How to Retain a Hand Drawn Quality to Your Vector Drawings

1. Quick intro: Hi, I'm Lisa. I'm a full-time illustrator based in South Africa. In this course, I'm going to show you some simple and effective techniques that you can use to retain that hand-drawn look to your vector graphics. As an artist, I create graphic resources for both the professional and amateur designer. I would say I'm mostly known for my whimsical and playful characters. So it's important for me to find ways to keep my graphics looking hand-drawn, but still provide a flexible format for the design industry, which is usually vector. In this class, I'll take you through the steps I use when creating my work. You'll learn some useful techniques and tools that'll save you loads of time when working with texture in Illustrator. By the end of this course, you'll be armed with skills that you can apply to your own work. Plus, you'll be creating a lovely hand-drawn character that's 100 percent vector. I'll see you in class. 2. Materials and equipment: Hey everyone, I'm so excited that you joined the class. I'm just going to quickly take you through the materials that you need. It's nothing fancy. We just need a couple of pages of bond paper. We need a 2B pencil and a 4B pencil. I prefer to use a clutch pencil with some lead and my pencil has to be lead in it. You need an eraser if you think you're going to make mistakes. We'll need some tracing paper or you can use light box or your window or what I'm going to use is actually a very thin, it's a 46 gram paper. It basically is thin enough to see what's underneath and it's still retains that paper texture that I prefer rather than tracing paper. Then we need a scanner. If you don't have a scanner, you can use the smart phone. Then of course, Adobe Illustrator and then come away to get started. 3. Shaping your character: So we're going to start with the basic shapes of the animal. This is the basis that you can use for just about any animal. I'm going to show you how to do that. So just to start off with, we're going to start with the head. The head generally, if you want the animal to look cute, should be quite a lot bigger than the actual body. So let's begin with the head, which is like a rectangle shape with rounded corners. I'm just going to lightly draw that in. Not going to commit just yet because you might want to make changes. Then I'm going to move in to the body area which is like a raindrop without a top bit. Assuming it comes round like that. Doesn't have to be perfect because these are just basic shapes that we're going to use later on. Then we need some arms, which are essentially just little sausages and then the legs, just a little trick with the legs. If you want them to look even cuter than the usual sausage legs, you just need to bow the outside curve. So basically curving outward and in coming in. That gives you an extra cuteness and then you face the little feet in inwards. It gives a little legs that extra level of adorableness. Is that the word? So I'm just going to fill in the head, this point because we happy with the shape. Just a rough, from here, such a basic shape, we can literally turn it into just about anything. If you added a little ears like that, it could be a bear. If you added bigger ears and maybe a little horn, could be a really cute little deer. Maybe want to turn it into a cat. So you need much big ears and nose with a couple of whiskers. So as you can see that you can pretty much use the shape for a lot of different animals. So as I mentioned, I'm going to use a fox. In order to do that, this kind like little side toughs the fox have. So I'm just going to do that. I'm just going to draw that in so that I know where my shape needs to go later on when we start applying texture. So it's probably going to be something like that. The nose probably going to sit like that and we're probably going to have a white area. You can remember fox have this white area on their face. Probably its somewhere around there and of course we need to add in a tail. So you need to think about where the tail starts. That makes it more authentic in terms of placement. Often people make mistake of starting a tail here, but that's not accurate and sometimes gives it that weird look that it's off. So think about your tail starting from behind with little bummies. This is why it's quite nice to plan your character first because you can do things like this and it doesn't matter. Bring it down and it's probably going to end up something like that. So that's your basic form. As I said, you can decide to draw a cat or a dog even, or a deer, or anything that's tickles your fancy, but that's your basic shape and from there on we going to actually apply the texture. 4. Adding texture: the power of layering: The main thing you want to think about is breaking your character down into the different shapes. This is how I basically get all that texture into my characters because I've literally gone and thought about how I want to segment each section. You can almost think of it like in animation terms how the animator would want the tail separately because he want to wag it, you want the head separately because he want to move it and so on and so on. The same thing is going to apply when you want to apply texture. Think about all the areas that you want to have their own different unique textures. If you want the head to have a different texture to the body, you're going to draw that separately. If you want the tail to have a different texture, you're going to draw that separately and so on. At this point we can either use a light box, your window, you can use tracing paper. But as I mentioned previously, I'm actually going to use a very thin paper, which I prefer because it retains that paper field. But you can see it's actually see through enough to see right through. The beauty of this texture technique is that it doesn't have to be perfect. That's the whole point. It needs to be rough and grungy and hand-drawn. That's why it's so lovely to do this way because it's so forgiving. You can basically make mistakes and it doesn't matter, which is the best part. I'm going to start with a head first because I'm basically going to go head, body, tail and then this white area is going to be a separate. I don't know if you can recall, but a little fox also has a white area here at the end of this tail. Those are going to be the main areas that are going to be all separately. I'm going to start with a head first. I'm using my 2B pencil. I'm just going to literally in a sketchy way, start with the ears. I'm not worrying about perfection or worrying about anything like that, because the rougher we make is the rougher we want it. All these little extra bits that I'm creating, I want that to show up when we scan. You'll see on the edges, see that little bit there that just happened, I'm going to keep that. I'm just making sure that I'm closing the shape because later in Illustrator, we're actually going to fill the shape, and I don't want too much work in Illustrator so I want to do as much of the work here at this point. At this point you can decide, do you want to actually apply texture to the head? Or do you just want flat area in Illustrator with a lovely textured edge. That's what I'm going for, but you don't have to do that. The reason why I'm choosing that because this white area that I'm going to draw in later, that's the texture that I want, like a really textured area there. I don't want texture on texture, I'm going to just keep this shape pretty solid. But what I'm going to do at this point is add the ears. I'm actually going to swap my pencil with a 4B. The reason why I'm doing that, because I find that the 4B creates quite a nice, you see how much nicer that is now with that point. I'll go back there, and then I'm going to do a little face, which is probably going to be something like that, and here's a little nose, and you see those little white areas, those are the things that we're going to pick up when we scan, and a little mouth. The next thing we're going to do is the body. The same thing, I'm going to stick with my 4B because feel great to me. Just roughly going over. That little line there we'll have to see if it looks nice illustrator or not. If we don't like getting in illustrator we can easily remove it. I'm just going to leave it, I'm not going to rub anything out. Now remember we want to close it because in Illustrator, to use at Paint Bucket tool, you need a closed shape. The same applies. I don't want this whole body to be textured. But of course, if you do you're welcome to apply a texture, and that texture could be literally crosshatching like that, or you can use the flat end of your pencil by doing that all the way, or you can literally just do that. This is the really nice thing about pencils. They're so versatile, you can create so many different textures as you're playing around. That'll be quite cool if you fold the whole body but as I said, I didn't want that because I'm actually going to apply a little fair texture on top by it tummy. The next thing I want to do is the tail. The tail, I actually do want to texture. I'm just going to turn my head slightly. Because the tail is quite furry, you can have fun and create all these lovely little bits and bobs. Just remember when Illustrator scans this and traces it, it's actually going to turn all those little grungy bits into black, so you want to retain as much or as little white as you want. It does take practice because you might find that the first time you do it your areas to black and it doesn't pick up any texture or you've actually not made enough texture, so it does take a bit of experimenting. But I have an idea how Illustrator is going to treat that so that comes just from doing it a few times. We've done the body, we've done the tail and we've done the head. We're going to do the little area on his face that's white. I want texture but not too much, so I'm going to do something like that. We can always play around with the threshold when we're in Illustrator. You'll notice that I'm not even doing it live perfectly on top. I'm not following the lines exactly because that's the charm. If you can recall, I mentioned I wanted to texture on his belly. I'm still with the 2B, I'm literally just going to do that. Little spiky lines coming down. I'm probably going to follow the curve of his body, which does something like that. You want it to look random, or maybe you don't. Maybe you want something like this, which is fun, or maybe you want something like this. You could even do little dots, run dots of different sizes, options are endless. I'm also going to add a little texture area onto his forehead area. Probably I'm going to go with similar lines but maybe just something longer. Again, we're just random with our line work, nothing too specific. We need to actually add some extra bits to the tail. Again, this is the beauty of it, it doesn't have to be perfect. Even though I'm tracing over this area to get the exact shape, I'm still using this as my base. I probably wanted to do something like that. I'm just going to make little marks like this with my pencil just to give it that fair look, and that's it. In the next video, we'll add accessories to the character. See you there. 5. Adding accessories to your character: Here's another. We've got our basic shapes for our animal. I'm going to add some accessories just to give them that extra cuteness. I'm going to give them like a sling, like a little sling bag, and little bow tie, and little hat. Of course, you can decide to change the shape of the hat or add a little jacket, even maybe some shoes, or maybe even a little bit on his head. Main thing is just to have fun. Again, go with my thin piece of paper, and lay it over. You'll notice once again that we don't have to be perfect. This is why I love this technique so much. I'm going to start with the actual shape of the bag, which is a rectangle shape. It is a rectangle shape. Then they'll be a sling like a little belt that probably does something like that over his shoulder. I'm not going to fill in the texture because I actually want that solid. But what I'm going to do is without even going over it, just like a simple line. It does that with a baton. Then just for rough placement, I'm going to draw a bow tie. Probably something like that. There's nothing wrong with you doing a little sketchy lines if you're uncertain or your line work because all that sketching is what we want. Then the last thing is a little hat, which is super simple. It's literally like a little round shape, like a dome. Just close off the dome, and then add like a little sausage underneath that. Then for the actual band that sits here, I'm just going to eyeball it. Then I'm going to pull a texture because I want that texture. For the final touches, I'm going to create little cheeks, which are literally light-colored squiggly bets. You just make little round circles like that. It's actually quite fun because you can use a much heavier pencil. It's going to show you that this is a five B. You can just go light, and do that. You can even decide to do cheeks or do this, or cheeks that do that. Lastly, I just want to add some shadow underneath his body. This is a very simple way of doing that. You literally just going to draw it in an area with your pencil. It's probably going to do something like that as a tail comes down, the shadow gets heavier. Then with my finger, I'm just going to smudge it a bit, and go back in, and smudge a bit more. The next phase is scanning and I'll see you there. 6. Scanning your artwork: I've placed my paper down in my scanner bed, and I've done a preview. Depending on your scanner software, your window should look something like this. As I mentioned previously, if you don't have a scanner, you can take a photograph of your artwork and just import that into Illustrator, that'll work just as well. But I do recommend if you want to continue doing illustration work and especially this form of texture work, then a good scanner is not a bad idea. It doesn't have to be too expensive. Mine is like the middle of the range. I use a Canon 9000F Mark II, and it works perfectly. Then once you're in your settings area, the main thing you actually want to be looking at is the percentage. What I've discovered over the years is that the bigger the percentage of the image, the better it actually traces in Illustrator. I'm going to leave my output resolution at 300 DPI, I'm looking to change that. But what I'm going to do is change my percentage from 100, and I'm going to select 250. I want to make sure that it's on grayscale because I don't need color. Then all the other adjustments, I'm going to leave on none because those aren't really all that important. If you start playing around with the auto adjustments, I find that sometimes it takes away some of the textures that you actually want to retain. I'm going to leave everything as is, and then I'm literally just going to scan the area of the document that I want. I'm just going to crop here a little bit and hit "Scan." I'm just going to work my way through this document, and you can do the same with yours, and I'll see you in Adobe Illustrator. 7. Image trace: vectorise your sketches: The real fun begins now, we can auto trace and compile your character in Adobe Illustrator. The first thing you want to do is actually create a document, I've already gone ahead and done one. What I recommend is that you actually create a document with two artboards. To do that, just go File, New and choose whichever size you want to add. Just like to stick to a square shape. I've just gotten a number of artboards is two. I have a spacing of 20 and the width and height is 200 miles.Then just hit "Okay." Then we're literally just going to drag, so once you've located your scans, we're just going to literally drag all of them into our document all at once, which is just the easiest to do. If you've taken photographs, you can do the same thing. I want to come back to this, I'm just going to move each one so we can see what's going on. I'm going to start with the head. I'm just going to rotate it, I've hit my "R" on my keyboard to get the rotation tool up. I'm just going to hold down my shift to keep it straight and hit "V" on my keyboard again to bring the selection tool back. From here we're going to need the Image Trace window open. If yours isn't open, you're just going to go to Window and select Image Trace. I've got mine open already. We're going to start with the default settings that Adobe has. When I expand this window, you'll see I've got quite a few extra ones. These are presets that I've saved for myself, which I want to show you how to do. But let's just start with the standard ones that Adobe comes with. I'm going to select Sketched Art as my starting point. You can see obviously it hasn't picked up anything. What we need to do is we need to up the threshold and I'm just going to keep doing that until it picks up a lot more of those little edges that I want. That looks about right, I'm going to expand the Advanced and then zoom in. At this point we can decide how much texture we actually want. Let's start with the Path. The low amounts that you have, the less it's going to fit to the actual original path and we don't want that. We want it to be really grungy and keep all those gnarly bits. You'll see over here, the top of the ear that's way too smooth. I'm just going to tone it up. I even go as high as 97 you can even go as high as 100 depending on what you want. If we zoom in closely, you will actually see a skipped a little jagged bits and that's what we want. This is important to let you know at this point you do need to experiment because my line work is probably going to be slightly different to yours. I might have gone darker, I might've gone lighter, thicker or thinner, it all depends on your actual artwork that you have. This is just a rough guide, but the basics are that you want to have the path fitting to as much as possible because as I said, it keeps all the roughness. Your corners is an experiment, but I generally have higher corners because the higher corners actually means that there are more nodes and more little curvy bits and things that go on. That's the kind of stuff that I'm looking for. Then the noise, you'll see the higher value means less noise but we actually want the noise. We want to keep all those extra little art bits and pick up all the little imperfections. You'll see it started actually picking up all these extra dots here, you can decide whether you want to keep them or not. But later I'm going to show you how to remove stuff that you don't want. But at this stage, we actually want it as rough as possible. So I would recommend keeping your noise down to one or around about there. I'm going to push the threshold up a little more because over here you'll see it's quite open. I'm just going to take it higher. Don't be annoyed at this point you might be thinking it looks so ugly. How are we going to work with that? But you'd be surprised once you add color and you vectorize, it actually ends up looking really lovely. So don't be afraid of really going grungy because you can always take it back a notch if you need to. But I'd rather you apply that grunge at this point and then you can experiment as you go down. Quite happy with that. I'm going to click "Expand" because this is now basically going to trace the drawing. If we're going close, you'll see Adobe has basically kept all those extra little bits, the gnarly bits and things like that. I must warn you at this point, if your illustration is a fairly large and complex illustration, your document is going to start getting a little and really admired slow down. You might end up with a really mess of file. What you could do at some point if you need to, you could actually take the point count down. In order to do that, just select your Actual Artwork and we go to Object, Path and then we go simplify. Again, this is an experimentation that you need to fiddle with to see what works for you. Just make sure you have preview selected. Now you'll see it's taken way too much away. I don't want to lose all that stuff. So what we need to do is probably go something like 90 percent. Over here you'll see the original count is 10,000 odd and if we take it to 94 percent, the current is 3,000 odd, so it really has reduced it quite a lot. But to be honest with you, I'm not going to do this at this point because I want to keep that and this document is fairly simple, so I'm going to keep all those little grungy bits, but this is just a little go to that you can do to reduce your file size if you need to. I'm going to click "Cancel" and I'm going to move on to the next one. Here we have the body and the tail in the same. Just a quick point, I want to remind you, don't scale anything at this point, because obviously you drew everything at the size that you need each element to be. Just keep everything as it is and we can scale it down all it wants to make sure that everything still fits. I'm going to go back in and do the same. I'm going to start with sketched art. You'll see Adobe doesn't pick up much so we need to go back to threshold and probably push it to say 185 to start off with. Going to go a little higher. That's starting to look a bit better. I want my paths again, if you can recall, I want it to fit quite well, quite snug to my original drawing. I'm going to go to 96 percent. I want it to pick up all those little extra bits and I'm probably going to push the corners up slightly. If you have this situation where you like the result of the tail, but you don't like the result of the body. What you can do at this point before you actually commit by hitting expand, you're just going to make a duplicate by holding on your Option key. At this point is still the original image, you've just made a duplicate so you can use that same image for a different trace setting. I'm going to go back to this one and work just on the tail. The tail is looking quite good but I might need to take away a bit more of the white space, it might be a bit much. I'm going to up the threshold at this point. That looks pretty good. I'm going to commit and hit "Expand."Then I'm going to go over to my body and work on that one. The main thing we're going to look at here is that we want to close the shape as much as possible. But you don't want to up it so much that it ends up being so black that you lose all the texture. This is a happy compromise. You'll see most of the areas are closed. When I refer to the closed I'm talking about the actual body shape of the little guy. That looks good to me, I'm going to commit and hit "Expand" and move on to the next. I'm going to use this as an example so that you can save a preset. I'm going to go back to my sketched art, go up to about 193. That's already starting to look good. I want that path to be like 95/96 percent. I want the noise to be one because I want to pick up all those extra little bits and probably something like 67 percent on my corners. I'm pretty happy with that. Now I'm going to actually save this as a preset. You're going to go Manage Presets, Save As New Preset, and then just call it whatever you feel that you're going to remember what it is. I've already got a pencil, so I'm just going to hit "Pencil-02." Hit "Okay." Now that setting will be under your Presets the next time you need to trace, which is a great starting point. I'm just going to show you how it works. First, I'm going to commit to this. Let's trace this little guy. I'm going to go to that preset that I've just made, pencil-02, see that pretty much looks good to me. I don't think I need to make any changes there. I'm going to commit. Now you have a preset that you can use for all your future drawings. I'm going to go ahead and do the rest of these. Now that we've done all our auto trace, we now just need to scale it down so we can work with the files. I'm going to hit "Command A," which is Select All. Then I'm literally just going to hold down my Shift key so that I retain the proportion as I'm scaling down and just bring it all the way down. Then I'm going to move it over to my second artboard and just bring it down again. Then move this across and now we can actually see what's going on. I'm just going to flip this around. So I'm using R on my keyboard holding shift to keep it all in line and I'm going to bring it up.The same for this one because that's the area that sits on the fox's face.That's it. But first I'm going to take you through some essential tools that are super handy with this kind of work and will save you loads of time. I'll see you in the next video. 8. Three time-saving tools in Illustrator: As I mentioned, there is a couple of tools that I think are essential and will save you loads of time when working with texture. I'm going to take you through some of them that I use every single time I'm in Illustrator. The first one is the lesser tool. If you just hit "Q" on your keyboard, that'll bring it up, or it's a couple down on your left-hand side of your toolbar. The reason why this is an essential tool, because there's going to be lots of little things that you don't necessarily want, like those little dots, specs and things. This is a great way to get rid of them, in this particular instance, this was the body that I wanted to work on. I'm going to go ahead and ungroup it, I'm going to use a shortcut which is Command Shift G, but if you don't want to use a shortcut, you can just go object ungroup. Obviously it's great now because it's ungrouped already. I just want to be careful because if you start moving things, you'll see a whole lot of points that you actually want to retain. Just be careful that you don't move something at this point accidentally. What we're going to do now is actually go and select all the little bits and pieces that we want with part of the body. Again, I'm going to hit my "Q" and just draw all the way around the actual body and hit Command G to group all the nodes together. The next important tool or function that I want to show you is removing the anchor points. There are other ways of removing anchor points. For example, you can use your eraser, but the problem with the eraser, I find the illustrator actually takes away some little bits and bobs that you want to retain, the best way to actually keep all those things is just to remove the anchor points rather. This little line here I actually don't want, I'm going to hit my "Q" on my keyboard to bring up my Lesso Tool and I'm going to go in to all these little bits and bobs that it I don't want. Make sure I've got it all and make sure I haven't selected ones I do want, for example, that nerd there do want, so I'm going to hold down the option key that brings up the minus tool that takes away basically any selection that you now cover, which I'm going to do now, that's great. If I had to hit Delete on my keyboard, what'll happen is it's going to delete all those nodes, but it's now made an open path and we didn't want that, so I'm just going to undo that. I'm going to go over to object path and remove anchor points, so what it's done is it's actually kept the path closed and has removed all those extra bits without losing anything else. You'll see there's an extra little thing here that I don't want, I'm going to do the same. Object path remove anchor points, and then there's an extra one there that I don't want, so I'm just going to hit "Delete" because that's actually an open path can press delete that's a really Handy tool, it's so handy that I've actually made a keyboard shortcut for myself for that. You can do that yourself by adding a little action under your actions panel, I can quickly show you how to do that, so we're just going to go new action. You can say, remove anchor points. I'm just going to say two, because I already have that as an action. I'm going to hit "Record", and then I'm going to come back to the top and I'm going to say insert menu item, and then go to my objects path, remove anchor points, and automatically puts that into the menu item and hit "Okay". Then I'm going to hit "Stop" because, stop recording I don't need anything else. Now I want to apply a shortcut, so I'm going to hits on the name of the actual recording. Go back to the top of the menu and hit action options, and from here, you can select a function key. I've chosen F7, but of course you can decide whichever one you want. In the future when we need to use it. When I go to my Q, which is the lesser tool, select this area that I don't want and literally press "F7" and you'll see it's applied the action for me. The other tool that I wanted to show you was the warp tool, so to activate it, that would be shift "R" on your keyboard or set little funny looking guy on the side there, first you need to select your options in your Warp Tool. I'm going to double-click. I want to make sure that the detail and simplified is clicked off. If it's not, what's going to happen is every time you use it actually simplifies the path, and we don't want to do that, we actually want to retain all those grungy bits and detail. I'm going to make sure that that's off. This area here actually indicates the size of your brush. It's quite a small one at the moment, which is actually what I want, I'm just going to give it one mobile, one more just because I wanted fairly round while it will be around, then I'm going to hit "Okay" and that's my brush size, and you'll see this area here I actually want to bring down again to just do that an even at all out. Those are the three tools that I think are quite essential to working with texture in Adobe Illustrator, and I hope you find them useful, I do recommend that you get used to the keyboard shortcuts because it saves you masses of time and apply a shortcut key as well that will be very helpful to you. We're going to move on to the next part of the class, which is actually building your character. See you there. 9. Building your character: part 1: Now that you're armed with some tools that are going to save you time, we're going to go ahead and actually group areas that we want to keep and delete things that we don't want and actually work our way through each little area so that we can have a clean working space to start off with. First pause this video so that you don't have to tediously watch me doing everything. See you on the other side. Now I've, grouped the facial features together, but I actually want to go in once again into the grouped area to clean it up. Once your area is grouped, you're just going to double-click on the object and it takes you into the isolation mode. You'll see that just some of these little blobs I don't want, so I'm just going to delete them. I think they were a few here. Yeah. Then to actually leave the isolation mergers, double-click anywhere on your outboard. That's what we're left with, all the little pieces to the animal. In the next video, we're going to apply color. 10. Building your character: part 2: Okay guys, we're on the home stretch. The next step is to apply colors all the bits in pieces, and start building your character. I've actually gone ahead and chosen the color palette that I want and before I bring it in, I'm just going to get rid of all the colors in the panel that I don't want. I'm just going to use one of the default playback options that Adobe has which is ''Delete Unused Panel Items''. I'm going to hit the ''Play Button'', and it just gets rid of all the extra things that you don't want in your colors palettes, in your brushes panel, or those kind of things. We're basically starting with a good clean document. I'm going to move over to my color documents. This is like an extra tip that I just want to let you know. Over the years I've developed an Adobe document that basically has all my color combinations that I've picked up along the way that I really like. This is the way that you can save the things that you come across and you really wish that you remembered what that last color palette that you use, it really worked, or something that you saw in a picture that really worked. This is a good history reference that you can keep going back to and this is where I actually start every time I start drawing anything, I actually open this document first, and this is my starting point for all my color combos. This is the set that I'm actually going to use this time for the fox. I'm going to copy it and just bring it into my document. You'll see all the swatches appear in your panel. The first thing I want to do is actually just color his little face, which is this darkish color. We now are going to apply a solid color to the actual head. We're going to use the Live Paint Bucket tool, which is ''K'' on your keyboard. You'll see if you click this area, it's going to automatically folate. This is why it was important originally when I mentioned that you actually need to make sure that the path is closed as much as possible. I'm going to go ahead and click that area. It might take a while because obviously there's lots of little bits and bobs that are happening. We don't actually want the outline and the inside to be separate, we actually want the whole thing to be a solid. I'm going to expand that and then I'm going to go over to my ''Pathfinder'', and then I'm going to unite all the objects together. That's basically made it one solid object and we don't have to fuss about the inside or the outside. I'm going to send it to back. Go ''Object'', ''Arrange'', ''Send to Back'',. Make sure it's behind the little facial features, and then I'm going to go ahead and color it. In this case it's orange. Now I'm going to do the same with the body. I'm going to hit "K" on my keyboard. I'm going to fill it, ''Expand'', ''Pathfinder'', ''Unite''. I'm going to go ahead and do the same for all my little bits of objects. In this instance, you'll see we have a massive area that hasn't been fold. I'm going to double-click to enter the ''Isolation Mode'', and there is several ways that we can fix that. You can either use your Blob Tool just to close that off, or you can steal little bits and bobs from other area of your document just to make it more authentic looking. In this case, you'll see I've got that extra line at the top. I'm actually going to use that. That should be enough for Adobe to fill it. If it's not. Just to be sure, I'm going to go back to my Warp Tool and I'm just going to bring this down, and that up and that down. We're going to assemble our little guy. Something I recommend that you get into the habit of, is working with your ''Layers Panel''. We're going to start by creating a background layer. What I've done is I've hit that little ''Add Layer'' icon and I'm naming it, and I'm moving it to the bottom. Then, I'm going to create a rectangle. Go to the corner, just click once. I know my document is 200 by 200 and fill it with the color that I want, in this case it's cream. This layer that actually contains the fox, I'm going to name Fox. The ''Isolation Mode'' is because I had ''Paste Remembers Layers'', so I'm going to take that off and bring that down to the Fox layer, and delete that. Let's start building our little guy. I'm literally just placing one item on top of the other where they belong and you can see at this point why it wasn't really all that important to be perfect, because it's the imperfections that make it lovely. We've come to a situation where actually I want this part of the bow tie to be in front of the bag, so I basically need to duplicate this. I'm going to go ''Command C'' and ''Command F'', that place in front in the same place. Then there're going to be areas that I actually want to remove. For example, these little tassels that hang down. Again, I'm going to go back to my Lasso Tool which is ''Q''. Now we need to go into ''Isolation Mode'', so I'm just going to double-click and do that again. Use my shortcut to remove anchor points which is ''F7'', and I'm going to take this to the front. We just basically brought that one side to the front. For his little hat, I'm actually going to delete the outside lines and just retain the center, but you'll see here there's some open bits and there's some really jaggedy bits. We need to use our Warp Tool again, I'm going to double-click to go into ''Isolation'' and just bring it out like that. That's not looking so good, so I'm going to use my Lasso Tool and remove those points. I'm now in my Direct Select tool. I've just selected one of the nodes and have brought them out. Going back to our Warp Tool, I'm just making it a little bit jagged so it looks natural. These I'm extending so that they're touch. I'm closing this whole area and then there's a bit here that I don't like, I'm going back to my Lasso Tool. We're moving anchor points. Same for here, it looks about right. As I said, I actually want to retain the inside. There's a few ways you can do that, but this is the easiest way for me. I literally just press the ''Direct Select Tool'', which is ''A'' on your keyboard. Just select the outside, you'll see just the outside has been activated. What I forgot to tell you, we actually need to combine this, you need to unite this first, otherwise it's going to select it just individually. We're going to go back to our Pathfinder and hit "Unite", and you'll see all those little extra bits at the bottom are now one object. Go back to my Direct Select Tool, select just the outside, you'll see just the outs has been selected now and I'm literally just going to hit "Delete" and "Delete" again, and it's removed that outside and it's created a shape. Now we can color it, which I want to choose that color. You'll notice I've kept all those little bits and bobs there on the edge which gives it a nice look. Then I'm going to add this little guy which is our band if you can recall, bring it to the front, and just choose that color perhaps see how it works. I'm going to group this and place it on top of his head. What we need to do is actually increase the size of exhibit smaller in the art board. I'm just going to lock my background, select all and hold down my ''Shift Key'' as I pull out just to increase his size, and that's it. We've now created a cute little ones ego character with all those little texture bits that you hand-drew, and you can see how easy it is you can apply to just about anything. I just want to show you one more thing, a quick way to make a pattern which is a great way to add some interest in your background, and I'll see you in the next video. 11. Bonus: create a quick pattern: I'm going to show you a quick way you can add texture and interest to your background. I don't know if you can recall the little staircase that we drew when we were drawing our character. We're going to make a pattern out of that. So I'm just going to go ahead and select it. Then go over to object, pattern, make. I'm just going to zoom in so I can see what's going on. Now, we're literally just going to adjust our art board size to turn it into a pattern that we want. I'm going to click this area, which is the Pattern tool, Tile tool, and actually just bring this in and this down slightly. You'll see what's happening, it's basically creating a block pattern. Because it's not absolutely perfect, this is where the Warp tool comes in. I'm going to go ahead and activate the Warp tool by Shift R on my keyboard. I actually want to increase the size. I'm just going to double-click and make it something like three. Three looks good, and literally just pull this out like that, just to make it line up better. Just extend that. Yeah, that looks about right. Once you happy, you're just going to hit, "Done." Let's test it. I'm just drawing a rectangle and it'll automatically be in your Swatches panel. So I'm just going to hit the New Pattern. Yeah, that looks pretty good. But now I actually want to apply color to it. So I'm going to double-click again on the pattern swatch and just Select All and choose a color. Now, we're actually going to apply it to the background here. I'm just going to duplicate the background layer. So select it in your Layers panel. Come over Duplicate Background. Change the name so we know what's going on. Select that, make sure you've selected the Pattern layer and just choose your new swatch. There we have a cute hand-drawn pattern made in no time at all. In the next video, we're just going to apply some final touches. 12. Final touches: We're just going to quickly add some final touches to our illustration. If you can recall, we created some smudgy little splurges when we were drawing our animal. I'm just going to bring that over, and obviously increase it to the size it needs to be. Make sure we're on the right layer, which is fox. That's correct. I'm going to take it to the back, and just increase a dash more. Probably something like that. Now I'm going to select a coolish color. The thing with shadow is generally, it's on the cooler side, but of course, that's not a fixed rule. You can always play around any color that you like. But I'm going to select the khaki color. Then come over to my Transparency, select Multiply, and bring it down to probably about 20. Let's see what that looks like. Yeah, 20 looks good. Then you have a quick little shadow. Then of course, at this point, you can add little flowers. These are flowers that I created earlier on, just to add a little bit more interests. I just quickly want to show you a trick with some of the shapes that we have here already. If you selected this little tail, we can actually easily turn it into like a little mountain or little hill. I'm just going to do that. I'm going to select my color that I want, which is probably something like that or maybe darker. Maybe we want a little bit more interest so I'm going to actually choose that guy. Copy it by holding down my option key as I drag it, hit R on my keyboard to get rotation. Probably, color that, something like that. Then you can basically re-purpose your little shapes that you have and turn them into something else to pull some added interests. You could even use these cheeks if you wanted to, or maybe turn them into little floating blobs of color, which is quite nice. Something like that. I also wanted to just show you a couple of more examples of some illustrations that I did using exactly the same technique. As you can see, you can apply the same principles you've just learned to just about any subject matter. That's it. Now you can see how easy it is to retain that hand-drawn texture in your Vectorworks. I hope you guys have fun. Please do experiment because that's the best way you learn and figure out what works for you. I'll absolutely love to see what you create with this. So please do upload your class projects so that I can give you some feedback. So that everybody else can see all the lovely things you create. I'm looking forward to it. Thanks for watching. I hope you enjoyed it. Bye.