Vectorize in Adobe Illustrator on the iPad

1. Intro: Hey, I'm Maja Faber and in this class I'll teach you how to vectorize in Adobe Illustrator on the iPad. [MUSIC]. When Adobe Illustrator on the iPad was released as an app, one of the most wanted features was to be able to vectorize with just a few taps. Now, the tool is here. It's simply called the Vectorize tool. In this class I will teach you the ins and outs of this tool and how to use it to vectorize different type of artwork, such as hand drawn watercolors and line drawings, as well as digital sketches and picturized colored artwork. I'm a professional surface pattern designer who loves to create both pixel-based and vector-based artwork. To be able to vectorize directly on my iPad, is a huge deal. It saves me time, energy, and personally I feel that the more I can do on my iPad the better. If you are familiar with the desktop version of Adobe Illustrator, you might have used the tool Image Trace. The Vectorize tool in Adobe Illustrator on the iPad works in a similar way and gives you the same result, which for me is very impressive. This is a beginners friendly class. I do however, recommend that you have some basic knowledge of Adobe Illustrator on the iPad before you take this class, which you can learn in my class; introduction to Adobe Illustrator on the iPad. This is a class for anyone who are interested in vectorizing your artwork or even photos for that matter. To take this class, you need to have Adobe Illustrator on the iPad installed with at least the version 2.0, which was released in October 2021. By the end of this class you will know how to vectorize all sorts of artwork in Adobe Illustrator on the iPad. You'll know the ins and outs of the Vectorize tool and how to use it to successfully vectorize your artwork. 2. Your Project: Your project in this class is to vectorize your pixel artwork in Adobe Illustrator on the iPad. Try to vectorize different art techniques to experiment and learn how a vector is to work in Adobe Illustrator on the iPad. As a project here in class, you can export and present the vectorizing technique that you like to use the most. Be sure to share your project here in class. If you share it on Instagram, feel free to tag me with maja_faber. 3. Downloads: I've included a bunch of downloads here in class so that you can follow along and use the vectors in tool the same way as me, and on the same artwork as me if you wish so that you'll learn how the tool works. The downloads are different type of cactus that I've drawn. All of these resources are free to download in using class for learning purposes. You are not, however, allowed to reproduce, resale, or in any way share this artwork and say that it's yours. You always need to credit me as the artist and photographer. You'll find all of the downloads in the project and resources tab here in class. 4. Vectors vs Pixels: This class is not a deep dive into the topic vectors versus pixels. I won't cover things like when or if you should work with pixels or vectors. It all depends on what you create and how you enjoy working with your artwork. For me, I work with both pixel and vector-based artwork. It all depends on the purpose of my art and also in what mood I'm in and how I feel like creating that day. In this class, however, we will vectorize raster, also known as pixel artwork. Before we get started with the practical parts of this class, I just want to take a short moment to explain what the difference is between vector and pixel artwork and why you may want to vectorize your pixel artwork at all. What is the difference between pixels and vectors? Well, simplified, you can say that pixel artwork are made out of small dots. These squares that are put together to an image. If you zoom into any raster image or photo, you will get to a point where all you see is blurry dots. These are the pixels. Vector artwork, however, are made out of paths and anchor points and are actually mathematical calculations that are made when you draw a vector line or shape. These calculations tell you where your lines and shapes will appear. No matter how much you zoom in on your vector artwork or how much you scale up for that matter, vector artwork will never go blurry. That is one of the main differences between pixel and vector artwork. Because pixels are made out of these dots, you can scale it up to whichever size you want. This will spread out the pixels and you will get a blurry image. Vector artwork, on the other hand, are scalable to the infinity. You will never get a blurry line or shape if it's made in vector no matter how much you enlarge your artwork. This feature is probably what vector artwork is most wanted for. You never need to think about the final size of your art because no matter what size you create your vector artwork in, you can always scale it up without losing quality. Another difference between pixels and vectors are the possibility to details and texture. As you'll learn in this class, vector artwork can have texture, but the texture will never be as detailed as in pixel artwork. The more details you have in your vector artwork, the more anchor points you get, which will also give you a heavy file when it comes to file size. When you work with vectorized artwork with a lot of details, you can experience that Adobe Illustrator will be slow to work with. Typically, vectors are used for things like logos, stylized or simplified artwork, patterns, and more. Pixel artwork are used for illustrations, but also patterns and even photos are made out of pixels. When it comes to illustration and surface pattern design, there are no right or wrong when it comes to if you should create pixel or vector artwork. It's a matter of preference and how you like to draw and create. 5. Different Techniques: There are two ways of vectorizing your artwork. The manual way is by tracing your paths on an image in any vector app. For some, this might be a good option. It will bring you very simplified vector paths. It's great if you, for example, are creating symbols, logos, or any type of solid shape with sharp edges. The other way of vectorizing is by using a vectorizing tool. In Adobe Illustrator on the iPad, this tool is called vectorize. If you use Illustrator on the desktop, you will be familiar with the Image Trace tool. These two tools works in the same way. A vectorizing tool like this allows for a more organic look with rough edges and textures. I would say that it's the most preferred way of vectorizing illustrations and patterns as it gives you a closer look to the original pixel image than if you trace over with a pen tool. In this class, we will focus on the vectorizing tool in Adobe Illustrator on the iPad, which is a new feature when this class is released. 6. Basics of the Vectorize Tool: Before we dive in and experiment with vectorizing different type of artwork, let's have a quick look at the tool and a different settings. I know that it might be hard to remember all of these settings and options after this lesson, but you can always refer back to this lesson later on in class to get a certain tool explained more in detail. During the practical lessons in this class, we work more with learning by doing, but I think it helps to have a basic explanation of the options before we start experimenting. To access the vectorizing tool, tap a pixel or raster image and tap the Objects panel. At the top, you will see an option that says Vectorize, and this is the vectorizing tool. If you tap the little information box, it says the vectorize is built on Adobe Sensei machine learning technology and its performance will improve with time. That's good to know that this tool will get better the more we use it. At this moment when this class is published, this tool has just been released. It will probably grow with time and get better and improve just as it says here. There might even be some more features added, who knows? Let's start with looking at the tool. The first thing is this little eye symbol here. Tapping on this little eye means that you will turn on and off the visibility of the vectorized image. Here you have your original image and if you tap the eye symbol, you'll see the vectorized version of that image when we're working in the vectorize tool. The first little option box is named source. You can choose different sources: sketch, line art, logo, painting, and photograph. What's pretty cool with this source option is that it auto detects what type of file this is. That's pretty cool. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. That's why it's good that you can change if you want to, for example, use the source painting instead. We will go through this later on in class. But what source you choose depends on what type of artwork you're working with and also what look you're after when you're vectorizing. A good first thing to mention here is that this tool takes a lot of capacity of my iPad and Adobe Illustrator on the iPad, so all of the different settings that you make in the vectorizing tool when you're working with it will take time to process. In this class, I will probably speed up the processing speed a bit because otherwise you will just sit and wait without nothing happening. If you notice in class that my processing is going much faster than yours, that is just because I speeded it up in the video. The next thing that you can choose is the color mode that you want to vectorize in. You can choose color, grayscale, and black and white. Here's an example of color, grayscale, and black and white; the same image vectorized. A thing to notice is that you can't choose color or gray scale when you have the source sketch selected. Then you can only choose the color mode, black and white. The next option that you have is the output: fills or strokes. This means that you will vectorize your artwork as filled shapes or strokes. Here's an example of filled, which will bring you these filled shapes, and strokes, which will bring you strokes in your vectorized artwork. This mean that if you vectorize in strokes, you can always adjust the strokes after you created your vectorized image. Then we have the color option, which is only available when you're choosing color as your color mode. What this slide does is to specify the number of colors to use when you vectorize. Sliding it up means more colors, and down less colors. This will bring you different looks depending on if you choose a limited color palette for a more simplified look, or more colors for a look that probably will be closer to the look of your original pixel image. If you have chosen grayscale, you specify the number of gray colors in your image. Sliding the percentage up will give you more gray colors, and down less gray colors. Here's an example of less gray colors, and here's an example of more gray colors. This option is only available when you have chosen the color mode, grayscale. The option threshold means a value of black and white in your image. Easily explained, if you slide this down, you will get less black, and if you slide it up, you will get more black. The next option is called path, which means the distance between the vectorized shape and the original shape in your image , which sound complicated. But easily explained, sliding this down will give you a looser path with less detail. Sliding it up will give you a more detailed path. The next option is corners, which specifies how sharp your corners will be. A high value will bring you more corners, and a low value will bring you less corners. Here's an example of a low value with less corners and a high value with more corners. This is really detailed, but what you can see is that the corners are sharper on the one with high value and smoother on the one with low value. Noise specifies an area in pixels that is ignored when vectorizing, which means that the higher value you have here, the less noise you will get. Let me show you an example. This is a low value with more noise, and this is a high value with less noise. What you can see at this textualized artwork is that you will get less texture when you have high value in noise. Down here at method, you can choose two different options. The first one is called abating, which creates cut out paths and means that your path will be edge to edge. Let me zoom in and show you how that looks. This can bring you a little bit of distance between your edges if you vectorize very detailed artwork. The next option is called overlapping. This will bring you vector shapes that are mostly overlapping each other a little bit so you won't get these white in-betweens when you vectorize really textured artwork. The next option is ignore white. It does exactly what it says that it does. When you tap that option, you will either have the white in your vectorized image or ignore the white and get transparency where your white existed. Last but not least is the expand vectorization option. That is what you tap when you want to expand your vectorization and are finished with adjusting the details in this tool. A little note here, if you, by accident, tap the expand vectorization option, you can always tap undo to get back into the vectorization tool if you change your mind and want to adjust something more. That was all of the options in the vectorize tool. Let's go ahead and try this out on our first type of artwork. 7. Vectorize Line Drawings: I have drawn simple cactus on a piece of paper with a black fine liner, and this we will vectorize with the Vectorize tool. The first thing that I did, was take a photo of my cactus, because for me, that's just easier to take photos with my iPhone than with my iPad, but you can do whatever you wish there. You can also scan in your image if you wish, if you are after a more detailed look. But for me, taking a photo of my hand-drawn line drawing is perfectly fine. A little tip before we get started with vectorizing this piece of artwork, is that if you feel that it is a little bit grayish, because that might happen when you take a photo with your phone on a white piece of paper, or it can be a little bit of yellow as well, and that you see your background a lot, and that is not something that you wish to do when you vectorize them, then you can always go in and edit your photo either on your iPad or in your phone. What I do, is really simple. Just bring up the exposure as much as I can without losing any artwork, any lines in my artwork. Here in this example, I could bring up the exposure to 100 and I still don't lose any details in my artwork, and that will bring me a perfectly white piece of background, which is much more simple to vectorize than this textured and gray yellowish paper background. You can bring up the exposure and then tap "Done", and there you have your line drawing with a perfectly white background. This will make it much simpler to vectorize it in Adobe Illustrator on the iPad. Let's head into Adobe Illustrator on the iPad. I just have 1000 pixels square document here. I want to mention before we get started that if you feel that this class is going too quickly for you and that you don't follow along in Adobe Illustrator on the iPad. Then I have an introduction class for Adobe Illustrator on the iPad that you can watch before you watch this class, so that you don't get confused, and that this class isn't too complicated for you. With that said, let's get started and import our file. I've saved my file so you can download these files in class as well. It's the file that says hand-drawn sketch edited compared to the hand-drawn sketch photo, which you can see has a really grayish background. The hand-drawn sketch edited has a perfectly white background, and that will make it much easier to vectorize this artwork. The first thing that we will do, I will just put my artwork a little bit to the left, so that I can access the Vectorize tool on the right. I will tap the arrow and make sure that my artwork is selected. Then tap the object's panel and vectorize. Now, vectorizing black line drawings is a fairly simple thing to do, and all that you need to think about is what type of look that you want to have in your artwork. The source auto detects it as a sketch. You could also try out line art to see if there's a difference there. What I noticed when I choose line art is that it gives me this more details in the lines. I don't like that look, so I will just go for sketch. You could also try logo painting and photograph. But logo, I almost never use. But let's just try that out to see what will happen. That actually brought me a little bit more see-through lines, and all of these shapes that I don't like, in this type of artwork at least. But it all depends on what look you're after. For me, when I vectorize line drawings that I draw by hand, I feel that sketch is the one that works the best. You could also try painting and photograph, but we will go through those later on the class. For this example, let's go for sketch. When you've chosen sketch as a source, you can only have the column on black and white, which is perfectly fine for this example as we have a black and white line drawing. You can choose the output, fills, and strokes. I usually go for fills, and then the threshold is what I feel will make the most difference in this vectorization. Bringing down the threshold, will bring me really thin lines, and it all depends as I said, what look you're after. But if you want thin lines, I would go for something where my lines still meet. If you have a gap in your line, you won't be able to color that in because it will have open paths. But there, I have closed all of the paths, I think in my image. Let's just zoom in on that again, and that looks pretty good.. Let's move on, I'm fine with the threshold there,134. Let's go ahead and try the paths, and if you watched the previous lesson, this basically means that you will get a looser path if you slide this option down. Let's slide it all down and see what that will bring me; that will bring me a simplified shape in my lines, and if I slide it, maybe not all the way up to 80 percent, that will bring me a much more rough type of line. Again, it depends what look you're after. I will go for 25 for this one because maybe I want this little rough shapes, so it looks a little bit more hand-drawn. Corners. You can choose lower corners, will bring you smoother shapes, higher corners will bring you sharper edges. Again, it depends on the look that you're after. I think that I will go for just 50 percent in this one, you can try out noise as well, and see if you can see any difference. For some things that you vectorize, some of these options will be really detailed and will probably not make that big of a difference, for me it doesn't matter where my noises because I can't see that much of a difference. For this, I will just leave it at 16 pixels, and the method a bad thing or overlapping. You can see if it makes an idea difference, and here it made a really big difference that if I chose overlapping in this line drawing, you will get a solid black shape, which was really crazy, so I will go for a bad thing. For me that looks good. I have tapped "Ignore white". If I bring out my artwork to outside of my artwork, you can see that I have a transparent background. If I tap, ignore white again so that it doesn't have this little check boxes. You will see that I have the white background added in my vectorization. I don't want the white backgrounds I tap ignore white, and for me, this is a really good vectorization of this piece of artwork. When you're finished and happy with your vectorization, you tap expand vectorization, and that will bring you a piece of vector artwork that you can scale up to any size you wish without losing any quality. Where we have this vectorized artwork, you can do whatever you want with it. It's not a pod in this class to show you all the things that you can do when you have vectorized artwork. But let's just, for example, put a blob of color behind our cactus to show you how that will look. Let's just remove that again and zoom in, and here you can see my finalized line drawn artwork vectorized in Adobe Illustrator on the iPad. 8. Vectorize Watercolor: Let's go ahead and vectorize watercolor artwork drawn by hand. Now bear with me because I'm not a watercolor artist. But I have drawn some blobs to cacti here and I have chosen a few that I like that I will try to address. Just the same as with line-drawing, I will go ahead and turn this cacti into a photo. The photo is actually of the whole page with six cacti. What I want to do is to just use this one. I also need to bring the light up a little bit. I go to edit again and bring up the exposure. Here as it's watercolor, it might be a little bit hard to find that perfect way of not losing too much texture and details, but at the same time keep the background as white as possible, so maybe somewhere around 82. Then I will tap the little shapes symbol and I will free-form this to only have this cacti in my file. Something like that. Most of the background is white and there's also white parts of my cacti. But I still have the texture that I need in my watercolor art. Good thing to mention is that as we are vectorizing watercolor artwork, you can't expect to get all of the texture as you have in your hand-drawn watercolor. Even if you lose some details when you bring up the exposure, that's totally fine because we will vectorize this and simplify it a little bit. In Illustrator I will add the watercolor file that's called , watercolor cactus edited. Here I have my watercolor file, tap the arrow to select it. I will just bring my cactus a little bit to the left so that you can see what I'm doing when I open up the vectorize panel. Tap object and vectorize. What's pretty cool here is that the vectorize tool auto-detected this source to painting, which is the one that I would have chosen for myself if I would have done this manually, so I will just keep painting as a source because this is a painting. Zoom in a little bit so that I can see the details. I definitely want to have color as color mode. When I have painting selected, I can choose fills or strokes, so I don't need to mind that one. But here I can select how many colors I want to have in this vectorization. Let's bring down the colors. I know that if I bring them down completely, I will only get a green cacti, but let's go ahead for 10 colors and see the difference. The number of colors that you get to choose from in this color option depends on how your artwork looks from the start. If you have an artwork with only three colors that are really solid, probably not hand-drawn but drawn digitally, then you won't get the option to get all of the 38 colors that I got in this watercolor piece. When I brought down the colors to 10, I lose a little bit of texture and colors in the red blobs. I think that the details of my cacti, the greens in my cacti are fine, but I want to have some of the details in the red parts as well. Let's bring up the colors to 20 and see what happens. That brought me a little bit of colors to my red blobs as well. But let's bring up the colors to all 38, and see what that will do with our watercolor image. Probably, sometimes when you want to vectorize watercolor artwork, you might want to simplify it a lot because that is the look that you're after. But sometimes you might want the vectorized artwork to be as close to the original watercolor drawing as possible. If you want it to be as close as possible to the original drawing, then I would recommend to bring up the colors to maximum, 38 in this case. As you can see here when I zoom in, or I hope that you can see it on camera, there are some cream white areas here, which means that our background on this original image wasn't pure white. When I finalize and expand this vectorization, I need to clean up these areas that aren't white. You can solve this from start by having a good lighting when you take pictures of your watercolor artwork. Or if you have a scanner, it's probably the best way of getting a really good white crisp background to your watercolor images. But now this is what we have to work with, so let's go ahead. I've chosen 38 in colors. We can slide the options, let's add more path to see what this will bring us. Now remember that when you have this large file size as a watercolor artwork is, and the reason that it is large is that you have so many objects, so many shapes that needs to be vectorized. Everything that you change in the vectorized tool will take a while to process. That's good to know, that if you want to experiment back and forth, it might take awhile for all of this process and you just need to sit and wait and let Adobe Illustrator on the iPad work its magic. I didn't really see what happened with the paths, let's go ahead and zoom in on my cacti and bring down the paths to see if something happens there. That brought us a little bit of softer look, if we zoom in. The shapes of the objects of this cactus got a little bit softer, so I can have liked that look. Again, these are really detailed steps. You don't need to adjust all of this if you just want a quick vectorization of your watercolor artwork. But I'm trying this out now to show you what will happen. Let's slide the corners up again to see the difference. A higher value will bring me sharper corners. Again, it's detailed, it depends on the look that you're after, but let's just leave the corners at 85 percent for now. We can try out the noise function. Drag up the noise to almost the top. I dragged up mine to 93 pixels. That got me more like a fussy look. I don't know how to explain it, but more noise, more details in the objects that I vectorized. Again, it depends on what you're after. I didn't like that so much, so I will just bring it down to about 30 again. I want to make sure that I have overlapping which is a second option in methods selected. This means that the shapes are overlapping most of the times. If I choose editing which is the first option in method, let's see what happens. I hope that you see this on camera, that I get some white space between all of the objects. This will only bring me issues later on in my vectorization. Make sure you have overlapping selected when you have these many colors and when you vectorize watercolor artwork if you don't want the look where you have white space between your small objects in your image. I like that look and I don't want to ignore white because I want to keep the whites in my cactus, and I need to clean up the whites around my cactus. I will just tap expand vectorization. Here you can see all of the anchor points that you have created, or that we have created when we have vectorized this watercolor image. The next thing to do here is to clean this up. If you tap the little ungroup symbol over here, you will see all of the shapes that needs to be cleaned up outside of your cactus. Tap outside of your cactus. I will just remove all of my panels, and then I can go in and select some of these shapes. If you think that it's easier you can also go to the outline mode to see all of the shapes here. Oops, I will just select everything and delete everything that is outside of my cactus. As you can imagine, this is a little bit of work to remove all of the shapes that are outside of your cactus. I will just speed up this process for you a bit as it will take me quite some time to remove all of this extra shapes that I don't want to have in my vector artwork. As you can imagine, if you scan in your artwork, it will be much easier to get that white crispy background and then you don't need to do this detail work where you remove all of the extra shape that are outside of your cactus. At this point, for the purpose of this class, I won't be more detailed than this. There are still some parts left of my cactus that are not to be included in the final artwork. As you can see now, when you have vectorized watercolor artwork with this many colors, you get all of these shapes and lines and objects and paths, and all of those will affect your file size and how smooth it will be to work with your file. That is a good thing to know. When you are finished, I would suggest to group everything again in the little group option to make sure that you don't move the separate small objects of your artwork. A little tips when you vectorize watercolor artwork is that, if you would need to vectorize another watercolor piece in the same file, in the same document, I will go in and select this one and lock that layer. This way Illustrator won't mind this piece of artwork when I move around and work with other art in my document, because when you have many pieces of vectorized watercolor artwork, your file will be really heavy and slow and it may even crash because there will be too much for Illustrator on the iPad and the capacity of your iPad to work with this large file size. 9. Vectorize Digital Sketches: This lesson is for all of you who like me enjoy creating pixel artwork in Procreate, and you might want to vectorize that artwork at some point. First up, let's vectorize sketches made in Procreate. I will tap my files again and add sketches from Procreate to my document. Here I've created three types of sketches. You can create all kinds of sketches and artwork in Procreate, of course. But I've just found these three types to show you the difference. Here I used yes the sketching, I think it's the HB pencil. This one is our favorite company Monoline brush. The last one is our favorite company Everyday liner. Both of these are available to download in my freebie five three Procreate brushes on my website if you're interested in using the same brushes as me. Let's get started with vectorizing this sketch. Basically is the same process as when we vectorize line drawings made by hand, and either we take photos of or scan in. The difference here is that we have a perfectly white background and we can use different types of pens in Procreate to get different results. Let's tap the Vectorized tool in the objects panel and now something fun happen. Here you can see that the vectorized tool auto detect this as a sketch, which is correct. But, I feel that when I vectorized sketches from Procreate, most of the time get a better result if I choose painting. Sure, sometimes you might want the pure and solid line drawn feeling, for example, with the middle one. But sometimes you might want a little rough edges of your sketching brushes. Then painting gives you a better result for those textured brushes in Procreate. I placed all of these three types of sketches on the same page, just so you can see the difference. But let's go ahead and choose painting here and see what happens when we do our different settings. If I bring down my colors, maybe I don't want that many colors, but I just want the texture it looks I will bring down my colors to two and see what happens. This actually got me a pretty clean and nice result with some textures. You can clearly see that it texturized shapes. Maybe some of you want that look. Maybe some of you want the more sketched look with the different gray scaled artwork. You could, of course, also choose Grayscale if you know that you want your sketches in black and white. Let's try that out. I will go for grayscale. Let's go for 31 percent and see how many different types of gray that will bring me. That looks pretty nice. It's still a sketchy look but you have some clean shapes and you have some edit texture. Let's go ahead and experiment with path. I will bring down my Path slide to one percent. This will bring me a smooth look. If I bring it up, I will get this really rough, textured look. Again, it depends on what look you're after. I think that I will have it in somewhere around 50 percent. Corners, I don't want sharp corners here, so I will actually bring down my corners. Noise, let's see if something happens if I bring up the noise. Yes, if I have a 100 pixels in noise that made all of the white spots on this Everyday liners sketch to disappear. I quite like that look for this sketch. Let's see in the middle that one looks good too. Nice and solid shapes. Then this one looks pretty cool too. That is probably a nice look. The method overlapping is good for this purpose. For this one I want to ignore white to make sure that the white aren't vectorized. Oop, what happened there? This is a little bit surprising. Why that all of this turn black? Let's experiment a little and see what happened there. It seems like if we choose painting and ignore white, some of the parts of our drawing will turn completely black. If we don't ignore white, we can still have our sketch, but then we need to remove the white from all of our illustration. After experimenting a little and seeing what option was the problem, it seems like the problem was to using overlapping instead of everything. I actually have no idea why this is. That's just the way it is. I will choose everything. That way I can select the painting, have grayscale, get the nice textures in my sketch, and have ignore white turned on and tap Expand vectorization. If we drag this artwork outside of our art board, you will see, let's remove that panel. That all of the white in the sketch is ignored. This part that seems white is actually a little bit of gray. That depends on how much percentage of gray you chose in the grayscale option. That looks pretty cool and that's one way of vectorizing sketches from Procreate. 10. Vectorize Color from Procreate: Next type of illustration that we will vectorize is a colored illustration from Procreate. I just want to mention that I create these pixel illustrations in Procreate, but you can of course create them in any other pixel app, and the vectorization in Adobe Illustrator on the iPad will work just the same. These images that I've exported from Procreate are either PNG or JPEG images. They work exactly the same when you vectorize. Let's go ahead with the first simplest file, the cactus with multi-color, and that is three colors on this cactus. Fairly simple to vectorize. I will place my cactus to the left so that you can see it on screen. Tap "Vectorize" and "Objects" panel, and wait for it to auto detect what type of image this is. Probably, because this image is so simplified, it's just solid shapes, three colors. The source that the vectorize tool thought that this is is a logo. It is sent, so I will select "Painting". As you might have noticed in this class, usually I go for sketch or painting. For me, that is the two sources that works the best when I vectorize, but you should definitely try out the different type of sources and see which ones you prefer for your artwork. You might also prefer different sources on different type of artwork, depending also on the look that you're after in your finalized vectorized file. In this artwork as it's so simplified, the painting, sketch, and photograph didn't do that much difference, but when I choose sketch, I get this really weird shape that I don't want, and when I tap line art, I just get a little blob down here, a small little line. As you can see, some of the sources work better for certain types of artwork, and for this, I will go for painting. In colors, it selected nine colors for me. What happens if I drag this down to three? Let's see. That will remove my pink little flowers. Even if this original artwork only have three colors, the vectorize tool don't want to acknowledge the three colors exactly as they are. It probably has three types of green colors. Oh, no, it actually has the white probably. If I tap "Ignore White", will I get back my pink flowers? No, I didn't get it back anyway. Drag up the colors until you get your pink flowers back, and there we are. I won't mind how many colors exactly it is. I've chosen seven for this artwork. When it comes to path, that again means the distance between the vectorized shape and the original shape in your image, which for me sounds really confusing, but sliding this down will bring me a looser path and up will bring me a rougher path. That will bring me really smooth shapes, and if I slide it up all the way, I will get really rough edges. As this cactus from start are drawn with a Blobby brush, I want to keep some of the blobs, so let's go for a path of 70 percent. I think that that will look pretty good. That looks pretty close to the original. Corners, I don't want sharp corners, but I don't want too smooth corners, so let's just keep it at 50. Noise, let's bring up the noise to 100 pixels and see what happens. Not much happened. If we bring down the noise, not much happened there either. On some artwork, you won't see that much of a difference on these different types of options, and that's totally fine. You can just keep it at whatever. I have my noise at 43 pixels at the moment. I want to overlap being selected so that I don't get the weird white spaces between my objects in the vectorized shape, and I want to ignore white and then I tap "Expand Vectorization". When I have expanded this artwork, if I ungroup this and tap one of the pieces and remove it, you will see that it has no background object, no shapes that are filled because you have vectorized your full image. What it might mean is that it can be hard to make changes to your object afterwards, after you vectorized it if you don't go in and fill in the shapes. If I would, for example, want to move this line a little bit after I have vectorized, I then need to go in with the pen tool and fill in this shape. It's not that much work, but it's still a little bit of work. That is what will happen when you vectorize a completed piece of artwork, this cactus with three different colors. Let's just select that group, that again, and I will drag that above my art board. Then I will add the cactus with texture. This is a file with much more texture added to my original artwork. If I tap the file, make sure it's selected, and tap the object and vectorize. This is what the vectorize tool will bring me. It's still notated as logo. I think that I will go for painting again to keep it more detailed because on this type of artwork where I already added a texture to the artwork in for me Procreate freehand, I want to keep as much texture as possible. I will have color as selected color mode, and I want to have many colors here because I want to keep all of these shapes that are seen as textures on my cactus. I'll keep the colors at 24, and now I will experiment with the path. Bring down the path to one percent and see what happens. That gave me smoother shapes. I will zoom in and bring up the path to above 90 percent to see what happens, and that will bring me sharper edges to my shapes. A matter of preference, I think that I want to zoom out and see what looks the best if I have it not zoomed in. Let's bring down the path to 31 and see how that looks. That looks pretty good and a little bit smoother. Just how I like it. The corners, I will bring down to three percent because I want soft corners on this cactus, and that is what I got. The noise, I can try to bring up to 100 pixels to see what happens. When I bring up the noise, it gives me less detailed textures. If this is the look that you're after with only a few blobs or texture, maybe you want to keep your file size low, or maybe that's just how you want your vector shape to look, then bring up the noise. I will keep mine at pretty low about 20 pixels because I want as much texture as possible on this artwork. Now if I ignore white, I want to have overlapping as the method so that I don't get the weird white shapes in-between all of the shapes. But if I tap Ignore White, all of the texture that is white on my cactus will be transparent. That is a matter of choice. You can move out your artwork and see if it really is transparent. It seems like some of the white parts are and some aren't. Tap Ignore White again to uncheck that box to make sure that no parts of our cactus is transparent. Then tap Expand vectorization. Then what we can do is to ungroup and select the white part that is the background. Delete that one. Select everything again. Group it. Then if we drag this one up, you can see that we don't have any white background anymore. In this type of vectorization, you still have the objects as shapes that are cut out to each other. If I can just fetch this little green line, you can still see that if I drag that one out, I will get a hole in my cactus. That's good to know. That is what happens when you vectorize in this way, a full image. Lets just group that one again. To not make this document too heavy to work with, I will lock these two to continue to add other types of colored artwork from Procreate. The next type of artwork that we will import is a layered file, or actually artwork from Procreate exported as layered PNG file. This is my cactus in Procreate, I make sure that I untap the box for the background color, and have all of the layers selected I want to export, and then I share layers in PNG file. That is the type of file that I will show you now in Adobe Illustrator on the iPad. We will add the four different PNG files. Start with the cactus number 1, and I will just add all of these files from the start. Number 2, I will place that to the side. Number 3, that's the texture. Number 4 is the little flowers. Now we have four different files added here, it's PNG files, with transparent background. When vectorizing these types of files, I will start with the green solid shape of the cactus. Tap Object Vectorize, and I will just use painting. Then I think that looks good from the start. I won't mind. Go ahead here and do all of the things. But what I want to do is ignore white because I don't have any white in the original file. Then when it's finished, I will tap Expand Vectorization. Now I have vectorized the first file. Then let's go ahead with the second one, the lines of the cacti. Tap Object Vectorize. That auto detected it as a sketch, but I want mine in color, so tap Painting. I will keep all of the settings here as well. You can, of course, go in and experiment if you want a certain type of look. But for the purpose of this class and to not make it too long of a process, let's just go ahead and expand that vectorization. Now for the texture, Vectorize. Painting will probably be the best for this texture as well. Normally textures are made out of small little dots or weird little shapes, and it's a heavy file because there are so many small parts, and that when you vectorize will bring a bunch of anchor points. Let's go ahead and see if we can vectorize this texture in some good way. Tap Ignore White. Let's just bring up the noise a bit to see if that helps to bring a little bit more texture into this vectorization. For the purpose of this class, I don't want to wait anymore, so I will tap Expand Vectorization, and there we have our texture. Next, go ahead and vectorize the pink little flower. This shouldn't take quite as long as with the texture. I will tap, colors are fine, Ignore White and then Expand Vectorization. Let's remove the panel. The difference here is that we have our different shapes in different objects and different layers of your artwork. If we start with the green shape, you can drag over your green vectorized lines that are actually filled shapes. When I have these four different parts of my object, I can reassemble them to make them look as the cactus that I want in the final result. That is the look of that. This texture didn't turn out so good, and we can look at that in the texture lesson later on. Maybe you want to add some other texture that we will create in the texture lesson. But all in all, this is a good way of keeping all of the original shapes of your artwork so that you don't get the cut out in your background object from your foreground objects when you vectorize as we did in these previous vectorizations. But, as I mentioned before, it all depends on how you would like to use your artwork. You can always go in and fix these little details later on if you wish. If you feel that this is just a paint vectorized for different files, then you don't need to do that. But I just wanted to show you so that you know that you can do this if you want to keep your original shapes. 11. Vectorize Textures: In this lesson, we will vectorize textures, which is very interesting. Typically, textures in vector can never be the same as texture in pixels. But with that said, it doesn't mean that you can't add texture to your vector artwork. But the details that we can get when drawing in pixels, with specially textures, can't be the same as vectors. That is just because as I mentioned before, in pixels you will get this really small squares that makes up your whole image with the textures. But in vectors, it will be mathematical calculations and all of the paths that are created when we vectorize need to be separate small objects with edges, which makes it impossible to create the exact same look in pixel and vector artwork when it comes to textures. You can however, work with vectorized textures. They will look a little bit more sharp. I would say, not as smooth as you can get pixel textures, but it all depends on the look you're after. The important thing to know is that when we work with a lot of textures in our vector files, the file size will become really heavy. The more textures you bring to your document, the heavier the file size will be. If you bring too much texture, it can end up crashing your app and you might lose your artwork. Be aware of that when you work with vector textures and make sure that you lock your objects if you have a bunch of textures and also maybe divide your different objects in different files and things like that. With that said, I have this file that you can download in class that are called textures from procreate. This are made with some of the texture brushes that I use. Some of these brushes are also free to download on my website. You can check that out this procreate brushes. Now let's go ahead and texture at this. Select your arrow tool, go to object and vectorize. Here it auto detected this as sketch. This might be an interesting look if you after this black and white texture thing, but I'm not so I will select painting, which is my favorite source when I vectorized illustrations. Then when we vectorize textures because the textures are made up of so many small objects and shapes. There are some options here that are more important than others. I will choose to vectorize this in colors as I have the green texture thing going on here. You can select how many colors you want. If we bring it down to two colors, you will get a less detailed texture. This is actually a really good look for vectorized textures to just have two colors or a few more colors. But to be able to show you a bit more, I will bring it up to 10 colors, just so that you can see how the other options in the vectorized tool work when we vectorize textures. Here we have close to the look of our original textures. You can see that the edges of all of the objects here in the texture are pretty sharp. What we want to do is to probably, if we bring up the path, we can see what happens. If we bring down the path. If we bring up the path, you will get more objects in your texture, more shapes. That is a look that I want I will bring up my path to about 80 percent or something like that. Then I won't mind the corners because I don't think that it will make such a big difference because the details in this textures are so small, so the corners won't look that different, at least not on these textures. But what is important when you vectorize textures is the noise option. If we drag up noise to 100 pixels, you will get less noise in your textures. Less noise means less shapes in your objects. When we vectorize textures we probably want to have the noise slide down as much as possible. That brings us much more interesting shapes in our textures. Also, what I want to do here is to ignore the white because that will be really annoying to go in and remove all of the white details in between these texture objects. Ignore white are tapped in. Now I will expand the vectorization. That has brought us transparent textures that you can use on top of other objects. If we zoom into this you can see that the amount of anchor points that's tap the pen tool, the amount of anchor points in this file is crazy. That might make it a little bit slow to work with. Make sure that you save your file once in a while when you work with these heavy documents with a lot of vector textures, because otherwise, sometimes the app will crash and you might lose what you are working on. Zoom in and you can see all of these textures, shapes. As you can see in my Illustrator on iPad, It's going pretty slow to zoom in and out because this is a heavy file. That is how you vectorize texture in Adobe Illustrator on the iPad. 12. Vectorize Photos: Let's go ahead for the last type of vectorization in this class and that is to vectorize photos. Typically, I don't use photos to vectorize that often at all because I don't use it in my artwork. But some of you might take photos of, for example, plants, vectorize them and use them in your patterns or illustrations for some mixed media thing or whatever you create. For that purpose, I have a cactus photo that I have taken. It's from here in Majorca. Just as I mentioned in the third lesson of this class about downloads, you are free to use this photo here in class for learning purposes, but you are not allowed to reproduce, resale, or in any way share this artwork and say that it's yours. That is also regarding this photo. If you would share this photo in any way, you need to credit me as photographer. With that said, let's go ahead and see how we can vectorize this photo. Tap the arrow, tap the Object panel and Vectorize. This might take quite some time because a photo is a very heavy file compared to, for example, a line drawing. The processing of vectorizing this photograph might take quite some time. Just be aware of that. Now you've seen that auto-detected source is Photograph, so that was good job Illustrator on the iPad. If we zoom in, you can see all of these different fields and shapes that are vectorized. That looks pretty cool. What you can do is to, for example, reduce the colors and that will bring you a much more simplified image. I drag down my colors to 51. That brought me a little bit more simplified look, but I still want to have even more simplified. I will drag my colors down to 12 and see what happens. That brought me a much more stylized look which can be interesting. Here you can experiment with the noise, the corners, the path, and see what you can create with this photo. As I don't work that much with vectorizing photographs, I don't have that much experience in this and I don't know even which look I'm after. But if you are working with vectorizing photographs, you probably know how you want them to look. You can just drag up and down all of these options and see where you can get the look that you want. When you are finished and happy , tap Expand vectorization. Here you have your photograph with all of these different path that makes up your vectorized image. 13. Export: So when you are finished and have experimented with all different kinds of artwork, you can decide which one or if you want to, that you want to export so that you can share as a project here in class. So to export artwork in Adobe Illustrator on the iPad, the crash course, the quick course, is to place your artwork that you want to export. Let's see, this one is locked, so unlock that and then place your artwork. That one. Unlock that in the layers panel. Place your artwork on your artboard. You can align your artwork in the align panel if you wish. When you are happy with the size of your artwork, you can tap and drag, and to constrain the proportions, you can tap the little dot at the bottom left corner. When you're happy with your artwork on your artboard, you export that artboard. So I have the artboard 1 here. Publish and Export, Export As, and then you can choose what type of format you want to export as to share in class. I would export as a JPEG or PNG. The scale one is good, background transparent, or probably white is good if you want to share it in class. You can choose to export all artboards if you have several or the range that you wish or the full document. So I don't want to export a full document, but I want to export all artboards. Export, and then you can save the image to somewhere on your iPad or in the Cloud so you can share it as a project in this class. 14. Final Thoughts: That's all for this class. I hope you enjoyed watching and that you learned the ins and outs of the vectorizing tool in Adobe Illustrator on the iPad. I'm super impressed by this tool and that this app allows this very heavy work to be made within it. Vectorizing is a heavy duty to do for any computer or iPad, and the fact that you don't need to work with Adobe Illustrator on your computer to vectorize anymore is a huge deal. At least for me. I draw almost everything that I create on my iPad and the more I can do on my iPad the better. Just as I mentioned throughout in class, how you would like to work with the vectorizing tool, the different options that you choose to use, and all of that depends on the artwork that you create or photos for that matter and how you would like your finalize artwork to look. With that said, thank you so much for watching. If you liked this class, hit the Follow button by my name to make sure that you don't miss out on my future classes and to follow me here on Skillshare. If you have any questions at all, please ask them on the discussion page here in class, and feel free to leave a review to let me know if you enjoyed this class; I would love to hear your thoughts. Make sure that you share your project here in class. If you post it on Instagram, feel free to tag me with maja_faber. I would love to see what you create. Thanks again for watching.