Painted Textures in Adobe Illustrator

1. Introduction to Painted Textures: I'm Lucy, I'm an artist and licensed textile and fabric designer. In this class on painting textures, we will learn key concepts on how Illustrator creates vector images. Then we'll work through an example of bringing original painted artwork into vectorized. Once you understand how Adobe Illustrator creates vectors from existing images, you can create freely and with more intention. As a professional, I've had to learn over the years how to translate a character of my traditional work into my digital work in service pattern design. I've crafted this as a part of a series of texture Adobe Illustrator to teach you several different ways that you can work with texture in vector form. You can take this class as a standalone class or as a part of a series. Painted textures in Adobe Illustrator is best for beginners to intermediate and Illustrator. And as long as you have a base knowledge of how the program works, this class is for you. Let's are more about Dewey illustrator and how you can use it as one of your mediums to create meaningful designs that feel like you. I'll see you inside. 2. Class Project: The project for this class is to create an illustration using painted textures. Since we'll be learning techniques on how Image Trace works well in Adobe Illustrator, go ahead and gather up some smooth mixed media paper and any dark color paint. I use, mainly rich blacks. I and the rest of the class want to see your artwork. To submit a project skillshare on your desktop. Go to the Projects and Resources tab and click the Create Project tab. Choose your cover image, name your artwork, and tell us about your materials and a product description tells us what worked and what didn't work, give us all the details. Then you can share with us as many images as you would like from the sketch to the messy middle parts, to the finished artwork. The word that you've done has taught you something and it will surely help someone else as well, including me. In the next lesson, we will dive into some key concepts so that we can begin vectorizing. 3. Key Concept: The Image Trace Panel: Now that we've discussed and programs, Let's get practical. In this class, we'll be looking at a multi-colored painting and breaking it down into separate vectors by using black inks and image trace, we will add color once we've created the vectors, I want you to have a good understanding of the image trace panel and how it works. There are a few things that you need to know. Number 1 is simply block is best for image trace in Illustrator when you're painting has a range of values. And at this point I'm only referring to black and white images. Image trace looks for the deepest values to trace their presets and the image trace panel that work well with their respective title. I generally start with a sketched art preset. If I'm doing anything with texture, using this preset sometimes gets me exactly what I'm looking for, especially if I've prepared my artwork and advance. Since Image Trace looks for the deepest values in an image, the threshold represents the amount of darkness or lightness to trace. If we open the Advanced panel, you will see paths. This tells Illustrator how smooth or rough you want the outer edges of your illustration to be. If you add paths, it will add anchor points and pick up more edges. If u less than the past, you will reduce anchor points and create smoother edges. And anchor points are the points where lines joined together to create a bend. The last part of the image trace panel that I pay attention to when I'm working with textures is the Noise section. I find that I use it most with more intricate textures such as pencil strokes. The noise picks up the most subtle of the textured elements that threshold might ignore and pulls them into focus. There's so much more than the Image Trace panel can do, but this is a quick overview of the Image Trace panel as I apply it to textures. In the next lesson, we will get into vectorizing painted spot illustrations. I will discuss some key points of the technique that I discovered. And I will talk about how I prepare my artwork in advance, knowing how Illustrator will translate that. Let's get started. 4. A Brushstroke Technique for Vectorizing Well: Let's get into painted textures. In this lesson, I'm going to cover a technique that I developed for myself that I will call the dry brush technique. Now, this is not a new technique in the painting world, but working between mediums. This is the technique that I use to keep the character and texture of my paintings in my vector work. I've set out different brushstrokes that I painted with gouache and I've used an artist smooth paper. I'm going to focus on one color for this exercise, but we'll move to multiple colors in the next lesson. Let's look at these original strokes. The first three are wet brush strokes, meaning that I added water to my brush. And these are much like what an original painting of mine would look like. Down here, the squashes a little bit thicker. I use less water, which creates a little bit more of a raise stroke with a natural texture. But there isn't enough value change for illustrator to distinguish. So it will likely pick up everything together and turn it into a single blob. The solution is to pull out some information so illustrator can create more specific marks. And I do this by creating a dry brush strokes. To do this, dip the brush in a deep black wash and make your first stroke. My first stroke on this page is this third bottom stroke. Keep going without adding any water, allowing the brush to dry out with each stroke. This will keep the integrity of the stroke, but create more information for illustrator to pick up fun fact and printmaking. This is called ghosting. Printing several images from one inking and money in the ink just run out. So let's vectorize these, select our image, pull up the image trace panel. Sometimes you have to click back in. I'm going to use the sketch to our preset. And I'm already pretty sure that it will work right away in my favor because I prepared the strokes in advance, will see this happen in actual RPs in the next lesson. And it did work really well with this preset. I generally will mess with the past and the noise and found textures or things with subtle or more detailed texture like a pencil stroke. But again, I've already prepared this artwork specifically for the Image Trace panel. So I don't think much will work, but just to see, I will up the paths to 77 percent and I don't see much change. I think the only thing that's changed is that it's added several anchor points that I really can't even see any difference in. So I'm going to Command Z and undo that. And you can see that it took off about 5 thousand points. So those anchor points just weren't necessary. And making sure that we're keeping our anchor points down. We'll only keep our file size better. So I don't wanna do anything that's, that's just, that's unnecessary. So it works really well with a preset. Let's expand. And I need to ungroup these Command Shift G. I'm going to pull out a brush stroke and I want the stroke to have a bit of depth. I'm going to take a base stroke and one of these dry brush strokes and layer them on top of each other. So let's bring this solid base out and we'll select it and make it this color. And then I'm going to use my Lasso tool for me is Q, and pull out this one. So I've selected all that with the lasso tool and I need to group it together to keep all those bits and pieces together. The pulls up my selection tool and I will just layer that right on top and choose a lighter color. And then I'll select them both and group them. So there we go. To get the best vector texture out of your fine artwork. Really study the texture and the work. Ask yourself, what do I see? What are the darkest values that illustrator will see that I can recreate myself. So do the lines and the shapes and the shadows that you see, knowing that that is what Illustrator will see two, that's always a good starting point. So if I know the character with the texture and then I recreate it, I can work in partnership with Illustrator. This is an overview of my dry brush technique. Let's use this technique on some actual artwork. 5. Example 1: Painted Illustration: Now that we've looked at the dry brush technique that I use, I want to bring you a real life example of a painting that I've already done that I want to translate into a vector image. We're going to be doing some color separation here because we know that black works best for vectorizing. I want to retain some of the really beautiful painterly strokes and the feathers. This is a loose painting or more of a sketch painting that I did on a loose sheet of paper. And I want that vector image to have the same feeling. First, I need to identify how many layers of flat color can I get from this painting? I've identified a background color. I've identified the down feathers, the top feathers, and I've added some darker feathers on the wings. If I zoom in really closely, you can see for the planar brushstrokes and the spot color feathers, the beak and the legs are definitely used a dry brush technique to really make sure that I'm getting to streaks, that I'm getting a painterly effect. I've done an outline of the base, which I'm going to factorize and build a shape. And for the outward feathers, the bright part of the feathers, I definitely used a dry brush stroke and actually tussle the top of the brush to separate the hair so that I could get a true brushstroke so that I could really get some truly separated lines. And the top of the feathers is what I really considered to be the most expressive in this painting. So I was a little loose in my translation, but I really did want to capture the movement in the character of these top feathers. So let's go ahead and vectorize. These should be pretty straightforward because again, I've already prepared the artwork in advance to do what I want it to do. We'll do sketched art. I've ignored the white. I'm happy they are with what Illustrator is pulled, so I'm going to expand and then Shift E is erase on my computer. So I'm just going to go ahead and erase a few little bits that I see laying around. Selected the next photo, sketched art, what a beautiful image right at the get-go. I don't even want to touch this. I'm going to go ahead and expand. And I'll move to the next one. I made sure that this was enclosed in every area so that I could create a shape once I've vectorized it. So we'll just go ahead and do sketched art. This is my base layer, so I'm not too concerned about any details. I'm going to up the threshold just slightly to make sure that everything is closed, will expand it. And then I'm going to bring up my shape builder tool, which is shift M for me and go ahead and fill in those two shapes. So this is my base layer. And then to get to the tips of the wings, again, go to sketched art. And that is beautiful. I'm going to up the threshold just lightly. That is way too much. And then let's pull in a little bit of noise. It didn't do too much if I up the parcel little bit. Since this is the most expressive, I'm curious to see if I can add any detail, but it looks like I've already done the work for myself. So, uh, pull the past back down and expand. And now I can begin pulling these together so I'll close out my image trace panel. I may need to do a little bit of aligning. I didn't take the pictures all from the same exact place. So let's make this kinda my darkest midtone will bring this over to match as best as possible. I need to pull it to the front. So Command Shift right bracket. Let's get everything together and then I'll start getting a little bit more picky. Let's see what that looks like. We'll make that kind of my lighter mid-tone. Just said I wouldn't get too picky, but here I am. Okay. Can pull over the wings, the top of the wings, they need to go in the very top. So again, Command Shift right bracket. And these are like a light cream or white, I think. And they need to put a background behind this image so that I can see it just a tad better. And then I want to put in the final touches, I will continue to move these around slightly. One thing I already knows that I don't want the feathers to be as dark as the beak or the leg. So I am going to isolate it by double-clicking into this Group. And I'm holding Shift so that I can select multiple parts. And then I'll like this darker color. And maybe make this bottom one even a different color. Midtone will do that green. Okay, so I think that this is looking more and more like a beautiful painting. And then isolate this again so that I can pull these over a little bit. Because you can continually adjust to get what you're looking for. Because apparently I'm not satisfied with a plain background of time. I'm going to pull in a texture to the back just to give it something else, just to give it some depth while I work on it a little bit further. We'll bring it up one, I just think this already looks so much like our other illustration. We can compare the two. I really love the way this turned out. It can be recolored a number of different ways. I've made the actual bird five colors at this point, but I've really done what I set out to do, which is keep the expression of the wings. Parents still looks like a sketchy painting. And if this was a tighter painting, kid use the same techniques to recreate that as well. In the next lesson we will go over another example, an experiment with some brush strokes. 6. Example 2: Painted Illustration: This is an example of some birds that I've painted using dry brush strokes. I have three birds that I'm vectorizing, and I've painted them with a black wash on tracing paper. I went ahead and separated the beaks, eyes and legs so that I could easily isolate and color them later on. On this third image, you can see that I have tried three different versions of feathers to see which one will work best for me, I can also make copies of this image and pulling different thresholds for each of the factorizations just to be able to play route. So let's vectorize this first image. I'm going to go ahead and do my sketched art preset because again, I've already prepared this artwork. I think I want to pull the threshold down just a little bit. I want a little bit more whitespace between the feathers. And that looks good. That looks a lot like what I am looking for. Let's expand that. Come over to the second bird. Click in sketched art. This bird has a little bit of a different texture because the gouache on tracing paper or give a little bit different and effect. But I like the way that these feathers have a lot of movement. Let's look at a smaller threshold. I do think I like that a little bit better. Let's go back and see the first image. I will pull it down just slightly. And overall this image looks really good. So I'll expand this one. And on this third image, Let's go ahead and make a copy. So I'm going to select hold down Option and Shift to keep it in line. Make a copy. I will do sketched art on this on this first image. And sketched art on the second image. Just so we can compare the two. On the first image, I'm going to pull the threshold down pretty far. I liked the way that it gave me a little more negative space between the feathers. I think it gives the feathers a little bit more volume and you can see the actual strokes of the brush. It also gave me a little bit more detail in the neck. I'd originally drawn this bottom image a little bit rough, but it did have a lot of black and not a lot of value changed. I didn't expect to get too much out of this. I was really more just curious to see how it would turn out. This one has a little bit rougher of a texture. I might keep one or more of these, but so far I think I'm going to be looking at this top one for what I'm looking for. Move over to the second image and the threshold on this one is 78. Let's pull this one down to 55 just to see if there's any difference or from my like it better. This one does give me a little bit more detail. I am curious to see if I can get a little bit more texture out of this bottom one. So I think I'm going to raise the threshold. And that blacks it out a little bit. 133 I think, is about where we started. And all in all, I think I'm liking this first image a little bit better. So we'll expand that. And I will delete the second image. So now I'm going to assemble the birds will start with the first one. Right now everything is grouped together, so I'm going to ungroup them with Command Shift G. And then I will need to regroup individual elements with my lasso tool for me, that is a cue. Lasso. The feathers. Group them together. Let's lasso the eyes and the beak together. And then I'm going to zoom in because these leg feathers, I do want to be one single group. Oops, here we go. Group. I am going to group this leg because there's a separate piece here. Group that together. I don't need to group anything. On the second leg. Let's lasso this bird and delete. Just deleting any information that I'm not going to use at this point. I will give this a background to start off. Let's make it a green color. Outline. Okay, we'll give this a cream color. I'm going to lock this background image so I don't need to worry about it. Pull in the eyes and the beak. Pull it up to the front. The legs can be the cream color and I'll pull them up as well. The legs can make this a more orange color. Do you want to clean? Keep the eyes. So I will double-click into isolate. These two pieces. Hold down, Shift, hold down, Shift, double-click. And then I can unlock the back image, which is Command Option to give it a really nice dark background color. There's my beautifully painted here. I'm going to pull together the rest of the painted images and I'll meet you at the end. Three beautifully painted Herons. They are completely vectorized and they are in two colors. And they become a two-color print with a background. So now that we've learned the technique that I use for vectorizing paint, and we've gone through some examples of these Herons and I painted both in the last lesson. In this lesson, it's your turn. Show us what you painted and vectorized in the project tab below. Make sure that you're on your desktop, browse through other projects to get more ideas and inspiration, and then head over to the lesson. 7. Final Thoughts: That's a wrap on painted textures. We discussed how the image trace panel works, how Illustrator sees the images you pull in. And my hope is that you learned how to leverage that knowledge to work with intention, getting ahead with your brushstrokes, we went over the dry brushstroke technique and how to separate color so that the paintings were prepared to vectorize and pull together with these. I want to see your work and so does the class. Please, please share your work in the project tab below. Make sure you're on your desktop to submit and look around at your classmate's work. Feel free to reach out to me anytime with questions I am here for you. See you in my next class.