very minimal design, just a few strands of hair defining how it looks. And I will probably only use two colors or maybe three. So let's try to keep things very minimal. I'm going to start up here to draw the first darker detail that runs down defining this angle. So that can come down here and then go back up. Staying close to that curve and the nicely closing up here on the top. And let's set this to this darker color. And then we just have to make sure that this is in the right layer. It actually ended up going in the background layer, but I'm going to drag it up and make sure it's moved all the way to the top. Now, let's refine this a little bit. So I want nice smooth transitions here. I don't want the direction handles to overlap the path itself. That's when you get interruptions. Here as well, I would like this to be coming down a bit further. That's looking good. Now I'm going to draw the next detail. We can draw this one up here. Like that. This can be straight. Coming down, I will already set this up so we can see the color that I'm adding. And I think we can come down here and then curve it. That's one line. Then we can draw another one coming this way, can overlap a bit, like that. Come back down. Close to the other shape, but not overlapping it this time coming down here and close it. Okay? And this should be again going in the right layer. I'm not sure why it's adding always in the background layer. I'm just going to lock that background layer so we don't accidentally keep drawing things there. We can move these two shapes up here on the top. Now it still looks very weird, but I'm going to now add the highlight. So this is the one that's going to define the top of the head. Just going to draw around it here. Let's go up there. Row down a bit. Something like this, come down all the way here, then define this angle here. Go behind this shape. Then come out a bit this direction. And then this is the front of the hair. It's important to get this curve right, and set it to white and set it to the back. Just like that. I can refine this path a bit, have that angle move this way a bit, and I feel like this shape needs to be refined here, so maybe this one can come up to be aligned and go that way. That looks good. The shape can also come up a bit higher and the nose can be curved up a bit as well. Just drag this up slightly. That can move up as well. The shading creating more of an angle. And for the mouth, I want to probably have this a little bit higher. Maybe even higher these couple of points can come up here. And then this detail here, the shading can go underneath the front wide bit. So let's take a look at this without the sketch. Yeah. It's coming together. It's a very minimal design for the head. Like I said, with the sketch, I can finish off just adding maybe two more shapes here that will define the back, or maybe three. We'll see how much we need. First, I will start drawing this with the darker color. There's our next shape running up there that defines that silhouette. And then maybe come down here. Go up again and close it off with a nice curve. Then we can have another shape running out this way. Like. Like that. And then finally, maybe one last shape, which I bring down here. And then close it off like that. So what you can see here is that I always kept in mind the outline of that original sketch. But I tried to simplify it as much as I could. So have the highlights here, the shading here on the left, generally, this would be an outline that you can draw with one path, and then you can draw these shapes inside it. But sometimes I like to have that freedom of not being restricted by a clipping mask. So I can easily move these shapes around outside of it and judge it later if I want these shapes to come out in a certain angle or not. So although clipping masks are great, It can sometimes feel a bit limited to be working them. So like even this shape, I can independently move to the left a bit if I feel like that defines the shape of the head better. And for the mouth, I feel like we need a little bit more definition here, so I will round this shape up and also maybe round this detail a bit more. And then this section can actually be moved up a bit more like that. That looks a bit softer. Let's look at this from a distance. It is coming together. I will introduce some shading on the hair later, but for now, I am happy with the way this looks. Maybe we can have just one more shape running down here. Just define this section of the hair. Again set with the dark color like that. And maybe this can be moved down a bit here. Yeah. I feel like that's a good little detail there. Now, these points here can be turned into sharp corners. I created them as soft curves, but I'm not sure if that was a good idea since all the other details have sharp corners. So let's just take a look at this from a distance. And of course, we can still use the pen tool, hold down the old option key and add some curves on these on the sides of it, but the corner point stays. And I feel like that's helping to make it look more interesting. Yeah, I like this, but maybe this point can come down a bit just to have a good distribution of detail. Like I said, very minimal way of indicating hair. 5. Drawing the hand: And finally, I promise that we will refine the hand, so that's something that I'm going to do now quickly. And I will come back to this shape that we created. And I'm just going to check my sketch. So I wanted the knuckles to be here, which means that all of this bottom section here I can delete. And instead of drawing a shape there, I will just use additional shapes to draw the digits independently. So I will use the eraser tool, take this off. Of that section, and I can use the object path simplify option to reduce the amount of anchor points here. That looks already much better. Now let's draw this first digit here. Coming down. I think I wanted it to be curving here somewhere. It's hard to see the sketch on this dark color so I can just temporarily turn that off from the layers panel. So yet, something like that, and then go back up like this. This shape can be set to white because that's where the highlight is going to be. Then the next digit is going to cover this up. I draw the next shape. Come down, curve a bit here, and then curve curve curve and then close. This one can be that pink color. Then let's draw another shape and similar to before. I create the digits other finger ready. And then finally, the small one coming out here and finish that off. Okay. The thumb is not going to be visible from this side, but this finger can come a little bit closer. That this shape can be aligned to it. Yeah, I feel like that looks better. So there is already a highlight here, but we can move these shapes around a bit just so we align them better. And I will actually use the darker color on these two, since we will also have a shading on the hand. So I'm just going to select the hand now and choose raw inside. And then let's draw the shading. So this will run down around here and then come up. This side and then follow the edge up this way. Up, and then close it around. So let's see how this looks. This should be this darker color. And then on the other side, we want the white detail to go up. So from this point, or maybe somewhere from here, we can start it and then go up. Follow this outline and create the highlight that we needed. Like that, go do, fill it in with white. And let's take a look at this without the sketch and also turn off the draw inside mode just to be able to better judge it. Okay? Now, let's not forget that we had a pens here, which I temporarily turned off. And with that, it's coming together very nicely. So this finger here, I was originally planning to have perfect alignment on. I will use the direct selection tool, select that point and align it here. Maybe we can even have a little bit of a gap between the fingers. Maybe I can add an additional point here on it and drag it down. Make it look like it's curving in there. And then this shape here maybe can come up a bit. And then just drag this out up there. This anchor point as well to create a nice curve for it. And then this finger can also come up slightly, just to have some separation between them. Let's take a look at this from a distance. Yeah, I feel like this needs to come down as we felt a bit too long. To come down maybe here. And this highlight can come here on the top a bit further inside like that, like that. And maybe this one can be narrower as well. Okay. So that is looking much better. We have more details on the hands, more detail on the hair. But now we can take a look at this from a distance. And let's not forget to put everything together into a group. So I select all and then commando Control G. And let's just call this surfer. So we have our background and the surfer girl so far, which is a single object on this additional layer. And if I turn back the sketch, we have a few additional details that we will need to add before we can move on to adding the texturing that will make everything look more exciting in the end. 6. Beach, waves and clouds: So it's time to add some additional details. First, I would like to define the beach. So for this, I'm going to draw just a quick shape down here. Which is going to be the sand. So just very quick and simple. Set it to yellow, and this can already be placed under the surfer, so behind her. And probably it's the right time to also set up a global mask that this is a technique that I use often when I want to keep things inside the artboard, but I still would like to have separate layers created. So what I normally do, and I use this in a couple of other projects already in this course is to create a new layer and call it mask. Then create a shape, And in this case, I would like to have the shape exactly the same size as my artboard. So I draw it out that way, aligned to the artboard. While this is the only shape on this new layer, I can go to the layers panel menu and choose make clipping mask. That will turn this whole layer into a mask, and then drag the illustration layer into this layer. And then also the background layer can be dragged there. Just make sure you first close the other layer, that way, they won't end up being in the same layer. So now we have the same structure as before, but the good news is that whatever we are creating from now on inside either of these or maybe even above or below, it's going to be automatically masked out by this square that we created here on top. So that's our mask. And this is why I call a global mask effect. So the good thing is that if I have this path selected here, if I now draw another shape, let's just draw the form, which I want to have above the sand created here following closely, the outline of the send. You can see it's automatically masked out. So I'm not seeing anything outside of the artboard. I'm just going to set this to white and send it behind the send like that. And then let's just fix this corner here, round it down a bit. I want these to be more round like that. Okay, I'm going to use the pencil tool just quickly to draw a couple of addition or shapes here. These are one to be a little bit more organic. So there's one set to white. Let's draw another one here. Also set to white. Maybe one other little foam detail here. Set to white, one more here. You can consider this the highlights on the waves as well. But it's more like the foam when the waves hit the beach. There's one there. That's just a another one here on the left side. Okay, looks good. Now I want to have a larger wave detail running across the whole canvas. For this, I'm going to use a curve with the pen tool, drag it up this way. I'll set this already to be white and then come back down curving this way. Maybe we can have a detail added like that. And then run down across and curve like this. Okay. That looks good. Maybe let's just make this more curved. And then behind this, we can have a darker shape that's defining the volume of the wave. That can be aligned to this path here. And this can be a darker blue like that, and just send it behind the foam or the white, brighter color. And the surfer, I'm going to actually keep above everything. Maybe we can even drag it out just to have it on its own detail. And to be honest, all of these additional details could go in the background in the end. For now, I'm just going to keep it separate. Maybe this path here. I can use the pen tool, hold down alter option key. And drag it up a little bit, just to have a little bit of curve on it and drag it down like that like an S curve. And maybe we can also have a bit of this depth created here on the left side with the penal, again, I'm just drawing another shape and make sure that this goes behind the other one as well. So let's just set it back there. Okay, that's looking good. And then maybe one additional shape. I'm just going to draw here that runs across the canvas. Just drawing this with the pen tool just very quickly, very thin detail I want this to be. Just a very subtle indication of another break in the water. Trying to create an interesting detail here and then set it to white. That's just another indication of the waves. And then we will add some more texturing later. But now I feel like the water looks good. If I lock the surfa layer, background layer is already locked. I can just select all of these shapes here, and we can call it waves and sand. So I created this group, call it waves and sand. And like I said before, I can drop this into the background layer because it would make sense to have it there. So the whole background is now together. And I will actually draw the clouds now, again, in the background layer, so I will lock everything else. So here while we are in the background layer, I'm going to draw the clouds quickly. And for this shape, I'm going to use the pen tool. I will just click here, click and drag, define that first curve, then click on this point again. And you can see this is actually behind the surfboard, but I still like to define it based on my sketch, just in case I want to move the surfer around. I will have those details already drawn in the background. It doesn't take long to draw these curves. It's a very quick little detail, but it will define the depth in the illustration. So there we have it. This will have to go under the water detail. And then let's draw the next segment here. Again, click and drag. Click, click and drag. Click. Click and drag. I can have a little bit more detail here. And drag. Maybe this can come out a bit further. Just use the space bar there. And the bigger curve, and one more here. Then we can just go down, close it. The global mask is already affecting this, now I just place it behind the water. I actually wanted to have maybe one more cloud created up here. This one, I'm just going to have a line at the bottom that defines the edge of it. Maybe can draw this shape with a point on the top. Then another one point at the bottom, like that. And then maybe drag this point out a bit. Keep it nice and straight. And then we can draw one more here quickly. Pen tool, click, and then shift click to make sure it's horizontal, and then draw these shapes one curve, another curve. Here, I'm going to click and drag on the top. Calm down. Click, and then maybe just one more curve here. Maybe one last one. And then close it off. I'll just drag this point with the direct selection tool a little bit out while holding down the Shift key. Maybe this one as well, shift drag that way. Okay, so we have these good horizontal lines established. Let's see it without the sketch. Yeah. That's looking quite nice. 7. Drawing the plants: Now we just need the plants. So this is something that I can do maybe on this empty layer, the one I called illustration. This can be just renamed to plants or leaves, and this is actually going to be above the surfa, so I already set it up the way I wanted it. And then here, I'm going to use the sketch as my guide. I will draw these large shapes first here on the top, so I will start here, click and drag. Click and then click and drag. That's our first shap ready. Set it to dark color. Then let's draw the next one. Again, click and drag. Here at the bottom, click and drag. Close this off. And one more click and drag and close it off. Like that. And now what I'm going to do is to draw some shapes to cut out of these larger shapes. And it's actually quite tricky to see this because of the sketch is not showing up properly. So I'm just going to brighten these up while I'm drawing them. So I can see my original sketch. Although it's fairly simple to do this. I'm just going to draw these shapes maybe with white. We can better see where they are going to cut into it. There's one, then we can draw the next one going up, maybe even going outside of the frame like that. One more here. And one more going up there. Like this. And now I can just select all of these together. Use the shape builder tool, which is Shift M, hold down alter option key, and just cut these out of the main shape. So you just draw over them, and there you go. That looks quite good. So this one, I can already set back to the darker color, which is going to be used as the main color for the palm leaves. Now here, again, I'm just going to draw this quickly. Let's have a small little detail here first. That's going to cut into it. I'll set this to white just so I can see it better. Nice little detail here. I can have this one curving this way as well. And I just don't want to have these very tiny narrow lines, so I will just adjust this and maybe set it to a corner point. A click on it. So it doesn't end up being a smooth point. Then I can have a little triangle coming up here. And I'm actually going to speed this up because it's a process that is just time consuming, but it's repetitive. So I will continue once I have all of these shapes in place. Oh. So, as you can see, I added some additional floral details here on the left side, and I'm just going to make sure that this is all in the same group, so I'll turn it off and on. We have obviously the surfer and the background. So three main groups. And of course, our mask, which, if I turn off, we can see all the shapes going outside of the. Going to turn that back on. It's a quick way of disableling and enableling the mask. And one thing that I noticed here is that I ended up creating these very narrow shapes. I don't like to see these. So this one, again, I'm going to set to a corner point that way that won't happen. And then also, these little details like the tip of this cloud is something that I would like to fix. So I will unlock the background layer, and that either needs to come out a bit more this way, or it has to finish before the plant or just finish behind the plant. It's just good to avoid having these small little details like that. That looks more like a mistake. So I will just strike this out, have a little bit more confidence on that line. And just going to double check if there's anything that's looking strange. Maybe here we can have this shape coming down a bit more. That way, it's not aligned, and again, creating a tangent here where these lines appear at the same point from the illustration. And the same thing, maybe here I can move this up a bit like that. That looks a bit better. Okay? And maybe at the bottom, as well, just fixing these things. It's good to see, actually, I like the way it was. Maybe this one can come a little bit closer. Detail is big enough for it to stand out. And I just noticed that our mask is not perfectly aligned to the edge of the artboard. So I'm just going to do that, come closer and align it exactly there. And I think we can do the same thing here on the right side as well. Just align it there as well like that. Now, looking at the surfer, there's just one quick fix I wanted to do here. I actually would like chin or jaw line to be a bit further in. So I'm just going to drag that in this way. And then this shape that we had for the shading will also need to be adjusted. Over so slightly. And it's almost like with a fresh eye when you work on some other parts of the illustration, you end up seeing these mistakes like this shape as why, we will use the pen tool hold down alter option key and add a bit of curve on it, instead of it being completely straight. That looks much better already. Looks like it defines that shape much better. And then this shading here can come down a bit because the chin is now further up this way. Maybe this shape can also come out a bit like that. And generally, the neck, I think, can be a bit smaller. So if I select that, I can just highlight these two points and drag it in a bit. Yeah, just a bit thinner. Maybe even go more this way. And then the high light can also follow the changes. But I also noticed that this shape should be above the highlight like that. That's much better now. Okay, subtle refinements there on the head. Now, one minor thing I also just noticed is that for the pans, I don't have a highlight, so that's something we can quickly fix. Use the draw inside mode and just use the pen tool and draw a shape here. Just very quickly fixing this and set that to white. And then we can just adjust it. Create a very thin line. I want to make sure the hand is still visible and also here on the top. This needs to make sure that it completely covers that shape. Mm hm, like that. That looks better. Let's turn off draw inside and zoom back a bit. Yeah, I feel like that adds a bit more detail there. And we wanted to maybe we could even have a little bit of highlight showing here, but that's probably in the shade, so it probably won't be directly affected by the sun. But yeah, if we wanted to, we could also add a little bit of white here. I'm going to skip that for now, but maybe we can come back and add it later. But now we are ready to add the final finesse and detail at the texturing. 8. Creating texture with the Grain Effect: For the style of this illustration, I feel like the texturing would work really well with the noise effect. I'm going to show you how I normally apply this, and I will use it in a couple of different ways throughout the illustration. First, I'm going to start with the waves or the water. I'm going to select that shape that I created in the background layer, and then copy paste it. Command or Control C, command or Control F. So I'll just show you in the layers panel. There's our duplicate layer or tuplicate object. And I can change the color of this to the darker blue color. That. And then I will click on M mask in the transparency panel. Turn off the clip. Click on the mask icon and then paste again at the same shape. So that's commando Control F one more time. Now, this shape should be set to black. So we can double click on the switch and set it to black. So it's completely hidden. So whenever you use black in an opacity mask, it's going to hide your object. Of course, you can change the size of this shape. It doesn't have to be exactly the same shape as the original one, but this is something that we can change later anytime. While this one is set up, I will actually switch to a gradient. So this object, instead of just being black, should be black and white gradient. So I will click on this option here. It's a linear gradient, and I'm going to use the gradient antator by pressing G on the keyboard and drag this down. Actually want this to be starting on the top. And then come down. Maybe have a smaller transition, something like this. I can align it up here. If I hold down the shift key, I can make sure that it's perfectly vertical. Okay. So we have a reveal effect essentially of this shape is showing only here on the top, and it's all hidden down at the bottom. So from that black point down, it's completely hidden, and from here to here it's starting to show. So it's a very subtle gradient effect there. But here comes the interesting bit. We actually going to apply an effect on this mask. So the shape that we are using to mask this detail out, we will be using the effect menu texture grain option. And the settings that I like to use is the following. Here on the right, you can choose the stipd or sipled effect. And then the intensity, I like to keep fairly low and the contrast on zero. If we increase the contrast, it's just going to make the spread or the transition between the black and white parts to abrupt. So contrast, I like to keep on the lowest value. And intensity, like I said, I like to keep lower because it's going to create an interesting effect for us, you will see later on. So I will set this up to around 35 something like this, I think looks good. So let's click. And already you can see what we achieved. We have this cool pixelated texture effect that we have here on the top, but we also have some of these specs showing at the bottom. That's thanks to the lower intensity that we used. If I were to go back and select this shape and increase the intensity of the grain effect, which is available or accessible through the appearance panel. So by going back there, increasing the intensity, I would eliminate those specs, and I would only have the effect up here. But I actually prefer it this way, so I'm going to have some of those details further down as well. Now, the only issue with the grain effect is that it's a roster effect. And if you go to the effect menu on the document roster effect settings, you might need to increase your resolution for it to show up like this. So if you have something different, let's just say you have something very low like ten PPI, it's going to look extremely pixelated like that, which could actually be a cool effect if you want to go for that. But the higher you set your resolution, the more detailed it will become. I'm not going to go about 72 PPI. I think that's plenty for what I want to achieve. But you have to remember to always check this, especially if you re size or scale, your illustration, you always have to adjust the document roster effect settings. However, there is a way to vectorize this, and I actually like to do that. So instead of keeping it like this, what we will do is to have this shape selected, so the one inside the mask, and I will go up to the object menu and choose expand appearance. So this is going to prevent me to be able to go back to adjust the green settings anymore. But this is the first step for vectorizing this effect. Next step is to click on image trace while this shape is still selected. So remember we are still working on the mask. So image trays, and then click on the settings to be able to see the image tras and be able to refine the settings. So that's the icon you need to click on. And then here, first thing you have to make sure is the parts are set to 100%. The corners can be reduced to either minimal value or close to minimal. Let's just say what happens if we set it to 0%. It doesn't really make that much difference here. What's going to make a difference is once we start adjusting the noise. But first, make sure you turn on simplify as well. And also the ignore color should be on, and the snap curse to lines can be turned off. These are all ways of reducing the amount of anchor points and parts generated with image traces. And that is important because if you end up having too much, then it will be a very heavy illustrator file, and it will be hard to come back and make changes to it. So yeah, use these settings, and now we are ready to adjust the noise. So I'm going to first type in five pixels. And let's see what happens. It's going to process this, and that already looks interesting. But let's see what happens if we go down a bit. I'm going to type in four. And you have to be careful with this. The lower you go with the noise value, the more it's going to take for it to render. And I think the three point should be working well. It's already rendering quite a lot. And I can see it's 40,000 anchors that has been created even with the simplify on. And what I like to do to test the vectorization is to use this little icon. Hold it down to see the original peak soles. And then when you let go, you can see the vectorized version. And we can see that this effect is applied here further down as well, thanks to the intensity or lower intensity that we used. And it looks quite nice here on the top as well, let's just check it on the left side. Yeah, I like how this looks. So now we can expand this. So again, this is going to make this settings that we used here in the imagery spanel finalized. By clicking on Expand, it's going to actually turn into a vectorized object. Close the image ase panel. And then now what we can do is to move this up and down just to see how it's affecting our illustration. I think it's in a good place already, but I can just drag this up a little bit more. Now, don't forget that this effect is applied to an object, which can be changed in color, so I can click back on the object itself, exiting the opacity mask. And if I change this to a darker color, that's what's going to appear there or any other color that I want to use. Could be used for highlights as well, if I wanted to. But in this case, it makes sense to use this darker color, and it works quite well, so we can see which one we prefer. I think that is a good one for this. So that's the first detail that we created using this noise effect. But I would like to introduce this on a couple of additional details like the send. It would make sense to use it there as well. So I'm just going to select that, copy, paste it. And in this case, because I don't have the swatch set up, I'm just going to double click on the swatch and just make it a little bit darker, something like that. Maybe a bit more saturated as well. Maybe we can slightly drag it down on the Hu wheel as well. Let's click. So this is again a duplicate object, just like before, we have this one and below it, we have the original color. So now having this one selected, I can go into make mask and turn off the clip, select the mask, and paste the shape in again, commando Control F, and then apply the gradient on it, the linear gradient. And then we can just use the gradient tool and apply it again. So here, I would like to have this e fact appearing on the top. Like that. Maybe we can drag it up a bit, make the transition smaller, like this. So first, you have to judge your gradient without the effect, whether you like it or not. And I feel like it adds to the illustration, but I want to break this up instead of it being so smooth. That's why I'm using this grain effect. So why this mask is selected, I am going to go to the effect menu, and now we can just reapply the previously U settings. So apply green. The good news, we don't have to do anything else here. Maybe we can just adjust the angle a little bit. I click and drag up here. And I want this to be quite subtle like this. And then we can go into object menu, expand appearance, then image trace. And unfortunately, the image trace settings were not saved. That's something that you can save as a pre set, so you can come here and save it. But for now, I'm just going to turn things on again. So ignore color, turn off the snap feature. I want to simplify part on maximum corners on minimum. And then noise I believe we used in the N three pixels. So let's see how that looks. Once I click in another section, it's going to generate it for us. Yeah, that looks good. I'm going to expand this, and then we can close this window, and we can just move this up a little bit. I think I only want to see it on the edge there. Another cool thing that you can do, of course, is that you can still move these points around. If you wanted the fact to follow this shape a bit better. You can just use tools like the Warp tool, and I'm going to alt or option click and drag, make the brush size bigger, and then just drag these points down, so you can move this down. And if you hide the edges, going to the view menu, you choose hide edges from here, I already use my keyboard shortcut F three for this, then you will be able to do this better. So it will disappear each time you are doing this. So that's better aligned to the edge. Maybe we can also drag it down a bit more here. And yeah, that's looking good. Now, if I want to change the color, I can always come back. If I feel like it's a bit too dark, we can refine it, make it more subtle, like that. So it's barely noticeable, but it's still there. It's a nice little detail. 9. Using the Grain Effect on the surfer: Of course, we can also apply this on smaller scale. Like, for instance, here on the shoulder, we can apply it. I'm going to just close the background layer lock it for now and then have this shape selected. And if you recall, this is a clipping mask. So if I have the clipping mask selected, I can switch back to draw inside or just simply place an object inside it in the layer spanel. I just want to have another circle created here with the orange color. And what I'm going to do is to go in to make mask for this, like before, turn off the clip option and just paste the same shape in here, so the same circle. But this time, instead of using the gradient on the field color, I will actually remove the field color and apply the gradient on the stroke. So having the stroke attribute selected, I'm going to choose linear gradient, and then use this third option when the gradient is applied from the center, to the outside of the shape, so we can create it like this, and I will increase the size of this stroke effect. Maybe go up to 100 points. And then temporarily, the preview might not show correctly because we have a clipping mask, and inside it, we have an object with an opacity mask. So sometimes illustrator is struggling to show things properly. But don't worry, once you apply the grain on this, so we go up to the effect menu and choose apply grain, it should look already better. But one thing that you might need to do is to reverse the colors of your gradient, which you can do from the gradient panel with this icon. So if I click on that, I can check which one is the one I wanted to create. I actually feel like this is the one that works better. But if I use these gradient stops here, I can see how I can control this. So I can make the transition a bit smoother like that. And we can actually increase the stroke size a bit, just so we have a larger transition. And maybe we can adjust these stops as well. Yeah, I think that looks quite good. And now it's completely up to you whether you want to vectorize this or not, but I normally prefer to do that. So I'm going to select the opacity mask, make sure this shape is highlighted. I go through the same steps, expand appearance, image trace, and then settings. Once again, I forgot to say it as a template. I will make sure I do it this time, so I will set the parts higher corners lower, and then the noise this time because it's a smaller shape. I will try to do two pixels. Maybe we can even go down to one pixel. That just makes it more detailed. That looks good. And by the way, the complexity can also be controlled with the anchors. If you drag them all the way down, you will see that the anchors go down to 21,000. If I drag it all the way up to 100, it goes up to 30,000. In this case, I feel like that amount of detail will work quite nicely. And then I expand this. And then, of course, we don't need all of these extra detail. So I can use the eraser tool, hold down alto option key, and delete all of these unnecessary details. And then we can also delete from here on the top. And then now we can just move this around. This actually can come up a bit higher. We hide the edges. We can see exactly what we are doing. So we can align this closer to what we wanted to create here. Maybe it would be wise to also go back to the shape itself and just drag that up a little bit. And if I just want to avoid creating the texture on the shading, what we can do is to drag this shape on the shading layer like that. So this way it's set up the way I wanted it. And we can go back to the fact. And just move it around a bit. And I feel like that looks quite nice. Okay. So again, it's just a more subtle transition between the two sides. But the good thing about this is that it's completely vector based. And just to bring the details of the hair a little bit together, I'm going to do something quite similar here. I will click outside of the opacity mask, and I'm just going to draw a shape with the pen tool. Let's just draw it around here. Like that, and then follow it up that way. Fill it in with this dark color, not for the stroke, but the field, and then copy this shape, going to make mask, turn off clipping and paste the same shape, that main shape that we created. And then let's use the black and white gradient on it, not on the stroke, but on the fiel. And in this case, maybe we can even use the radial gradient, or the second one, and we can just set it up with the reverse option in the direction that we need, so we can extend this on both sides. Like that. This point and that point, I can just do it from here on the panel, makes it a little bit easier. So this is the perimeter of the effect. We can drag this out a bit more, and then we can just drag the whole thing in the middle. Like that. We can also squeeze this into more of an ellipse, and we can even rotate it around. And then when we are happy with the effect, we can go up to the effect menu and choose apply grain. And the cool thing about this technique is that before you do the vectorization, you can actually control the grain much better, so you still have your gradient annotator. You can really see what you're doing when you're adjusting that. You can go back and forth. You can adjust these points as well. And I essentially just wanted a little bit of detail that connects the hair together. So I don't want this to be too dense. Something like this works well. And then now I can go into object, expand appearance, then image trace. And I still haven't saved these preset. I always forget, so I'm just going to go through the settings again, ignore color, simplify, and noise, again, we can do three points on this three pixels. And maybe even go down to one in this case. Yeah, that's much more detailed. And just so we can see how to save the preset. All you have to do is to click here and choose Save new preset. And I'm going to call this noise effect. So now it's saved. And it's looking good. The only thing I would like to do is once I expanded it is to drag it a bit out. So the edges are not showing. They were showing a bit before. Now the edges are gone. And yeah, it looks good. Maybe here. I can drag that down a bit as well. Okay. Let's close the image trace option. And then maybe we can just select the object itself and adjust the outline a bit on this by dragging these points here. I can just show the texture where it makes most sense. 10. Using the Grain Effect for masking: Maybe one final example of me showing how to use the texture. For this, I'm going to use these three leaves here, and I want to make it look like they are see through, so we want to reveal the sky behind them. So what I will do first of all is to group them together. So the three shapes selected commando Control G. Then I am going to use the make mask option. And turn off clip. And this time, instead of using the original shapes, I'm just going to use some ellipses because these original shapes are also like big ellipses or parts of ellipses. And I just have to make sure that I'm in the opacity mask. So once the group is selected, I click on the opacity mask and then draw the shapes. So the first ellipse that I want to create is here, and I'm just going to rotate this a bit, so it's more aligned to that other shape up there. And then I will apply the linear gradient on this and I can set up the gradient. I only want the bottom of the leaves to a bit texturized like that. And then we can already go into effect, apply grain, And then before you expand this effect, of course, you have the control over how the spread is. So we can drag this out a bit more, have more of a transition or less, be more subtle, like this. And then you can even flip this around by using the reverse option. So that way we can have it starting here, and we can also make this look more interesting to create the division this way. I drag it out a bit, maybe the transition can start further out like that. And this way, it will look a bit like there is a split in the leaf. So yeah, that shape that we created can be moved a little bit higher. But yeah, that essentially creates a slightly more interesting detail. So we have a solid outline, but within the shape itself, we see through a bit. And what we can do since the whole thing is a group, is to duplicate this object within the opacity muscles, have that ellipse selected, and then old or option, click and drag to duplicate it out. Now, the only thing is that you have to be careful that once these shapes overlap each other, they are going to affect what you can see and what is it in a way. So one thing that you can do is to have this ellipse cut, duplicate it, select the two together, and then use the shape builder tool delete these parts. So it becomes like just a crescent or a moon shape. And then that one is not going to affect the other details. So this way, we can set this up exactly the way we wanted it. So align this up here, and then using the gradient tool, we can still adjust the values as well. That looks quite nice. And then now we just copy this shape, paste it again, drag it up and rotate it one more time. I don't want to overlap this other shape, so I can even use the eraser tool. Let's shift the and then old or option key to delete from it, drag it up here, align it. Create that nice division in the shape, and then we can use the gradient tool and just align it exactly the way we wanted it. Just a very subtle effect like that. Okay. So we can see this from a distance. And these textures definitely add more interest, and we could use the same thing on the left side as well by exiting the mask and locking this group here on the right. You can just use Commando Control two on the keyboard that quickly locks it. And then Commando Control A should only select these other details, which once again, I will group together into another detail. This can be placed in the plants as well. So that's one big object here which I can move around. And just like before, I'm going to make a mask, turn off clipping, and then I'm going to use an ellipse, or it can even be a rectangle, just make sure you draw it inside the opacity mask. So I'll just draw this quickly and set it up as a radial gradient in this case. That could also work. And then we can just adjust it, maybe reverse it. That makes more sense here, and then just drag this down, drag it up, drag it in. Like this. And then let's apply the grain effect on this, and there you go very nice subtle effect there. If you want more control on where the effect shows, you could even use the free form gradient. So that's the third option in the gradient panel. Once you select that, it's going to give you points, similar to the puppet warp tool, and you can apply the colors here. So you can select that, set that up as white, then select this, set that up as black. Then if I move the black point here and the white point There, I will have the effect or the masking only show up here on the left side. But if I flip this around and move the black point up here, then I will have it showing up around the edges. So that's a nice way of doing it. And what we can actually do is to trace along the edge of this shape, so we can add additional points. Going to use black on these points around the edges. I also add black here, and then keep drawing around the edge. Let me just select this previous point. Following the edge. Like that. So that's the black points, and then we have these points here. This one here, I would like to remove, so I can just select that press back space on the keyboard, instead, I would like to have this shape continued, which I was set to white. This should be set to white. And then continuing this point, I can again, trace the outline where I would like the effect to disappear. So if we go up this way, and then also come down. This way, maybe now we have the transition exactly aligned or closely aligned to the outline of the shape. So when you have these irregular shapes, this is a good technique to use. Again, you will see these stops that you create with the gradient tool. Whenever you press G on the keyboard, they will appear, and then you can move them individually. So for instance, now, I can just select this point, drag it in. If I want more of the masking effect to show, I can drag those in as well. Or if I want to be more subtle, I can drag them out, and this point as well, I can further adjust and immediately, I can see more of the leaves. If I want to see even more, I can drag this point in as well, and so on and so forth. So I am not going to vectorize these effects that I applied here. I'm just going to keep them as roster effects, just so you can compare, these are steel roster based. And these are the ones where I vectorized it both on the water and on the sand and on the surfer girl. And it's up to you, you can even combine the tooth so you can keep some in roster effect format and some already vectorized, that can also create some nice variety. So I hope you will have fun with this illustration. I can't wait to see your version. 11. 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.