Transcripts
1. Sketch to Vector Art in Illustrator - Introduction: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch class, Sketch to Vector Art in Adobe Illustrator. In this class, you'll learn to take a simple hand-drawn sketch and convert into a vector in Illustrator. Now we'll set up the sketch as a template layer and then use it as a reference to draw the vector shapes and then color the art. Along the way, you'll learn tips and tricks for approaching the task so that you don't waste time and so that the final art and the file itself will be neat and professional. You'll find a lot of Illustrator learning packed into this course and I'll give you my sketches too so you can follow along with me. By the time you've completed the course, you'll be able to take your own sketches and vectorize them in Illustrator. Without further ado, let's get started.
2. Pt 1 Make your sketch into a Template: Before you can convert a sketch into a vector, of course, you'll need to have digitized your sketch. I've just taken a photograph of my sketchbook and these are the little beach houses that we have in that sketchbook. I'm going to open this in Illustrator. But how I do that is going to be different to just opening a regular file so let's switch across to Illustrator. I'm going to create a brand new document. I'm going to create it square because the basic image that I'm using is pretty much square. I'm just going to start with a square document, 1000 by 1000 pixels in size. Because we're going to vectorize this, it really doesn't matter what size we start at. I'll click "Create". Now there are two ways of bringing a sketch into Illustrator in such a way that you can use it inside Illustrator. I'm going to show you both of them. I'll choose ''File'' and then "Place" because we want to place the image inside this document. Here is the image. Now what I'm going to do is bring it in as something called a template. So I'll just click the "Template" option here and click "Place". This is not actually the best option although it brings it in as a template. The problem is that the original image is way bigger than this 1000 by 1000 pixel art board and so our actual image is way out of the way so let me just scale this back. You can say that the image I want to use is actually way off the art board. Because I brought it in as a template, let's just have a look and see what the layers look like. Well, we have the image here on a layer called Template and it's all locked down. To be able to move this image is going to involve quite a bit of work because we have to unlock layers, crop it, move it, and all that. I'm actually going to undo that. I'll press Ctrl or Command Z. I'll press Ctrl zero, that would be Ctrl zero on the Mac just to enlarge my art board back to fill the screen. Let's go back and do that File Place again but let's do it a bit differently this time. I'll choose File Place, I'll choose the image I want to place but I'm not going to choose Template this time so I'll just click "Place". Now I can drag to fill my document with the image so I have a lot more control over it. The other thing I want to do at this stage is just crop it to this shape because I don't need all these other illustrations here. With this image selected, I'm going to choose up here ''Crop Image''. Now I get a warning that this is actually going to embed this image in the file, that's just fine. I'll just click "OK". Now I can crop the image to the size I want. All I want now is this one illustration from a whole page of sketches from my sketchbook. I've dragged the crop rectangle around it. I'll click "Apply". Now I can just stretch it to fit. I'll need to hold the Shift key down though so that we scale it in proportion and it's not stretched out of proportion. Now the only difficulty remaining is that this is not a template but we can make it a template. I'm going to open up the last panel and you can make something a template by double-clicking on the layer itself. Now you don't double-click on the image. When I do that, you'll see that there's not very many options here in the options dialog but if I double-click here, things are very different. Now I can make this a template. When I make it a template, a few things happen. The image is going to be locked down so it can't move and the image is going to be dimmed by default 50 percent, I can make it any value I like. I'll just click "OK". Now we're ready to go ahead and vectorize this image. The problem is that the layer we're working on right now is locked down. If we try and use any of these tools over the top of the image, we can't do that because the layer is locked. We'll need to click here and add a brand new layer. What we've done is essentially the same thing as Illustrator would have done for us if we'd chosen the "File" and then "Place", grab this image and said we wanted a template. But we get a little bit more control over it and that's particularly important when you haven't pre-sized your image, you haven't cropped it and you haven't sized it to an appropriate size so that it matches the actual document size that you plan to use. It's probably better to do it this slower way and do it manually so that you can actually end up with a pre-prepared template that actually makes sense and is easy to work with.
3. Pt 2 Draw the Straight Lines: Now that we've got our drawing in place as a template, it's time to work out exactly how we're going to approach this task, where possible, I'm going to use shapes rather than actually draw lines. I'm looking at the roof line as being two long rectangles that're just joined together. I'm looking at the building here as being a rectangle with the top line missing. These are obviously rectangles, these two shapes here. This is a rectangle here across the base, but these are probably going to be lines, and this is going to be a line, and this is something completely different. We'll deal with that in a minute. But let's go first and do this roof line for which we need a rectangle. Now, I'm going to set this up with no fill, and I'm going to set it up with a colored stroke that will just make it easier to see it in relation to what's underneath the drawing underneath. I'm going to draw my rectangle. Now, with rectangles, you can't draw them on an angle even if you click to create your rectangle, it's not going in on an angle. So what I'm going to do is just draw what I approximately think this is going to look like, and I can finish it in a minute. I'll increase the stroke weight so I can see things really clearly. I'm going to the selection tool, and I'm just going to rotate it into position. Now, it's not on a 45-degree angle, and that's just fine because it is whatever it needs to be, but just be aware that we're probably going to have a little bit of work to do to align this top piece up in a minute. Let me just nudge this into position, and now we're going to copy this to create this side of the bathing box. I'll select this and choose "Object", "Transform", and then "Reflect". Again, wherever we can use a tool to do the work for us, it's a really good idea to do this, and this now is on the exact same angle as the other one, so they're just going to bar up together really nicely. I'm reflecting across the vertical, I want the original shape and this duplicate, so let's just click "Copy", and now I'm just going to move in into position. I'm going to look at the very top of this so that I can make sure that the lines are perfectly aligned. They're not quite, there's a really slight bend there, so I'm just going to move this across. Now, when I look at this point here, it's perfect, everything's nicely lined up. That's exactly what I want it to be. To get back to filling the Illustrator screen with my art board, I'm just pressing Control or Command zero. So in each stage, if you zoomed in, if you press Control or Command zero, you'll just zoom back out. I'm going to join these two pieces together because they will then become the roof, so I'm going to select both of them. I'll go to the Pathfinder palette, which you can get to by choosing "Window" and then "Pathfinder". I'm going to click here on unite, because that will put both pieces together as a single shape. Now let's have a look at the base of the building, as I said, that's really a rectangle just missing its top line. Well, we'll draw it as a rectangle, so I'm going to get the rectangle tool and let's just draw it in. We'll need to make sure that these two pieces are centered over each other, so let's select both the box here and the roof line and I'm going to select the roof line again. Now, couple of things here. I can't see that roof line has been re-selected, and the reason for that is that this layer's color is red. If I double-click on this layer here, you'll see that the color is light red. That means that things that are selected on that layer are going to be selected with a red highlight, and that is the exact same color as I'm using for my line art. What I'm going to do is actually change this color, so let's just go and choose a color such as teal, and I'll click "OK". Now let's go back and do the same thing over again. I'm going to select both shapes and I'm going to re-select the roof line. Now you can see it's a teal color, that's telling me that this is the key object. When you have a key object selected, it won't move, everything else will move relative to it, and that's going to be really important with this entire process because once we've got something in place like the roof line, we want to align everything to the roof line, not to the other bits that are not aligned. I'm going to the alignment options, you can get to those by choosing "Window" and then "Align". In the alignment options, I need to make sure that I'm aligned to key object. So that means roof won't move, the base will, and I'm going to center them, so I'll click here on horizontal, align center, and the red box at the bottom just jumped a little bit. I'm going to zoom in and just make sure that this overlap is fine, which it is. You might find that your little box goes into your roof line, in which case you're going to have to move it down. If you need to move it down, I'm going select just this box and you're going to press the down arrow key. It's not going to affect the centering, it's just going to move the box a little bit down so that you don't get a little bump in the middle of your roof line. Now, as I said, this building shape is a box minus the top line, so we need to get rid of this top line. We'll go to the Direct Selection Tool, and I'll select just that top line, and I'll press "Delete". You can see that top line is gone, the rest of the building line is still in place. Now we're going to do something similar with the base here, so let's go back to the rectangle tool. Let's mark out what our base is going to look like. I'm going to remove the top line, so let's go to the Direct Selection Tool, click just on that top line and press "Delete". Now I need to move it up and I also need to align it. So I'll just zoom into this area, go back to the selection tool, and just press the up arrow key to move this into position. Now it's positioned correctly in terms of its vertical alignment, but horizontally, it's not centered. I'll go back and select everything. I'll go back and click the roof a second time. This is the key object, all the other objects are not key objects. The key object won't move, the others will if they need to. Let's click here and make sure it says "Align to Key Object", and then I'm going to center everything. So I'll click on center, when I do, you'll see this bottom box is going to move. You might need to click a couple of times on that center option. If you know something's out and it's not moving, then obviously click a second time to get it to move. Now we want these boxes here, again, I'll go back to the rectangle tool, just going to draw in this box here. I'm going to draw a second one. So I'll just go back to the rectangle tool, make sure I de-select that first rectangle, and let's go and draw the second one in. Again, I'm going to want to make sure that these are centered, so let's go back and select everything, back and select the roof. Make sure we're aligning to key objects, center everything. I'm going to put these lines in as lines, so I'll go to the pen tool. On reflection, I want an extra line because I want to make these different colors. I have one color in the middle, and the top and bottom bands will be a second color. I'm going to start with the line that in actual fact isn't in the original sketch. Once I've drawn my line with my pen tool by just clicking and then shift-clicking, I've used the Shift key to make sure it's perfectly horizontal, I'll just press the Escape key to stop. We'll go back to the selection tool, I'll zoom in. With the selection tool, I now want to create these lines here. Now, there are a couple of ways of doing it, let's have a look at one of them, and it's using a tool called Distort and Transform. I have my objects selected, I'll choose "Effect", "Distort and Transform", and then "Transform". What I want is three more of these lines, so I'm going to click here in "Copies", and make sure it reads three, that's one original plus three copies. Make sure Preview is turned on. It wasn't in earlier versions of Illustrator. Now we want to move this vertically, so I'm just going to come in here and start moving it vertically. If you hold the Shift key as you press the down arrow key, you go up in multiples of 10, and if you just tap the arrow key without the Shift key, then you're just going to move one pixel at a time. I'm just going to place this roughly where I want them to be and click "OK". I now have these three objects. You'll see if we check the last panel that it looks like it's four lines. It's not actually four lines, it's just one line. Let's go to the Appearance panel with it selected, and let's turn off this Transform. It's one line with a transformation applied to it. It will help us if we expand this. I'm just going to choose "Object", and then "Expand Appearance". What that does is it now gives us a group with four lines in it. In actual fact, the lines are in a group as well, so let's just break them out of here. I'm going to click on the "Group" here and choose "Object", "Ungroup", and then "Object", "Ungroup", until I've just got my four lines selected. Now I'm going to put them in a group because it will be better if they're in a group, but they don't have to be groups inside groups, so we've got four lines in a group. The reason why I want them in a group is because I want to make a duplicate of them over here. I've got my group selected, I'm going to choose, "Object", "Transform", and then "Move". I'm going to move in a horizontal direction, but not in a vertical direction. So I'm going to zero off the vertical, and I'm going to start increasing the horizontal. I'll hold down the Shift key and press the up arrow key. I'm going to move this over until these are in exactly the correct position, which they are. Now, as we were using this move tool previously, we can make a copy, so we can have this copy plus this original copy if we just click here. I've got two groups, each of four lines. Now, if I want them to travel together, if I want to work on them together, it would be better if they were all in a single group. So I'm going to grab both of these groups, and this, it makes sense to import inside a second group. We've got a group that contains both the left shapes and the right shapes, each in their own respective groups. I would strongly suggest that even if you're not used to doing so, that you keep your layers panel open and that you look critically at your layers panel and try and keep things neat and tidy because it's really easy for things to get really untidy. Your art will be a lot easier to work with if you keep your layers panel really tidy. Now before we finish up this particular step, I'm just going put this line in. I'm going to the pen tool, just because it's two clicks. I'm going to click here and Shift-click here, so I get a perfectly vertical line, press Escape to get out of there. Now, I'm not sure that that line is in the middle, here is how I can do that. Given that these lines are in a group, that's really important because what I'm about to do won't work if these are not inside groups. I'm going to grab everything, I'm going to re-grab the roof because we know the roof is correct, I'm just going to make sure everything is centered relative to the roof. Go to the Align panel and click here on "Horizontal Align Center". The only thing I think is going to move is this, which it did. We've got everything except for the last buoy at the top of the building, and we're going to do that in the next video.
4. Pt 3 Make the Lifebuoy: The last element we need to create is this circular shape here with the line through it. Before I do that, I'm going to lock everything down. I'm going to the last palette, just going to run down the shapes here and just lock them. Now I don't want to lock the layer, because that would stop me from putting this shape on the layer. I'm just locking the individual objects. This is a circle. I'll go to the Ellipse tool, select that, hold the Shift key as I drag out an ellipse. To move it while I'm still drawing it, I can hold the space bar and that lets me move it into a better position. Let go the space bar and I can continue to draw it. I have the Shift key enabled because I want this to be a perfect circle. Without the Shift key it would be an oval. This looks pretty good for the outer circle. Now I need an inner circle. I'm going to worry about centering it all in a minute, not right now. Now, I can use this outer circle to make my inner circle. Let's just zoom in here. With the selection tool selected, I can Alt or Option drag, and as I do, I create a duplicate. Now, to size it, I'm going to hold Shift and Alt, Shift Option on a Mac, and just scale it in. I'm going to move this one into position. If I need to size it, I'm going to hold the Shift key as I size it because I want it to be a perfect circle. I want both of these to be circles. Now, I'm not convinced that everything is centered yet, but let's deal with the lines while we're here and then we'll center everything. I want these lines here to come in at a slight angle. The way I'm going to draw them is I'm actually going to cross them. They're going to be two pairs of lines, but they're going to cross in the middle. Let's have a look at this. I'll go to the Pen tool because it's just two clicks. I'm going to click here and over here. You can see that this line is going to be this line here. There's the first of my lines. I'll press Escape. Now I'm just going to rotate this to create this one. We'll go to the Selection tool, make sure that we have only the line selected. I'll choose "Object", "Transform", "Rotate". I've got Preview turned on. I'm going to start rotating and just rotate this line until it goes into the position I want it to be in. I think about 22 degrees is going to be good, so I want this line and this line, so I'll click here on "Copy". Now I have two lines, and they're crossing perfectly. I'm going to grab both these lines. Now it might be easier to select them by selecting them in the layers palette. I'm going to click on the top one, Shift click on the second one. Now I'm going to make those into a group so they'll travel together. "Object", "Group". I need a second copy of these lines, and I need them to be rotated. I've selected them again. I'm just using the layers palette because it's a little easier to select them there. What I'm going to do is rotate this, so "Object", "Transform", "Rotate". We want to rotate them 90 degrees. This way they're going to be perfectly rotated relative to the original lines. Of course, we need this set plus the original, I'll click "Copy". We have everything here that we need. I just need to make sure that they're lined up. Let's select over all of these objects. We can easily select them by just dragging over them because we've locked everything else. Nothing else is going to be affected by this. I want to align them both vertically and horizontally. Click on "Horizontal Align Center", and then click on "Vertical Align Center". We want to make sure that these are perfectly aligned relative to each other. Now you can say, and I can see really clearly, I've got a lot more in the way of lines than I actually want, but getting rid of the lines is going to be really easy, now that we've got something to get rid of, and we know that this is perfectly aligned, it's really neat. Let's select over everything, and let's use the shape builder tool. Now the shape builder tool shares a position over here with the paint bucket tools, but shape builder that we want. With the shape builder tool, we can hold down the Alt key or the Option key on a Mac, and just select and delete a line. The Alt or Option key means that you're deleting. I'm going to hover over this till you see your line and then click to remove it. Now it looks to me like I'm left with something in the middle, I can see it over here. I'm going to open up these groups and just work out what I don't need, what's causing the problem, and I think this is one of the shapes that's causing a problem. I'm going to select it, and then just press Delete. Here it is again. I've got it in this group as well. If you're unsure whether the part that you're seeing here is the one you want to delete, just turn off its visibility and if it disappears from the right place, then that's the pace that you don't want. I'm just going to select it and delete it. I would never just leave it invisible. Don't leave something here that you don't want or don't need, because, again, that's just going to be confusing later on if you've got things whose visibility is turned off. You don't need to be in that kind of position. Here we've got groups of lines. I'm actually going to burst these out of the group. I'm going to burst all these lines out and then I'm just going to join them back up together in a group. Let's go to this group and let's do "Object", "Ungroup". Well, let's first select that group, and then choose "Object", "Ungroup". Now go to this group here and do the same thing. They're all my lines and the two circles. I'm going to select all of these. Let's go back to the selection tool, drag over all of these, and I'll just group them together. Now, they'll be treated as a single object. That means true that I can align them relative to all the other objects here, and just make sure that this lifesaver here is centered on the building. Before I do that, I need to unlock all these parts of the building. I'm just going to run down here, unlock them. Control or Command 0 to zoom back out, selection tool, drag over everything, re-click on the roof, we know it's in position. We'll go to the alignment tools, make sure that we're aligned to key object, which we're not. I'm not quite sure why that keeps letting me down here, but let's do that again. Now we're aligned to key object. All I'm going to do is do a horizontal align center here. Now the lifebuoy is centered on the building. If I need to change its vertical alignment, I can just select it, it's all in a group. I can just press the down arrow key. If I go now to my layers palette, I can go all the way down to my template layer and just turn its visibility off. Now we have the basic structure of our building.
5. Pt 4 Colour your Art: We're now ready to go ahead and to color our illustration. Now, every one of the lines that you can see on the screen here is actually a line. It is a shape that has a stroke and it's a stroke that you're seeing. Now if some of your lines aren't the same line weight, you can select over everything and just set the line weight up here, the stroke weight. I'm going to make mine back to that five pixels. The reason why some of your line weights might not be still five pixels is, you remember that we took this circle and we copied it and shrunk it to make this inside circle. There's a setting in Illustrator that I have disabled, but if you've got it enabled, you would find that the stroke on this smaller shape was smaller than the stroke on the larger shape because you sized it down smaller. This is the setting and you get to it on a PC by choosing Edit Preferences and General on a Mac, it's Illustrator Preferences General, and this is the setting over here, Scale Strokes and Effects. I've got it disabled. When I made my shapes smaller, they still had five pixel lines on them. If you have this enabled, when you make something smaller than the stroke weights gets smaller on it. Just be aware of that. If you need to change your stroke weight, just select everything and just adjust it. But you will want all of these lines probably to have the same weight. It would look not so good if they had different weights. Of course, I'd like this to be black or so. I'm going to select either this. I'm just going to change the line color, so we can do that at any time to select all our lines and change the color. Now, to color this object, the easiest way in my book is to use something called live paint. Let's just go and see how we're going to do that. I have a layer here and on this particular layer is all this artwork. We've got a layer that has the template that we no longer need, and then I have a layer that's got all the artwork on it. What I'm going to do is I'm going to make a duplicate of this layer. I'm going to take this, drag it onto the new icon and so I've got layer to copy. This is going to be my line work. I'm just going to call it line work, and this is going to be my color. For now, I'm going to lock down and turn off my line work so I can't get to it. The only layer I can effect right now is this color layer. I'm just going to deal with that. Now, of course, before I can color things, I need some colors to use. If you don't already have colors selected for your art, you can use color themes to get them. I'm going to Window and then Color Themes. I've already been here. I've already looked up the word beach hut because this is a beach hut of beach house bathing box, whatever you like to call it. I thought I might be able to find some colors using that as a search term. But of course I could search for anything and I would still get colors that I could use. I could also choose my own colors. But sometimes it's really nice to get inspiration from the Color Themes, dialogue. Now for this particular beach hut, I think I want fairly strong colors. I'm thinking this would be a nice selection, so I'll click here and choose Add to Swatches. Those colors are just added to the swatches panel. I've got a layer that's got the artwork on it. I'm going to click here to select it. To use the live paint tool, we need to turn this into a live paint object. We go to Object, Live Paint, and then we choose Make, and that makes this into a live paint object. Now I'm going to go and get my colors. I'm going over here and I'm going to select a color to start off with. I'm thinking of put in the stripes now. Let's start with this color. I'll go to the Live Paint tool, which is over here and just choose the Live Paint Bucket Tool. Now, the way I've got it set up, if I double-click on it, you can say, you can say that we're painting fills. We're going to paint filled areas. We're not going to paint strokes. I've got that disabled, and I've also got cursor swatch preview enabled. What happens is that when I hover over a shape, you can see in the middle of the swatch there those three little boxes above my cursor, which color we're about to use, and I've lost my color, so let's go and select it. Notice now that color I'm about to drop in. I'm going to locate the areas where I want this color to be. I want it here, and here, and here, and here. It's the tip of the arrow that's dropping in the color, so that's what I'm selecting here. It's not the overflow out of the paint bucket. That can be a little bit confusing. Now I'm going to select a different color and I'm just going to put it in here. I'm going to continue around my shape dropping color where I want it to be. Now, I'm pretty happy with the colors I have. There's one thing that is of concern here. Right now, these white areas look white, but they only look white because the background that we're working on is white, and actual fact, they are see-through. I will want to go and get white paint and I will want to drop white paint in this area. If you're working on a larger illustration where you have a lot of white, I suggest you choose a different color instead of white. What I'm doing right now is dropping pink into those areas. It's going to be fairly obvious to me if there are any white areas or see-through areas in my illustration left over. So I will want to then pick up a pink color or a single color that I'm using to represent white, and drop it in. That just an easier way of working out, particularly when you've got a lot of white in an illustration that you have actually colored that, that's really important. Let's go and have a look at our layers palette. I've got a color layer here, and you can say that there's a group in here. I'm just breaking everything out to see what we've got. Inside the group, we've got this live paint object and it contains our lines. None of the fills, you can see that we're not actually seeing the fills at this stage because this is a live paint object. Well, if we want to convert this into a filled shape, what we're going to do is to expand this Live Paint object. With it selected, we'll go to Object, and then Live Paint, and we'll go to Expand. Now let's have a look and see what we've got in the last pallet, we've got a line art layer, which is the lines which appear to have got a color dropped into them. I didn't mean to do that. Then we've got the actual color. What I can do is I can take this line group and just get rid of it because I've already got some lines up here that I had already kept the side, and I've got groups inside groups inside groups, and we know that that's not always a really good idea. I'm going to my Color Layer, I'm going to start ungrouping it. Really just going to ungroup it all over again. Now in our color layer, we've just got the colored objects filled. Then in our line layer, which has got the line work. Now, I can recolor this layer but I'm going to need to get away from the Live Paint object. Let's just go and select this layer. You can say it's black, stroke, no fill. I'm just going to choose a darker version of the color that we've been using. Let's just go and get this color here and then double-click on it and I'll get a darker version of it. There are a couple of things that we need to do to finish up this piece of art. Firstly, we probably don't want our template layer in here any longer now that say probably don't, there's a situation in which you may want it. You may want to keep your template in the original file because sites like Shutterstock, if you plan to sell your art on Shutterstock, you might be at some stage asked to prove that it is actually your art. If you have your illustration embedded in your original file, it's going to be very easy for you to show Shutterstock that this is my original illustration that I used for this file. But if you're about to distribute it to somebody else, you don't want to give them your original art. So you would in that case, just come along here, select it, unlock it, and just delete it. Just be aware that there are some situations in which you may want to keep your art and your file, but probably not. The other thing we need to be concerned about is this pink color. We really want to turn it from pink into white. We'll come and select our color layer, and we'll go up here to the Recolor Artwork dialogue. What I'm going to do is locate this pink color which is here, double-click on it, and set it to white, which is 255, 255, 255, red, green, and blue channels. I'll click OK. Now we know that this is pure white and I'll just click, OK. If we go back in and select the Recolor Artwork dialogue, you'll see that these are four colors use in the illustration and white is pure white. We've now converted a sketchbook sketch into a vector colored object in Illustrator.
6. Pt 5 Drawing the Caravan: Let's look now at a slightly more detailed sketch. Again, I'm going to create a new document. Again, it's just going to be 1,000 pixels by 1,000 pixels. I'm going to import my image, my sketch. I'll choose File and then Place. This is the sketch that we're going to be using, so I'll select it, make sure I don't have templates selected, and click "Place". I'm going to drag it into the top part of this image. Ultimately, I want two-colored versions of this particular sketched once it's vectorized, and so I'm going to put the second colored version down here. That's why I've created a document that seems at this stage to be not in the right proportions. Now I'm going to the last palette, of course. I'm going to open up this layer. Now we learned in the previous videos that to create a template from this, we're just going to double-click here on the layer, not on the linked file. We're going to click on "Template". We're going to dim my images to something like 50 percent. That's just perfect. I'll click "Okay". Of course, I need to place a new layer in the document because this one is locked down, so we wouldn't be able to add anything to it. Now we're going to look at how we're going to approach this particular design, and I'm going to start with the curve here. Let's zoom in so that we can work on the curve of this little caravan. I'm also going to choose my colors. Now, the color for this particular layer is red. This time I'm going to choose a color that is not red for my line work. I'm going to turn off my fill and I'm going to click on my stroke and choose, for example, a turquoise color. I'm also going to set up my stroke width. We can change that later on, but you want a reasonable stroke width to be working with. Now for this shape, I'm going to use the pen tool. It's a fairly simple shape to create, so let's see how we're going to do it. Select the pen tool. We're going to start down the bottom here. I'm just going to click and drag. I need to click and drag so that I can start the curve, and that will give me handles on the line. Now, it's wise not to add a point on a curve. You want to add points before the curves or after the curve. I'm going to click and drag here just after the curve for this line. Now, the beginning of my line looks like it's out a little bit. I'm not really worried about that right now. Let's go across here. Let's just place an anchor point just after the curve, clicking and dragging to make that curve, and then again at the very end. There are a couple of anchor points that could be better. This one here and the starting one, but I'm just going to finish off here by pressing Escape. Now I can go back and select the anchor points that I think needs some work, and the starting one is affecting this line here, so I want to bring it a little bit closer to the actual illustration. Here, I could just bring that out and down a little bit. Here, it's probably this handle that's going to improve the curve. But you can, of course, decide how much of the curve you want. Do you want to follow along your sketch exactly, or do you want a better result? You'll find that for even curves, you want your anchor points to be at a tangent. You want these to be running in the same line. You don't want to bend them like this because, otherwise, you're going to get an untidy curve. I think my line weight is a little bit too thick, so I'm just going to bring it down. With this particular design, I want to extend this line all the way across here. I'm going to make one long rounded rectangle. Let's go to the rounded rectangle tool here and let's just drag out one nice, long, rounded rectangle. That's going to produce the bottom part of this little caravan here. I want the same line over here, so I'm just going to copy it. I'll hold down the Alt option key on a Mac, I'm going to hold the Shift key as well because that will drag it in a perfectly horizontal line. I want this to be perfectly lined up. The bottom of the caravan might be wrong right now. I'm going to fix that in a minute. Now that I have this second rounded rectangle, I can come here and just bring it in. You can see that this line here is not joining up, or we'll go to the direct selection tool, select this line, and just drag it down just to finish it off. Let's check and see how everything looks. You can come back into the last palette at any time and just turn on and off your template layer just to make sure all things are looking correct. Let's handle the door next. For the door, I want a rectangle. I'm going to the rectangle tool. I'm just going to drag in my door. Now I don't want the bottom line of the door, I'm going to use the bottom line that I already created for that. I'm going to lock everything down. Let's lock down the lines we already have, which will allow me to very easily select the bottom line of the door here and press "Delete". I'm also thinking that all of my lines could be a little bit darker. I think I've chosen a color that's making it a little bit difficult for me to see what's going on, so let's go and choose a darker color. I think that's a bit more robust. I can see here that these lines look perfectly lined up. I would like to round the corner of my door though, so let's go up here. Let's re-select this rectangle, and if I go to the direct selection tool, you'll see here that these two little widgets for rounding the corners are now accessible to me. I'm going to click on this one, and I'm going to Shift-click on this one, and now I can drag them both in just to round that top corner. While we're here, let's do this particular window. Again, I want a rectangle, so I'm going to drag out my rectangle here. For this particular rectangle, I want this corner to be rounded, and this one to be rounded, but I don't want these two to be rounded. That's easily done. Again, let's select the rectangle. Let's go back to our direct selection tool. Let's click on this little widget to select it. Hold down the Shift key and click on this widget to select it. If you select everything by mistake, just undo it and start again. Select that, Shift-click right in the middle of this one so that these two are white and they're not selected. These two have got this little thicker edge around them, showing that they are selected and I can just drag in on them to round that for the window of the caravan. Now I want this to be this as well because this is the hole that is showing where the window is open. Let's select over this, make sure that you do it with the selection tool, and we're going to just flip it, so we'll choose Object, Transform, and then Reflect. We're going to reflect over the vertical, and of course, we want the original window plus our copy. We're going to click here on "Copy". While I have it selected, I'm just using the arrow keys, the left and right arrow key to just move it into position. If you hold the Shift key down at the same time, it moves in 10 pixels at a time. If you don't hold the Shift key, it just does one pixel at a time. This is not matching up. That's exactly what I want right now because I want to erase this particular line. Back to the direct selection tool, back to selecting over, just this line here, press "Delete", and it's gone. Now, I can go back and just maneuver this shape into position so it lines up perfectly with the original window. We're going to get rid of this line in the middle later on. This is where we are so far. We need to do the window here in the caravan. Again, I'm going to use a rounded rectangle here. But before I do that, let me just work out how big this rounded rectangle is, how high it is. Because it would look better if everything was pretty neat and pretty much the same. Let's go and have a look at the height of this. It's 11 pixels. I'm going to make my other rounded rectangles, also 11 pixels. Again, a rounded rectangle. Again, I'll just drag it out here. I'm going to the "Transform" so I can see how high it is. Well, it's 12 pixels. This is unconstrained, so you want to make sure that this icon here looks like this so you're not going to adjust the width when you adjust the height, but I'm going to make this 11 pixels. These are going to match in terms of their size. I'm going to add a rectangle here for the window. So let's just go and get the "Rectangle" tool. I'm going to move it slightly away from the window because I want that top line to disappear, to be deleted. Draw it. Go and select the "Direct Selection" tool, select over this top line, which is the one I don't want, and remove it. I want to round the bottom corners here. So let's go and select these bottom corners, and let's just drag in on them. Now, re-select the entire shape and just move it into position. We'll center it in just a minute. Let's draw this line across here. It's just a line, we can do it with the "Pen" tool. Just click once, hold the "Shift" key and click again. Holding the "Shift" key, of course, is making sure that it is a perfectly horizontal line. This here is just another line, so let's just click away from the existing line, go back to the "Pen" tool, click, shift-click, press "Escape". Then I want a circle here, so let's go to the "Ellipse" tool and I'm just going to draw in my circle holding the "Shift" key, of course, as I do that, so that I get a perfect circle. Before we finish up here, let's center everything. Let's go and select all the shapes that make up our window. Clicking on the first one, shift-clicking on the remaining lines. If you find them a little bit difficult to select, you can always lock everything else down and select them by just dragging over them, or you can come in here to the "Layers" pallet and just shift-click on each of them in turn. They're going to be in line at the very top of the "Layers" pallet because we just created them, so they're going to be the topmost objects in the "Layers" pallet makes it a bit easier sometimes to select them. We're just going to click here on "Horizontal Align Center" but let's make sure, first of all, what we're aligning to. Okay, We're aligning to the selection. Don't align to the artboard or this whole thing's going to jump everywhere. Let's just click once and, again, to make sure everything jumps into position. Sometimes you will need to click twice, I don't know why it doesn't work the first time, but it doesn't. We're going to look at the caravan tires and also at the wheel well. So let's zoom in here. For my wheel well, I want it to be a shallow curve, much shallower than the actual wheel. So I'm going to do this just with a "Pen" tool line. I'm going to click and drag starting here so that I can start drawing my curve and I'm going to head in the direction I want my curve to go, which is towards the top right of the document. Then I'll click and drag to finish off the curve. Now, if you don't get the curve perfectly at this stage, that's fine. Just press the "Escape" key to stop drawing, go back to your direct selection tool, and you've now got access to these handles, so you can finesse this curve. You can also finesse the anchor points by just picking them up and moving them to wherever you want them to be. Just make sure that this line isn't creating any unexpected lumps inside this shape because you don't want that to happen. Let's have a look at the wheels, they are going to be circular. Let's go and get the "Ellipse" tool, hold the "Shift" key so we can draw a perfect circle. If you hold the "Spacebar" down, as you're drawing your circle, you'll be able to move it, and then you can just continue to draw it and position it where you want it to be. Now, I'm a little more concerned about getting it squared up in the wheel well than exactly over the original drawing. We've got the outside of the wheel, we want the inside of the wheel. Now, we did it slightly differently on the lifebuoy, let's see another way of doing this. We've got this circle selected, let's choose "Edit, Copy". Then let's choose "Edit, Paste in Place". What that does is it actually pastes a duplicate of this shape immediately on top of the original. It doesn't look like we've done anything, but we have actually created a duplicate circle and it's exactly in position and it's selected. Let's hold "Alt" and "Shift Down", that's "Option Shift" on a Mac and just drag inwards, and that allows us to perfectly position the middle of the wheel for this caravan. I need this piece here as well, but before I do that, let's add the ground. The ground I'm going to do with the "Pencil" tool. So just go to the "Pencil" tool and select it. Double-click on it so that you can see its settings. What I've got is the smooth option dragged all the way to the right, so this is going to be a nice smooth line. I'm just going to draw this in. Because I had "Smooth" selected, it's been smooth out, so I've got a pretty good line here. I'm pretty happy with that, potentially the only issue is here where the wheel might be below the ground. Let's just go in here. What I'm going to do is go to the "Pen tool and click the add anchor point tool. I'm going to make sure that I locate the ground blind, not the wheel, I want the ground here. I'm just going to click on it once and then go to the direct selection tool and now I can just pull it down. The ground is now below the wheel. Now that I've got my ground in place, it's going to be easier to make this shape. Let's just zoom in here. For this, I could use a rectangle, or I could just use two lines. Let's go for the lines. We'll go to the pen tool. Click once, holding the Shift key, click again, press "Escape". Click again here. Hold the Shift key, click again on the ground line, press "Escape". We now have everything that we need to create our caravan, except that we've got some overlapping lines. The wheels are not right and neither is this window. I also just want to check this joint here. That joint's fine, so it's the window and the wheels that we need to do something with. Let's go to the "Selection" tool and select "Everything". I'll then go to the "Shape Builder" tool. It's this tool here, so click on it. Now with the shape builder tool, it's really easy to use if you watch what you're doing. What we want to do with the shape builder tool is we want to position ourselves over a line that we want to remove and hold the "Alt key" on a PC option on a Mac. You'll want to wait until the line you want to remove is actually highlighted. Otherwise, you could remove something that you don't expect to remove, but once you've got the line highlighted, you can just click on it and it will just disappear. Let's zoom into the wheel well here so we can see a bit more clearly what we're aiming for. "Shape Builder" tool, hold down the "Alt" key, that's "Option on a Mac. We need to work out which line we don't want. Well, we don't want this line here because this is our wheel well, so this part of the wheel would be hidden. I'm just going to make sure it's highlighted. Click on it once. I also don't want these bits here. Again, make sure it's highlighted. Click on it once, and that's, of course, done with the "Alt" key on a PC Option on a Mac. At this point, you can go ahead and hide your template and just make sure that everything looks as you want it to look. Not really happy with this line here, I think I'd like it to be a bit shorter. Let's just come in here, go to the selection tool and just shorten this a little bit. I'm going to hold the "Shift" key as I do it so that it is moving in a perfectly horizontal direction and not in a vertical direction at all.
7. Pt 6 Draw the umbrella and chairs: Now that we've got a caravan lines in, it's time to look at the umbrella. I'm going to zoom into that area of the template. For the umbrella, I'm going to draw this as one line, so I'll go to the pen tool, click here at the top of the line, and then just click here again at the bottom of the line, press "Escape" to finish that off. I'm going to draw this as a curve. Again, I'm going to the pen tool. I'm going to click and drag here. It's really important that you click and drag to get the starting point of your curve with these handles attached to it, head in the direction that you're going in the curve, which of course is towards the top right of the document. Now I want to come all the way over here, and I'm going to click and drag in a downwards direction because that's going to finish off that curve. Now I want to swing around the bottom handle here. To do that, I'm going to, while I'm still drawing this curve, hold down the Alt key on a PC, Option on a Mac. I'm going to come back here and head in the direction I'm going with this bottom curve. I'll let go the left mouse button, and then let go the Alt or Option key, and you can say that my curve is now heading back in this direction. Now there's a risk that when I try and click and drag on this point here, now I'm going to lose my curve. Just let me show you what's going to happen. I'm just going to undo that. When you're heading back to this curve, you're going to hold down the Alt or Option key again, and click back here on this curve and drag out to create the curve, then you're going to get this entire shape. That's a way of creating a shape where your curves are actually turning around. We were going in this direction here, and then we swung it around to go back across here, and we wanted it to finish up with the curve that we wanted, again, Alt or Option clicking to finish off our line. At this point, if you need to finish your curve, you can do that with the direct selection tool that gives you access to your handles where you can just finish the curves. Again, you can decide how much you want to follow the original drawing or if you want to make some adjustments to that as you're actually drawing in your curves. Now this particular umbrella top is going to look better without really hard edges here, really sharp points, so I'm going to select over it and I'm going to the stroke options, and I'm going to click here on corners, I'm going to make them into a round join. It's just going to look a little bit better. Next, we need to put these five boxes across here. I'm going to make them all the same size box, but let's just zoom in and let's start drawing them. I'm going to start with a rectangle, so I'm just going to create a straightforward rectangle. I don't want the top line of the rectangle, so I'm going to select it with the direct selection tool and just press "Delete". Now, I do want the bottom corners here to be rounded, so I'm just going to drag in on them just to round them off a little bit. Now depending on how good you are at rotating and moving things around, you may find that this particular technique I'm about to show you is useful. With this shape selected, I'm going to choose Object Transform, and then Transform Each. That gives me access to this dialog where I can transform this shape by just clicking on things, so I'm just rotating it around until I think it is rotated so it's going to line up with this line here. I can also decrease the vertical, and then increase the horizontal a little bit to move it into position. Once I've got it in position, I'll just click "Okay". Now I'll Alt or Option drag the next one away. I'm going to place it roughly in position, Object, Transform, Transform Each. I'm going to zero this out because I'm seeing the transformation I did previously, and now let's go and adjust the rotation and the position if we need to, to add this second shape now. I'm just going to click "Okay" because it looks like it's pretty good. I'm going to Alt or Option drag the next one along. I think this one's actually a bit close, so I'm just going to move it along a little bit. Let's select this one, Object, Transform, Transform Each. I need to rotate this a little bit, so let's adjust the rotation, and I need to move it a little bit. I'll move it into position, looks pretty good, I'll click "Okay". Alt or Option drag, I duplicate away, Object, Transform, Transform Each. I'm just using the arrow keys to change the rotation, and also the vertical and horizontal settings. You can just nudge it into position that way, and then we'll go for the last one, Alt or Option drag. Now I think my spacing's out a little bit, so let's just go and see if we can fix that up a little bit. You want to make sure that none of these lines go beyond the bottom line of the umbrella and are actually sitting inside the umbrella. Everything looks pretty good there. Let's make the chairs here, so let's assume into the first of the chairs. We can do this with, again, the pen tool. Select it and click here for the first line, and click here to finish this line, press "Escape". I'll add this line in here, and then this line. If you don't get them exactly right, you can adjust the line position using the direct selection tool. The last one of these lines is a curve. Again back to the pen tool this time, instead of clicking, we're going to click and drag. Click and drag in the direction that we're heading with this curve, and then we're finishing off this and we're going to click and drag in the direction that the curve would continue to go in. So if we were to continue drawing that curve with a pen, for example, a pencil, we would be heading in this direction, so that's the direction we need to head with the pen tool. Make sure that everything lines up, which it does. Now, all of these shapes are going to be at the very top of the last panel here, making it easier for us to select them. There are four shapes that go to make up this seat. We're going to group them with Object and then Group. The reason we're going to group them is twofold. Firstly, it's going to back it easier for me to align it to the ground here, but also, this chair over here could be a reflection of this chair. Let's choose Object, Transform, and then Reflect. I'm going to reflect over the vertical and make a copy, and then since this one's already selected, shift and then arrow to move it into position. Now I can probably get that one to sit pretty near to start off with. But again, you could use that Transform Each to move it into position. You'll need to group it, of course, so it behaves as a single object, not as individual objects. Let's have a look and see where we are. At the very bottom of the last pallet is our templates, so we can just turn that off and say how everything is looking. Well, we've got one thing to fix up and that is the line going through the umbrella. Let's go and select all those objects that make up the umbrella. I'm going to zoom in so I can see them more clearly. I need to remove these two lines, which we can do with the shape builder tool. Click the Shape Builder tool, hold the Alt or Option key, and then make sure that you're selecting this line, so you want to hover over the line so you can make sure that it is selected. Now if you find that your lines aren't responding to the Alt or Option key, double-click on the Shape Builder, and make sure that you have selected Highlight Stroke when Editable, because that allows us to see the stroke rather than the fill. Again, Alt or Option, highlight it, click to delete it. Now everything's looking really good with our sketch. We've transformed our sketch into vector lines. In the next video, we're going to apply a couple of color schemes to this sketch.
8. Pt 7 Recolor the Artwork: Now that we've got all the line work done for this particular drawing, it's time to color it and we're going to do it exactly as we did the last one. You can keep the template layer here or not as you prefer. I'm going to leave mine in play, so I'm going to make a duplicate of this last, so I'm not working on the original. I'm going to turn off one version of this and lock it down so it just can't be touched. We're going to work on this version here. When I turn it on and off, we're not seeing anything. We're just confirming that this layer here has all the content on it. I'm going to select it, the easiest way to select it is just to click this icon here. To color, we're going to use the live paint. I'll go to object and then live paint and click "Make". Because that makes this a live paint object. Now we can go to the Live Paint Bucket tool, which shares a toolbar position with the Shape Builder tool that we're familiar with using because we've been using it up until now. Now I need to get some colors. I have plenty of colors here in my swatches panel. If you don't have the colors that you want, you can go to Window and then Color Themes, and you can go and look for some color themes to use. We did that in the previous video. Of course, you can just add your own colors. But I'm going to sample one of these colors to start off with. Now you can see the three colors above the icon so I can just choose between those by using the arrow keys. I can also just come and click on any other color to select it. You want to make sure that you can drop color into the right spot, so double click on the "Live Paint Bucket tool". Make sure you have paint fills selected, not paint strokes, because not painting the strokes at this stage. You will want to highlight the area so that you can actually see what you're about to drop color into. I'm going to start dropping color into my design here. I'm just highlighting the areas that I want to drop color into. Now we need a color for the tire here, which is sort of this color but not quite. I'm going to click the plus symbol here. I'm going to change the color a little bit by darkening it up. It's a bit more like brown and I'll click, "Okay". I've added this color in it. Added as a global color, doesn't really matter too much whether it's global or not at this stage. I've now colored my art, I'll go back to the Selection tool. The one thing that I didn't do, was this little circle here. In actual fact, I'm going to go back and select it and let's just fix that up. At the worst case scenario, I need to fill it with white. If I want it to be white, because otherwise right now it is see-through. Let me just zoom in and make sure that I actually did drop white in here. If we have a look in the last palette, we're going to see that we have a group which is a live paint object inside that group. Of course we need to expand it. With it selected, we'll choose object and then live paint and expand. Now that's going to give us groups inside groups. We've got a group for all the line work here, and then we've got a group for the actual colors. We can just break these out, you can ungroup them or you can just drag them out so that you have two groups, one for the line work, one for the colors. At this point, if you want to recolor this, to create a second version, so we can see how we do that. I'm going to grab this entire layer and drop it onto the new icon. I'll lock one of these down and go and select the other one and start moving it down. I have two of the designs in the workspace here. The second one, I'm going to recolor. But at this stage, I only want to recolor the colors and not the lines. I'm going to just select the color here. The easiest way to recolor things is probably to use the Recolor Artwork dialog. I'll click here on "Recolor Artwork". If you're using the most recent version of Illustrator, you may not see this in exactly the same way, but you're going to have a button down here that says "Advanced Options". You want to click on that so that you can see a dialog that looks exactly like this, or pretty much like this. There are a few things to be aware of here, I don't want to recolor the tire because I don't want the brown color to change. So I'm going to get rid of it as a color option. I'm going to click here to deselect that arrow. I'm going to right click and remove the color. Now brown is isolated, so to is white. If you're using white in an illustration, typically it will not be able to be used to recolor without you setting it up to do that. That's right. That says it should be because typically white and black are colors that you don't want to change. In this case, I also don't want to change this brown. Now there are various options I can use, one of them is this one which is just going to randomly change the colors around. But because I've blocked off the brown, the brown is actually not moving. So this allows me to look at some of the other colors in the image and just say how they might look if they were moved around the image. The white is moving into position, but every so often it'll disappear out as well. If you see a color combination that you like, stop, because you're not going to get this back really easily. As soon as you see something you like, stop and just click "OK". Then you could make another copy of the art and try again with a different color scheme. You can also recolor using the edit options. This one allows you to actually drag the colors around the color wheel. Here, you want to check this icon. At the moment it says, link harmony colors. That's what I'm going to do. I'm going to click on it to link the harmony colors. What that does, is when I drag around, all the colors come with me. The spatial relationship between the colors is staying steady, but the colors themselves are changing. I can move in and out. But basically the spatial relationship between this color and this color is remaining the same and this color and these colors are always going to be opposite each other. They're just going to be in different places on the color wheel. Now, if you find that you've got something you like, but you don't like one of the colors, for example, this purple might be a bit dark. Then we can disable this option and go and locate the purple and just find a different color for it. Then if you want to continue to explore the colors, you can relock this and try and drag things around again and see if you can find something that you like. But again, as soon as you see anything that you like, stop. Because you never going to find it again easily. I'm happy with this. I'll click "OK". Now in this second layer here, I've got the recolored artwork. I've got a group of lines and I've got my colors and they're separate from each other. If I want to change my line art, then I can click here to select just the lines. I can choose a different color for that. I can choose it by clicking here or I can go to recolor artwork. Sometimes that's a really nice way of adjusting the line color because you can experiment with it. You can drag around the slider here and just see what it looks like in place on your image. You can also lighten up your lines by just dragging here to lighten up the colors. You can choose lighter colors for your lines should you want to. When you find a color you like, click "OK".
9. Pt 8 Prepare Vector Art for stock sales: One of the [inaudible] that you might want to create your artwork like this, tracing a sketched images because you want to sell it or give it away. While the artwork looks good, it's slightly all done in terms of vectorizing. It's still not in a state that you would want to give it away. Let's have a look at the last pallet and let's consider what stock sites might complain about if we tried to upload this image as stark. One of them is it has an embedded raster image in it. It's got the original template layer. This is a linked file. It's a bitmap image, it's our sketchbook. We would not want to be giving this away and a lot of stock sites would actually reject the image because this layer is in here. We're going to get rid of this particular layer. So we're going to remove the embedded raster image. Now there's also a locked in the hidden layer here. What I did was this was the original line work and it's in a log black and it's hidden. Again, most stock sites would not accept an image file that has that in it. If we don't need this layer, we need to delete it. Now that begs the question as to what are you working on at this stage? Well, what I would be doing is having made a copy of the original vectorized image, I would now be preparing one for stock sales. You can see I've got it up here. Caravan for stock sales. This is not my original image. This is a copy of it. I'm preparing it for stock, so it doesn't have all the bits in it that I want in my file, but it will have only the things that are appropriate to sell as stock. Now we have a group here that is all the colors and that's looking pretty good. These are all filled shapes. There's nothing really much to worry about with this particular group. This group however, is, again, for a lot of stock sites, it would not be acceptable. For example, Shutterstock would not accept it because there are open paths. If I click on this, this is a line here, it's this line here and it has a stroke and no fill. Shutterstock doesn't like that. Shutterstock wants all of these lines to be expanded. Because I kept all my line work separate, all I need to do is to go to my linework, select it and choose Object, and then expand. I'll just click OK. Now this is expanded into one being holy mess, but it doesn't really matter because the next step is going to start cleaning this up. What I've got is groups and inside these are path. But let's have a look at this path now. This is this curved piece here. We can see now it's got a fill and no stroke. It's actually expanded so that when we look at it, it's got anchor points around the outside of the shape rather than having a line through it. That's what we're doing by expanding this. This would be acceptable to Shutterstock in terms of its no longer a line, but it is a filled shape. The last pallet here however, is still one big mess. what I'm gonna do is I'm going to grab this entire group and I'm going to join or merge all of these shapes together. The easiest way to do that is to just go to pathfinder and click here on Unite. Now what that does is it creates a compound path. Let's see what it looks like. Well, we've got one compound path that is most of the objects here, but then we have another compound path here for the inside of the wheel and we have another one here for the window in the caravan. If I turn all of those back on and select all of them, so I'm just going to go through and shift-click on each of them. I can actually make them into a single compound path, even though clicking here on the unite option is not going to do that is still ends up with three individual pieces. We can force illustrated to treat them as a single compound path. We do that by choosing object and then compound path and make. This is like taking a sledgehammer to Illustrator and going like listen to me, I want one compound path and now I've got that as a single compound path. A compound path is there's nothing wrong with a lot of people look and say, they've got compound paths and think, oh my goodness, what am I going to do? I've got a compound path. Well, there's nothing wrong with a compound path. All a compound path is a more complex path. It's got elements that surround other areas. It essentially, if you think of a compound path as a donut where you've got the circle with a hole in the middle and you're looking at the donut part, they'd been that's a very simple compound path here. We've got lots of circles with holes in the middle and so we've got a compound path, but that's just fine. What we do have now is something that's very easy to re-color and also when we click on it, we should see here that it only has a fill. It should not have a stroke. Again, most stock sites would prefer that you don't have stroke lines, that you just have filled lines. Here is all of our color and here is all of our line work. You may want to rename this. I will put this is color and I will double-click here and just call this lines. When I click and rename it, you can say that the word compound path has disappeared. It's still a compound path, but you don't have something potentially in your last palette that you don't like to see. Just be aware of that. You can also rename this here. Now if I had multiple caravans in this particular file or multiple objects in this file, I would make sure that each one of them was on their own layer and that they were named appropriately. This is a nice, clean way of distributing your content. The nicer and the cleaning you make your files, the more likely hood you are of getting higher star ratings for your stock images and also getting people who are going to repeatedly buy your stuff because they know that you produce it in a neat and tidy way. Now for any stock site that you intend to sell on, you need to make sure that you understand what that stock site means. I've gone online and I found this particular site. I'm going to give you the details of this site. What they've done is that they've summarized the Shutterstock vector requirements. Of course, you want to make sure that they have an actual fact summarized it to the current requirements. But this is going to give you a good indication. You want a file format of EPS. You're not going to be distributing AI files, you're going to be distributing an EPS file. The total file size limit is here. The bounding box should be between four and 25 megapixels. The vector should be inside the artboard will of course our stars don't include any raster files. Well, we removed our template, no open paths. That's why we went and expanded all our paths so that they'd be filled shapes, no strokes or brushes, no fonts, no lock layers again, remove that lock layer. No traced images. Again, we remove that a single art-board and no trademarks. That's a good summary of the requirements that you're going to find that high-end stock sites have. Low in stock sites probably don't have such stringent requirements, but you know, it doesn't hurt to look at something like shadow stocks requirements and try and meet those because they're the best practices, if you like. I would be pretty happy with this image it looks like it's pretty well-prepared for most stock sites. Of course, the last step that I'll need to do is to save it as an EPS file but before I do, I want to save it as an AI file because I want to make sure that I can always come back to my AI file and make changes should I need to do so. To save the file if we go back to this particular website, they're saying EPS 10 or EPS 8. Well, EPS 10 is an actual fact that an Illustrator 10 EPS file. Let's go back to Illustrator and see how we would make that choice. File, Save As we're going go down here and choose EPS. Now I want to use art boards and I'm going to select range and just do up or one. Remember it said in those previous instructions that we were just to send one art board. I'm going to click here on Save. Here is where we get the version. If we want an EPS 10, then we're going to choose Illustrator 10. Now we're getting a warning here and that's just because it's a legacy format. But again, we made sure that we saved our file as an AI file so we haven't lost anything. We can always get back to the original. But if we have to save to a legacy format, we may be losing some of the benefit of using a more recent version of Illustrator, but that's not the issue here. What we're trying to do is meet the requirements of a stock site. I'm happy with that I'll just click OK. I'm warned that any type would be converted to a point type. Now that's really important because you don't want to be including type in your files. We're not looking at type in this particular instance, but that would be the case and that would be desirable so just click OK. Of course what you'll want to do then is to go and test your EPS file. You'll choose File and then Open, and then you'll want to go and get your EPS file and open it. Make sure that what you see when you open it is what you expect to see. Make sure that there's nothing hidden. Make sure that there's nothing weird about this file. Make sure that it's possible to, for example, re-color or select things, just make sure that it's working as you would expect it to. It's got a somewhat weird name because it's got dash 01 on it because I saved that [inaudible] , but that would be easy enough to change. I'm not going to save this. I don't want to re-save it, I just wanted to test it to make sure it looked okay.
10. Pt 9 Add Texture to the Lines: There are other things that you can do to your vector illustrations to add more interests to them. Now, to a certain extent, that's going to depend on how far down the track you've gone in creating them. If you still have your vector lines as lines, and I've just selected my line group. You can see here that they're stroked, not filled, so they're still lines. Then we can add a brush to the line in place of the line itself. To do that, you're going to need to isolate your line. If you kept a copy of your original line work, that would be great. Or if you haven't actually expanded your lines, then you can use this process as well. I'm going to select all my line work here and I'm going to my brushes panel. You can get two brushes that are shipped with illustrated by clicking here on the brush library menu. There are all sorts of brushes that you can use. You may find that the artistic brushes have things that you could use such as the chalk, charcoal, pencil, or ink, or paint brush. I'm actually going to use this one which is already installed into Illustrator. But to get to any of the others, you would just click the collection that you want to look at. Choose the brush that you want. If you've got your lines already selected, just simply by clicking on this brush, you're going to not only apply it to these lines, but also added over here to the brushes panel. Let's just go and get one of these. I'll choose this one here. You can say it's been added to the brushes panel. It's also been applied to my illustration. Now, if that's not the one that I want, then I can try something else. You could also create your own brushes. Just going to close this down because this brush has gone in and it's very, very small. But we could solve that by just increasing the line weight because these are still lines, then we can change the line weight and see if we get a better result. I'm not liking that at all, so I'm going back to this brush. Again, in this case the line weight is too heavy, so I'm going to make it something like about two pixels. This has added some visual interests to our illustration just simply by replacing the lines themselves, the smooth lines with in this case, a brushed line. Instead of adding brushstrokes to your lines, it's also possible to use what are called width profiles. I'm going to select my line work again and I'm just going to remove the brush stroke. I do that by clicking here the bottom of the brushes panel, remove brushstroke. We're back to our original lines. They're a little bit thin, so I'm going to increase the stroke weight here. With my lines still selected, you'll see that there's an option here called uniform and what these are, are what is called variable width profiles. In other words, we can change the width of the lines. I'm going to click on this first one, which is width profile 1. Let's just increase the stroke weight so we can see what's going on. This is a variable width profile that has either end of the line very thin and it's very much thicker in the middle. We're saying that here, here is a line, it's thin at either end and it's thick in the middle. This is a line again, thin at either end, thick in the middle. There are plenty of width profiles that are shipped with Illustrator. You can choose and experiment with some of these width profiles. Now, this is one I've created myself, so just ignore that for now. You won't have that one, but you will have things like this triangular one. It's thicker at this end, thin at this end. When you have a width profile that is something that's different at either end, sometimes you may want to flip it around. For example, if I want to flip the profile on this line, what I'm going to do first of all is select the line. For that I need the Group Selection tool because these lines are inside a group. I'm going to click on it with the Group Selection tool. Then I'm going to click on it with the Selection tool, or you could just press the letter V. I've got the entire line selected. I want to continue to use this profile, but I want to reverse it, so I'll go to the stroke option here. At the bottom of the stroke panel is this profile selection, the profile that I've already applied to the line. This will flip it, so I can make it point in the opposite direction for that selected line. Now, this line which goes all the way around the umbrella is thick at this end and thin at this end. Sometimes when you're working with these width profiles and working with strokes, you may find that these options here on the control bar just disappear. That's just the Illustrator being really unhelpful. If it happens to you, it can be really troublesome. Here's the solution. You'll go to window and you'll click down here on ''Stroke'', and that will open up the stroke panel. Chances are your strike panel will look like this with only the stroke weight. Come here to the flyout menu and choose ''Show Options'' and you'll get all of those options. These options here are down here in the strike panel. It will always appear sometimes this can disappear. Now, in addition to using custom width profiles, you can also create your own. Let's go and get this part of the umbrella. I'm just going to click on it. I've got that line selected. Go back to the Selection tools I'm working with this entire line. Let's zoom in so we can see where we are. I want to thicken up the bottom of this umbrella so, I'm going to the Width tool. I'll just click on it to select it. Now, I can come down to this anchor point at the very bottom of the line and thicken it up by do that by clicking on it with the Width tool and then drag outwards. As I do you can see I'm changing the width profile of the line. Instead of being from thick to thin, I've made the bottom really thick now, obviously way too thick, but I was just trying to show you what we're doing here. Now, if you need to change things because you made something too thick as I have done, what you going to do is hover over it and look for these little markers either side of your line that is showing you where you dragged your selected tool and you need to pick those up, make sure that you don't add additional ones by mistake. I'm just going to grab this one and bring it in. Now, I've got a line which is still tapering. But this time not tapering quite as much. You can adjust the line at any point with the Width tool. Let's go and have a look here. I'm just going to click and drag in the middle of the line to make it below out at this point. What I suggested to you to be really careful of is that if you need to alter this, you don't do it by actually creating a second point by mistake. If you do do that and that chances are that you will when you're starting out using the Width tool, you're just going to hover over the anchor point that you don't want here, right-click and choose ''Undo Width Point Change.'' That's just going to remove it. Now, we can pick up the one that we made a mistake with this one here and just bring it in a little bit. Using this Width tool, you can make width profiles that you can use in future in your artworks. If you've got one that you like and you can see it's up here, it's showing the width profile I just created, I'm going down to the bottom here and I'm going to click ''Add to Profiles'', this one we call it, Helen profile 1. It's going to be in the panel here and you can see it's Helen profile 1. We can come back and use that for another line. Let's go to the Group Selection tool. Let's click on this line here. Let's go to our profile list and down the bottom is the profile we just created. It can be applied to various lines in your illustration. Between brushes and varying width profiles for your lines, you should be able to add some interesting detail to your artwork.
11. Pt 10 Shadows and Highlights Method One: In addition to working on the lines in your artwork, you can also add shadows and highlights to it. I'm going to revert to one of the brushes that I was using. some selecting all the line work, going to the brushes panel which of course, I could get to by choosing window and then brushes, and I'm going to reapply that line that I was using, and just increase the stroke weight until I'm happy with what I've got. At any point, you can also add fractional values here. You can see, my stroke weight at the moment is two pixels. I could make that 2.25, should I want to do so. Just type it in and I've got a 2.25 pixel line weight on my brush. But we're here to look at highlights and shadows. Let's just zoom in and let's get to work on that. What I'm going to do, first of all, is draw a shadow or a highlight line with the Pen tool, because I think it's the easiest way to see what's going on. I'm going to the Pen tool, I'll select it. I'm going to work with the color that's not in my illustration just simply because it's going to be easier to see what's going on. I have a stroke selected, no fill, that's just fine. I'm going to draw in the line I want for my shadow or my highlight. I'm actually going to add a highlight along this side. I'm going to start outside my caravan, click and drag. I'm going to swing into this point here, click and drag to make my curve, and come on down and finish at the bottom of the caravan. I'll press "Escape" to finish. At this point, I can go back to my line and I can make adjustments to it, so I can move it into a different position, I can also go to any one of these anchor points using the Direct Selection tool and adjust the anchor point, adjust its handles, and just look for the kind of curve that I want for my highlight. What I'm looking for is highlighting through this area here. When you've got the line that you want to use, you're ready to progress. I'm going to select it, I'm going to the Direct Selection tool, I'll click on it to select it, and go back to the Selection tool so I make sure they have the whole line selected. The next thing I need to select is this caravan color. It's going to be in the color groups, so I'm going to click to open that. I'm just going to scroll down because it's such a big area, it's really easy to see. I'll hold the Control or Command K and just click on it. I've got two things selected right now, this purple line and the orange part of the caravan. What I want to do is to use the purple line to divide this orange part of the caravan into pieces, we'll use the Shape Builder tool. I'm going to click on the Shape Builder tool, I'm going to click and drag in this area, the area that I want to use for my highlights. I'm just going to click this so it is an area. Now, it's lost its color, that's not a problem, but it has now been separated from this area here and that is really important. The other thing I'm concerned about is I've still got two purple lines here. But we know what to do with those. I'm going to hold the Alt or Option K, pick up the line with my Shape Builder tool, and click once to remove it. What I'm left with is a shape here and this shape here. This particular area here is really easy to find in the last panel because it's going to look like this. It's black and white. What I'm going to do is go and click on it to select it, so I just have this shape selected. I'm going to the Eyedropper tool because I want to make it a lighter shade of this orange. The simplest way is to go to the Eyedropper Tool and just click on this orange color. Now, the entire caravan has been stuck back together and the colors are identical. But if I double-click on this now and open up this color picker, because I'm using the hue option here. You can see that every one of these, when I click on them, changes the look of the dialogue. If I have it set to hue here, then I can just click a little bit below or a little bit to the left of the color that I'm using to make a lighter version of it. So to the left for lighter, below for darker. I'm going to make this a highlight, I'm choosing the color to the left. Here, we have a highlight through our caravan. Using a line drawn using the Pen tool as a quick and easy way of doing this. Let's do it once more. Firstly, I'm going to go and get a color to use that's not in use in my drawing. I've got the Pen tool selected, I'm going to click and drag and start drawing the line that I want to use for my highlight. I find this the easiest way because it actually possible to then see what shape you've got for your highlights, and you can decide if it needs [inaudible] or not. I'm pretty happy with this so I'll go to the Selection tool. It's selected. I need to pick up the rest of my caravan which is down here. I will control click on it to select it. Two things are selected, the line and the caravan color. We'll go to the Shape Builder tool, click on it. I'm just going to drag lightly through this area just to separate it from everything else. Then I've got some lines here that I don't want, Alt click on these lines, just make sure you pick up the line so that that's what you're deleting. What we're left with is this part of the caravan and this highlight area. Here it is. I'm going to click on it so it's isolated, it's the only thing I'm working with right now. Back to the Eyedropper tool, select the color from the caravan. This time, I want to go a little bit darker, so it's all still selected. I'll double-click on it and just pull down to a slightly darker color. This is the look that we're getting here on the caravan. Now, there are other ways of achieving similar results with these highlights and shadows, and we're going to look at that on the umbrella in the next video.
12. Pt 11 Shadows and Highlights Method Two: For the second method of creating shadows and highlights, we're going to use shapes to help us with it. The first thing I'm going to do is locate this part of the umbrella. For that, I'm going to need the group selection tool because it's going to be buried here somewhere in this color area. I'm going to click on it to select it. Go back to the selection tool so I make sure that I've got this shape selected. I'm going to copy and paste this, so I'm going to edit copy and then edit paste. That shapes going to jump out of where it was and that's just fine, that's exactly what I want to happen. I'm going to scroll up here and you can see that this shape is up here at the top of the current layer, and it's outside all of the groups that didn't get created within the group that it was copied from. That's just fine, we just need to be aware of where it is. I'm now going to select a different fill color. I have deselected my shape, I've got my fill color here. I'm going to use the ellipse tool to draw the circle or the ellipse to carve off my highlight. I'm just going to drag an ellipse here and I'm going to move it into position. If I'm going to rotate anything, I'm going to make sure that I rotate this ellipse and not this original shape because it's going to be much easier for me to put this shape back up here if it's still in the exact same rotation as it was. Any rotation is going to be done to this ellipse, not to the shape that I'm actually cutting it out of. What I'm looking for is to isolate this area here which is going to be my highlight. I'm covering up the rest of the shape with this ellipse and using this curve instead of drawing the line with the pen tool, I'm using the curve of this ellipse to create my cut line. I'm going to select over both of these shapes and I'm going to the pathfinder tool. Now we could use the shape builder tool, we can also use the pathfinder tool. With the pathfinder tool, we're going to note that this big green shape is on top of the shape underneath the umbrella shape. We can use this tool minus front to cut this big green shape out of this other one. When I click here on minus front, what I'm left with is this shape, it's going to fit perfectly up here. But before I go, let's make it a lighter color. I'll double-click here, we know that we can get a lighter color by going to the left. Let's just go and pick up a lighter version of this color. Then I'm going to drag and drop it into position. Because we didn't rotate it, it's going to go back into position exactly. Let me go and find its spot here. Now the only trouble with this is that right now, it's over the top of the line and not under the line. That's self-evident here. Here is the path that we're working on, here is all our line work. What we need to do is to move it underneath the line work. But since it's the color element, it also should be put in this color group. Let's just pick it up here and drag it into the color group and check that it looks okay. It is here. I'm going to do the exact same thing for the shadow. Click on this shape to select it, go back to the selection tool, edit, copy, edit, paste, and you can use the shortcut keys for that. That's just fine. I'm going to move it out of the way, making sure I don't rotate it. I'm going to choose a different color just simply because it's a little bit easier for me to see. Go back to my oval tool. Again, I'm going to use an oval to cut this area out, draw out a decent size oval. Maybe reshape my oval if I need to. That's looking pretty good. Select both pieces. This time, let's use the shape builder tool. I'm going to the shape builder tool. This is the bit I want, and these are the bits I don't want, so I'll hold the Alt or Option key as I drag over the bits that I don't want. The only problem with the shape builder tool is that I've lost my color, and so I'll need to go and get it again. I'm going to the eyedropper tool. Let's just click on this shape so that we get the color back. I need this to be darker, so I'll double-click here and we'll go down, or to the right to pick up the darker color. Now I'm just going to put this back into position. I'm in and just make sure that's where I want it to be. Probably haven't done that good a job of doing this, so I would probably go and make it a little bit smaller, but let's just see what we're going to do here. The important thing is to get it into the right position in the layers panel. It needs to be in this color group, and it definitely needs to be under this line work because the lines are being blocked by it right now. Let's grab it and let's drop it in here. I'm making a decision here that it's going under the highlights, so if there's any cross between the two, the highlight is going to be showing and not the shadow. Let's just go back out. That's another way of creating your highlights and shadows, is borrowing a shape to help you along. In this case, because I wanted curves, I use the ellipse tool. These shadows and highlights can add interesting dimension to your artwork and they're pretty simple to achieve. Just treat the pieces that you have created as the other pieces in the artwork and just make sure that they're placed in the correct location in the layers pallet. You certainly don't want pieces of highlight and shadow sitting outside of the group, that is all of your color elements. You don't want to be turning the visibility of this group on and off and having elements still appearing. That's not really a good form for designing your artwork.
13. Pt 12 Shadows and Highlights Method Three: It's also possible to add some highlight and shadow to your artwork using simple lines. Let's see how we might do that. I have a second version of our artwork here, going to just lock down and hide this top version. Let's look at this one in particular, the caravan. I'm going to draw a line for our highlight here, so I'm going to the Pen tool. Let's just set this up. I want to be using this color, so I'm going to target that color. Let me just flip it so it's going to be the stroke. Because I want it to be the highlight, I'm going to make it lighter. I'll double-click on it, and let's just go up here to choose a lighter color. With the Pen tool, I'm first of all, going to need to select the artwork that I'm actually going to work on, let me just go and draw this out. I'm going to click and drag here. Whenever you're going to work around a curve, always click and drag, just don't click because otherwise you won't get a starting point that has these handles that you can adjust to adjust the curve of the line. Let's come down here and click and drag. It's just going to be a very simple line here. I'll press "Escape." Go back to the Direct Selection tool and I can improve on this curve. You can also adjust the placement of any of these anchor points by just clicking on them and dragging. I'm going to make this a bit wider, but you can see here that I've lost those stroke options, sometimes this happens. I'm going to Window and then Stroke. My Stroke panel is over here, I can make this line a lot wider. Now one of the things I want for my highlight is for this not to be a blunt end, but to be curved. So I'm going to select here on round cap and that will give it round ends. I'm going to zoom in a little bit closer because I need to see where I'm working. I'm going to the Width tool, I'll click on it and I'm going to make the middle of this line a little bit wider. I'm going to eyeball where the middle of the line is, click and drag outwards to make it a little bit wider. Now I want the ends of the line to be narrower. With the Width tool, I'm going to hover over this anchor point and you can see these little markers here that are showing us how wide the line is. Well, I'm going to pick up one of them and just move it in. I'm going to come down here, do exactly the same thing, here's the width marker here. Find it and just shrink it a bit. I'm going to zoom out and just see how it looks. Well, I'm really happy with this. Now. This is a width profile and I can save it and use it again. I'm going to click on it to select it, come up here, and I'm going to save it. I'll click here on "Add to Profiles", and I'll call this Helen Profile 2. This is going to give me a nice line profile for my highlights and shadows. Let's come across here to this curve of the caravan and I'm going to make a shadow. I'll click here on the Pen tool, click and drag to start my line, click and drag to finish it. Now the width profile is already being applied to it, but if it were not, it would be easy enough to do that. Let me just go back to the uniform profile. If you've got a line that you've drawn out and it's not got the profile associated with it, well, just select on it, open up your profile panel and towards the end will be the profiles you've created. Here is Helen Profile 2, so I can just click on it to apply it to the line. Because this is still a line just with a width profile associated with it, it's fully editable. So we can go to any of these anchor points and adjust the line. Now this has got a highlight on it, I don't want it to be a highlight, I want it to be a shadow so I've selected it. I'd like to go back to this reference color, so I'll go to the Eyedropper tool, click on my reference color. It's been applied as a fill rather than a stroke, so I'll just click here to use it as a stroke. Now if I double-click on it, I can be sure that I'm going to get the same color but in a darker version of it so that I can use that for my shadow. It seems that in doing that I've lost all of my width profiles, but that's not a problem because over here is my width profile. I just need to apply it to the line and then just increase the line weight. The only thing we need to do before we finish this up is to treat these as color elements. Here they are, they're outside the line work and they're outside the color area of the artwork. But because they're lines, you may want to expand them before you put them here in this group. I'm going to select both of these and I'm going to expand them with Object and then Expand Appearance. Now they are filled shapes rather than lines. They can't be edited the same way that lines can be edited, but I can pick up both of them and put them where they belong in this illustration, which is inside the group that is the color elements of the illustration. One of them went in, let's go and move the other one in. They're here at the top. You could go ahead and add elements like this throughout this illustration to either side of the umbrella. You might add a little highlight around here or a highlight here and a shadow here. You can add a lot of dimension to your artwork just with these simple lines.
14. Project and Wrapup: We've now completed the video portion of this course, so it's over to you. Your class project will be to turn a sketch into a vector. Set up your sketches a template layer, draw the vector shapes, fine tune them with the shape builder tool and then color the art using the live paint tool. When you're done, post an image of your vectorized art as your class project. Now, as you were watching these videos, you will have seen a prompt asking if you would recommend this class to others. Please, if you enjoyed the class and learn things from it, would you do two things for me. Firstly, answer yes, that you would recommend this class to others, and secondly, write even just a few words about why you enjoyed the class. These recommendations help other students to say that this is the class that they too might enjoy and learn from. If you see the follow link on the screen, then click it, and you'll be notified when my new classes are released. If you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. My name's Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch, and I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.
Helen Bradley, Graphic Design for Lunch™
