Lessons

Lesson Info

Introduction to Illustrator Draw

Let's have a look at, Illustrator Draw as well just overview and we'll come back into Sketch in a moment. So Illustrator Draw, very similar apart from you draw vector shapes so what this does is basically draw compound parts by using either your finger or a stylus, this works brilliantly on the iPad Pro with an Apple pencil, it's really really good, lots and lots of advantage to doing that. Works on Android too, different styluses available for that, lots of those and some of those have got some great advantages as well. I've used lots and lots of different kinds of stylus in there, Wacom do one, there's plenty out there, lots of different things to choose from. Test them out if you get the opportunity to do that. So a few things I've done in here, let's have a look at let's have a look at some of those so there's some of the things you saw earlier on inside of there and there's a few other slides here as well let's see if we can find, let's find something simpler actually, let's find ...

this thing here. Let's go for this pumpkin which this was an exploration in something else so a lot of these things I'm testing things out, I do an illustration, get that out of the project get it into the desktop software and then kind of move it out of here so I've got some room in there. But let me drill down into a few of these things in here and turn a few of these layers off so you can see how this works. There's my underlying sketch just there down at the bottom and typically I'd work over that with something like this and I'd put some under lighting in there and then I'd add in some further details but all of these things that you can see here are vector shapes so if I took this across into Illustrator and you'll see that indeed later on, then you'll see how that works, that's a very very crude example of that but we're going to explore all of those different things. Okay they all have different kinds of brushes, Photoshop Sketch has significantly more brushes available to it than Illustrator Draw. Illustrator Draw has sort of a prescribed set of brushes, we go into this selfie just here and I'll add, actually add out a new project and make a couple of marks in here, okay so if I add a new drawing, you can see lots and lots of different presets I can do there and of course I can make up my own formats for this as well. I'll go for the iPad Pro in landscape and basically, the brushes you have available to you in Illustrator Draw are limited down to these five. Now don't think that that's it, it's just five brushes because you can model lots and lots of different things inside of the brushes to make them all variable. For example, on some of my projects I only use the basic round brush, but I change it out for each one, some of them are even the same color. In fact, you can see there's three here but if I swap them all out to the basic round brush, okay, you can see that I can come down here. So I've tapped on the brush again, this gives me various options, I can change the brush size by pressing down here and then moving up and down it doesn't matter where I move up and down once I press on that, until I release, that will change the brush size. I can change the opacity there, I can change the color in a number of different ways there, we'll explore that and I've got all of these settings, these different dynamics that I can use, okay. So it's quite likely that I will have several of the same brush tip but with different dynamics associated with them, might even be the same color might be at low opacity, big size just so I can work more quickly 'cause I do that fairly frequently. Illustrator Draw has a few different things to it, it has some drawing assistance that you can find in the top here, things that you can use to help you draw. One of the things I really like here with these shapes is that if you long press inside any of these shapes, it automatically fills it with however the currently selected brush is. So you can see here that I've got this brush which is at a 50 percent opacity and this particular green, it fills it with that. If I call back that particular shape, I'm just gonna offset that slightly, there like so. Long press, just there you can see that where that combines together, I've now got that green at 60 percent opacity and if I twirled it round again then I'd get a bit more there also. So quite a lot going on with those things, various different things you can do, you can actually make your own shapes which we will be looking at in just a little while. I've got a layers control here so we can make those visible or not. I can add two different kinds of layer here, this is common to Photoshop Sketch as well, you can add sketched layers and imaged layers. Here I'm adding draw layers or image layers and that's really useful if you want to use an image as a component of your illustration or if you maybe want to use it to trace over, you can use it to draw over the content that you've got there too. Sharing options, we'll be looking at later on so what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna nip back into Photoshop Sketch for a moment, okay just to show you the brush array there and then we'll come back to Illustrator Draw so if I go to that, and I'll just go into any one of these and just create a new drawing here just so you can compare, you can see if I long press here, there's a lot of brushes in that particular library. If I go to sketch brushes, you've got tons and tons of brushes there. But the difference is, if I go back to Illustrator Draw, is that they are creating pixels so it's really easy to use those to change the way pixels appear. This is creating you vector shapes and it's really important that you understand that. That's why there's a limit to the amount of brushes you've got here. They've got different constraints for the way they work, but if you're doing something like T-Shirt design on the go or something like that, then this is a brilliant tool to get those things started yeah and you just refine them in Illustrator afterwards because you can make all of your drawings, add in all of your different elements, okay and then you can push that to Illustrator, clean that all up and then get it production ready from there. So I'll just make a few marks here so you can see pretty much how this works, so let me just undo these two things here, something of course I can't do from my sketchbook of course, one of the big advantages here of working totally digitally is that I can of course just undo things. So I don't know, what should we have? We could have another cat I guess, any requests Jim for anything we're doing today or pretty much whatever I like? Fire hydrant with a cat? Cat and fire hydrant? Oh I don't know what your fire hydrants look like. (laughing) oh actually I've got a rough idea, but do you know what, I'm gonna stick to, I'm gonna stick to the cat. Or I can do cartoon Jim. Or a mug of beer right? (laughing) I could do cartoon Jim, this is always risky territory when, (laughing) when you're drawing your host in here and also and I haven't practice drawing Jim at all and I'm actually not even looking at Jim at the moment, I'm trying to glance up at him and then just get it from memory. Let's just, actually, do you know what? That's gonna be terrible if I do that that way. Let's change that and I'm gonna change the brush dynamic so I'm gonna make sure that velocity is turned off, so that's something the brush can be changed by how quickly you draw. There are certain places where you might actually need that, so if for example you were working with a marker pen in the real world, yeah, then if you moved quickly, the quality of your stroke in so many different ways would be modified by the movement there and that's something you can use if you're trying to emulate something like a marker. Do you know what? I'm gonna keep it nice and easy for myself and I'm just gonna do cartoon cat so here you can see how pressure's changing that so if I just draw a couple of googly eyes there, it looks like I'm still drawing Jim. (laughing) So let me draw an eye shape here and then long press in the middle there and you can see how it fills that shape like so, now eyes have a highlight so I'm gonna swap to the eraser tool here, let's have a look how big that eraser is, that's just fine and I'll just tap in there, whoopsie daisy I tapped too long and it just erased that, whoops. Might have to zoom in, something else again I can't do very easily in my sketchbook and I can easily just erase that part for a highlight. In all likelihood, what I'd really do is I'd of course use white over the top of that 'cause that is actually going to create a gap in there. I'm sorry about the quality of those lines but I'm just a tiny bit at sort of an iffy angle really but that's just fine, I want you to be able to see what I'm doing so kind of erase that there. Okay let's go back to lines, definitely going to be a cat here I really am bouncing on the old table today, there we are. So let's do that, zoom out let's do let's just do something like that, there we go. So one more, one of my quirky cats with a bit of a wobble in that line now if I was really struggling with that line I could bring in something like a french curve like so and I'll just drag outwards to resize that, now I'm repositioning it like so I'm gonna try and drag that in with a single finger there now and I might just be able to do this stroke, there you go, they're not gonna quite join up just there but that for the purposes of this demonstration, yeah, is neither here nor there, I'm just gonna erase the extra bits of line there like so. I'm gonna draw, let's see, we need a ball of wool in there I think, definitely. Biblo's always fascinated by balls of wool. I'm gonna actually long press on the edge there or double tap on the edge there and it draws round at a consistent line weight, I'm gonna make a bit of erasing here, need a bigger eraser so tapping through. Now if you've never used this before, I know I'm doing that bit fairly quickly but if you tap on any brush, you can go through to its options and then you can change the size of the brush here like so so I'm just gonna erase a chunk just in there, okay, like that. Back out, back to the pen I was working with originally and I'm gonna be swapping out to capture in a moment anyway but I'm just gonna make a start, whoopsie daisy on drawing something just here so let me try and pick up that line come out there. This is the worst cat I think I've drawn in a long time, but there you are. Yes, there we go, superb. That will do. I've got a tiny mark down here so I need to actually get rid of that, I'm just gonna get the eraser and long press on it, okay, and you'll see how, or you should see how it erases it. Something else you can do here, is, let me just make a series of marks that I don't want, there we go, dah-dah-dah like that. And I wanna get rid of those. Rather than coming along and erasing all of those things, I go to one of the tools here. I'll choose the ellipse there, hover that over the top, long press on there with the eraser, boom, all gone and that's a good way to clean up segments of a layer. You might find you get the odd drifty shape inside there, I've got quite a lot of cleaning up to do here, I'm gonna need to rotate that canvas around, I'm using two fingers to do that and just come in and do some drawings 'cause, whoops, not from erasing and just come along and draw some shapes in, there we go, just to tighten it up, just a little bit, okay, that's slightly less worse that it was just a moment ago. If you were, if you do this for a living you probably can identify with sometimes you start off with a bad line and you can recover it on occasions but a lot of the time it's just gonna stay bad but my quirky cats don't mind wobbly lines, they're just fine.