Sketchy Image Effect in Adobe Illustrator - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. Sketchy image effect in Illustrator - Introduction: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design For Lunch Class: Sketchy Image Effect in Adobe Illustrator. Graphic Design For Lunch is a series of classes that teach a range of tips and techniques for creating designs and for working in applications such as Illustrator, Photoshop, and Procreate. Today, we're going from a photo to a sketchy image effect in Illustrator. Along the way, you're going to learn heaps about illustrator. I learned a lot in trying to make this video and make the effect really efficient to create, so I'm sure that you're going to learn heaps, too. As you're working through these videos, you may see a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. When you do see it, if you're enjoying the class, please do two things for me: give it a thumbs up and write just a few words about why you're enjoying the class. These recommendations get my classes in front of more people who, just like you, want to learn more about Illustrator. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and your questions, and I look at all your class projects. Now if you're ready, let's get started creating a sketchy image effect from a photo in Illustrator. 2. Sketchy image effect - Part 1: For this project, we need to start with a photograph. So I found a really good photograph to use at unspliced.com. For the photograph, you probably want something with has some fairly simple lines in it, but I'm going to give you the download link for this image. Just click on the download button. Now, I've already done that, so let's get rid of that, and I'm going to create a new document. I don't know how big that image was, but I'm going to start with an image that's 2,000 by 1,000 pixels in size that's going to handle a landscape image quite well, RGB color mode, and I'll click ''Okay''. Next we need to go and get the image. We're going to do that by choosing file and then place. I'm going to select the image I've chosen to use, and down here, it's important that you disabled the word link. So you want to actually embed this in the image. So I'm going to click place. Now you get to drag out the image, and you can see we did pretty well with our file size. We don't need this image to be as detailed as it is and it's just going to stop your machine if it is. So let's start by rationalizing this object. Rasterize, and we're going to choose RGB, we're going to choose a resolution of screen, and we're going to make sure that we have no anti-aliasing at all. We don't have spot colors anyway, so you can just delete that click ''Okay''. That just simplifies the image. We need it to be gray scale, so we are going to choose edit and then edit colors and then convert to gray scale. This is just converted to a gray scale image. Next up, we need to simplify it even further, and for this we're going to use a filter. I'm going to choose effect and then effect gallery. I'm using the cut-out filter you can see that it's already being applied to this image. The cut-out filter simplifies the image, and so what we're looking for is some interesting colors, and interesting shapes in the image. There you can set the number of levels here, and I want quite a bit of light in this image. So I'm thinking that that's probably going to be a better setting at four than it is at five or six. They're getting a little bit detailed and perhaps not quite as light as I want them to be. Edge simplicity is just going to be the simplicity or otherwise of the edges. You can take it from ridiculous to sensible or some way in between. So I am going for an edge simplicity of about five, and then edge fidelity is going to give you a lot more detail. Probably, don't want that, I'm really going to back off edge fidelity pretty much all away. All you're looking for at this stage is some nice shapes and something that's vaguely recognizable as a car and maybe a building behind it in this image. So that's really all you're looking for. On second thoughts, I think I'm just going to take my edge fidelity up a little bit. I would like to see a bit around the front of the car. So I'm just going to click ''Okay''. Now I have my image simplified quite a bit, and I want to go and trace it. The problem is, that even though we've only got a few colors in this image, if we go ahead and trace this right now, Illustrator, even if we ask it only to choose like four or five shades of gray, it's going to go off on its own. It's just going to create something like about 200 shades of gray. So it's going to be a total nightmare. Before we do this, what we need to do is to create a color palette. I'm going to the swatches panel which is just [inaudible] , so let's go and get my swatches panel. I'm going to make a set of gray scale swatches. I'm going to click here on new color group, and then I'm going to add a color. So I'm going to go here and just create my white first of all. I'm going to drag white into here. Now I'm going to go and create something that is more like about 15 percent gray, and I'm going to place it next to white. Let's go for something here that is more like about 60 here, drop it in, let's go down here, looking at this let's make it 30 percent brightness which is about 70 percent gray. We've got four colors so far, and now let's hit for almost black but not quiet. Let's call that black even though it's not quite black. So we've got five colors here. This is critical these are the five colors that we're going to get out of this image. So now that we've got our swatch ready, and we've got our image ready. In the next video, we're going to go ahead and do the trace. 3. Sketchy image effect - Part 2: To try see image you'll need to make sure that the image itself is selected. So I selected up here on the toolbar you have the image trace option. If you don't have that you can go to object and just choose image trace make. But I'm just going to click on the "Image Trace" button here. The first trace is always going to look absolutely horrible and that's fine. What you need to do is to grab this dialogue here, the image trace panel. We're going to turn off preview and we're going to make sure that advanced is opened up here. You want to see the advanced. We're turning off preview because otherwise the Illustrator is just going to continually traces while we're making our settings, and we don't want to do it until we're ready. I'm going to select color from the mode even though I'm working in a grayscale image. From palette, I want to select Document Library, and then from colors, I'm going to select the color palette that I created. Now what we're doing here is we're saying to Illustrator, we know that you've got your own opinion as to what colors should be used in this image, but we want you to use the colors that we prescribe. This will limit Illustrator to using only these colors. If we don't do that, it's going to throw hundreds of shades of gray at this even if we only asked for a handful. I don't know why it happens, but that's what does, and this is how we're going to solve it. Now, with paths and corners, we're going to drag each of those across to this side and the noise goes in the opposite direction. Typically, these two slides is going the same direction and this one goes in the complete opposite direction, for the settings that we want to use. If you set this too high you would set this one low, but that's going to give you a more detailed scan. We want simplicity today. I'm going to click "Preview", and now Illustrator can go ahead and do the scan. Here is the scan, and Illustrator so used another colors that we asked it to use. Now at this point, if you want to, you could test out some different settings here. Just say if adding a bit to the paths or removing a bit from the paths will give you a better effect. One I'm a little bit concerned about is the front end of this car. I would like it to be a little bit more defined, which seems to require me to have passed set a little bit higher and perhaps even corners. That's not really helping. But I might increase paths a little bit and see if that's going to help just a little bit around the front of the car. You can just experiment with that. Once you're happy with what you've got, you can close the dialog and then you're going to click "Expand". That expands these traced shapes into actual shapes, and now we have a series of vector objects. We just need to ungroup them because they're all in one big group. Let's click "Ungroup", and if we go to the layers panel, we've got one layer with lots and lots of shapes on it. What we need to do is to break these out. I'm going to start first of all by adding a layer and this is going to be light. These are the lightest objects that are going on to this layer here. I'm going to just click "Away", so I don't want anything selected at this stage. I'm going to click on something that is really really light, a shape. I'm going to choose "Select", "Same", "Fill Color", and everything that is white is now selected and you can say throughout this layer, there are lots of little pieces that are sort of light color. To move them up onto this light layer using the lab panel here is a total nightmare. There's a much quicker and easier way of doing it. What you do is you click on the layer you want them moved onto, there's still selected here, and you choose "Object", "Arrange", "Send to Current Layer", and because that was the targeted layer, now all layers light objects are on that targeted layer. You can turn it off or on as you wish. Let's go and create a new layer for the light grays. Going back to our main image, select something that is a light gray. Select "Same, "Fill Color". Target the lab we want to move them to, "Object", "Arrange", "Send to Current Layer". I'm going to do that until I finish with all the colors in this image. If you get a little bit confused, you can always just turn off the visibility of the two layers you created, and that makes it clear the colors that you still have to work with. What I'm now left with is I've got a layer here that has light paces on it. I'm just going to actually call this white because they are going to be the lightest paces in the image and this is now our image, and we've broken it up into five layers, which correspond to the five shades of gray that we applied earlier. Now, at this stage, if you're not really happy with the shade of gray, you can do something with it. I'm going to go to these light grays. I've selected this layer and that selects absolutely everything that is on this layer. Now I could come in here and I could just adjust this color if I wanted to, and click "Okay", and then everything that was colored that shade of gray, has been lightened a bit because I made the color a bit lighter. You do have quite a bit of flexibility here in adjusting the image at this point. Now we've got an image traced down to the few colors that we want to work with, now we're ready to go ahead and to create the sketchy look for it. 4. Sketchy image effect - Part 3: At this point, before I go and create my sketchy look, I'm going to the last panel and I'm thinking if at any stage I wanted these shapes filled with these colors to help with my image. I don't want to lose them. What I'm going to do is I'm going to select all of these layers, I'm going to drop them on the new icon, and that creates two sets of layers. They're both identical. I'm going to add another layer just in above the second set, and I'm going to move all these duplicate layers into that layer. What I've got is layer 13, which I'm actually going to call master color because that is all the color filled shapes. I've got the black, mid gray, light gray, light, and white and it's a duplicate set. What I'm going to do is turn them off, lock them down and just close up that layer. We're going to work on this top layer, but what we've effectively done is saved a copy of this image just in case we want to borrow pieces of it back later on. Probably, I won't in this video, but I just want you to be aware that it's going to be really difficult to unscramble what we're about to do next. If you think there's any chance you may want those layers intact, do this before you take the next step. Let's start with the light gray because this is going to be really highly visible. I've got the layer selected, which means that changes I'm making now are affecting everything that's on this layer, all these light gray shapes. That's why we took the trouble of breaking these out to different layers, it just to makes life a lot easier. We're going to choose Effect, Stylize, Scribble. In the Scribble settings, I'm going to use something like this. I'm going to do it at 30-degrees, so it's going to be going at this angle. You can see the previous setting here. Path Overlap is how far it is inside or outside the path. Now, I don't want it to be outside the path at all. If anything, I might want it to be a little bit inside, so you could play with those values, by which I'm going to set mine to zero. But just be aware that you could also get some good mileage from a minus setting here. Variation is, am I allowed to send just a few lines outside the path? Well, the answer to that is no. We don't want to send anything really out of the path, maybe a really small value, but I think it's better without. Stroke Width is how wide is the stroke. This is a fairly light color. I'm actually going to bring this down to maybe 0.75 of a pixel, or you could even put 0.5 of a pixel. You'll just need to type that in there. Curviness is how curved are the lines. If we wind it up to really curvy, they're like squiggly lines. I don't want any curviness on this at all, so I'm doing zero. Variation is how much variation can I have in saying I didn't want curviness, but now I do want a bit. Well, you can increase the variation to get a little bit of curviness, but not a lot. I'm going to wind that up to about 15 percent. Spacing is how tight or how loose are these lines. You can make them really loose or you can make them really tight. You can take them down to small amounts of a pixel. Let's try 0.5 of a pixel. That's a good space line here. You can try out different values here, but just be aware that you can go really small and you probably don't want to be anything much more than about one or two pixels of spacing and variation, you could just do a small amount of variation. I've done five pixels of variation, that's variation on the spacing. Having done that, I'm just going to click, Okay. These values are sticky, so that means that the next shape that we go and fill when we asked for scribble, we're going to get those same default options. Let's go to the mid gray. Click on it, Effect, Stylize, Scribble. Here are the same settings we used before. At this point because we're working with a slightly darker line, we may want to increase our stroke width. I've got my spacing at 0.5, I think that's probably pretty good. In fact, I'm pretty happy with this right now, so I'm going to click Okay on that. Next, I'm going to select the black or the darkest areas and choose Effect, Stylize, and then Scribble. I'm going to use the same settings as I used before, but I am noticing that there is not a lot of difference between the areas I'm coloring in this time and the ones that I colored in last time. Well, we can solve that in a different way. I'm just going to click Okay. I'm going to take this black copy layer and I'm going to drag it onto the new layer icon. I've got two copies of this layer. Now I've got a darker version of what was underneath, just simply because I put two layers on top of each other. But what I can do with this topmost layer is make my lines go the other way, so I get cross hatch pattern. I'm going through the topmost layer and I'm selecting it. I'm going to the Appearance panel, because what I need to do is I need to access the existing scribble. If I just go and choose Effect and try and add scribble to this, it's going to add another scribble on top of this one. It's going to scribble and scribble which is going to stop your machine and cause all sorts of strain and stress. What you need to do is you need to go to the existing Scribble, Effect, double-click it, and that opens up this dialog. Now what we're doing is we're changing the top version. We're just going to wind this around so that it comes from a different direction, and now we're getting our cross hatch look. At this point, if you wanted to reduce your stroke width a little bit, you could, so you get a slightly lighter darker effect if you like, and click Okay. Now, I started with the light gray ones. If you have a look in here, the light grays have got a scribble effect associated with them. The lights don't. When I select these, you can say in the Appearance panel they don't yet have a scribble associated with them and we're not seeing one on the screen. Let's go to our light copy and apply a scribble effect to this. Now, I'm going back to my 30 degree. I'm pretty happy with all these settings except that I can't see anything because the color is not right. I'm going to click Okay. I'm just going to double-click on the color, which is now going to let me add a little bit of color to the lines that I'm making. I don't want them to be terribly colored. Just looking at this here and click Okay, and that adds a little bit of color into those shaded areas. This is a scribble image. It's being created from a photograph, but it's been made out of scribbled lines. Now you can go and fine tune this any way you like. You may want to use crosshatching throughout, you may want to go and adjust your scribble effect. To do so, just display your Layers panel, select on the layer that contains the items that you want to adjust, and then if you open up the Appearance panel, you can get to the scribble that has been applied to those objects. Remember also that you've got this filled color layer behind everything. If you were to take this layer and if you were to adjust down its opacity quite low, you could get a little bit of additional color behind the scribble effect. That's another potential effect that you could create as to bring back some of the original color from the image below. Of course, if you want a little more detail, you could also, when tracing your image, use more than just the five colors that we used. But there is the effect that we came here to create. Your project for this class will be to go and get an image, you can use this one or you can use any image of your choice. Create a new document in illustrator, place this image into your document, rasterize it, turn it into gray scale, go and run the cut-out filter on it, create a color scheme of shades of gray that you want to trace to, and then go ahead and do your trace. Split all of the different shades of gray into different layers and then apply your scribble effect to them. Post your finished image in the class project area. I hope that you've enjoyed this class and that you've learned lots about tracing images, making color schemes, and applying effects to images in Illustrator. As you're working through these videos, you will have seen a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you're enjoying the class, do two things for me; give it a thumbs up and write just in a few words why you enjoyed the class. Those recommendations will help other Skillshare students to find my classes so that they too can learn more about Illustrator. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read and respond to all your comments and questions. I look at and respond to all of your class projects. My name is Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch. I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.