Creating Objects from Scanned Sketches
Lesson 6 from: FAST CLASS: Design Surface Patterns From ScratchBonnie Christine
Creating Objects from Scanned Sketches
Lesson 6 from: FAST CLASS: Design Surface Patterns From ScratchBonnie Christine
Lessons
Introduction to Illustrator
23:33 2Basic Tools: Pen, Text, & Blob
14:46 3Color & Function Tools
18:33 4Custom Color Palettes
14:07 5Essential Tools for Pattern Making
28:10 6Creating Objects from Scanned Sketches
10:03 7Tracing & Coloring Sketches
17:43 8Hand Tracing Over Photographs
15:22Lesson Info
Creating Objects from Scanned Sketches
So have already done all of my sketches and I've scanned in most of them but I've left a few of them for us to go over today. So, I have a scanner over here. It's HP Photosmart 5510. Most scanners kind of operate the same way. So I'm gonna walk you through how to optimally scan in your sketches and what settings you can be looking for. So, I just have a plain black and white, went over this with black pen. And, it's on clean white paper. So we're gonna scan this in. So, when you're working with the scanner, you'll just go ahead and open up the scanner. And right off the bat, you will see kind of a preview of what you're gonna be working on with the scan. If that doesn't happen for you automatically, you should be able to see, select a button that says "preview". So, this, I'm not sure if I can make it a little bigger for us. So, this looks pretty good so far. What I want us to do is kind of isolate the particular image we want to work with. Because if I go ahead and scan this in right ...
now, I could work off of it from a tracing perspective, but if we're gonna use maybe the live trace tool this black area is gonna give us some problems. So, usually you can just simply draw a marquee over what it is that you're interested in actually scanning in. Okay, sometimes this will probably be automatically set to color. I want us to set it to black and white. I always scan in at a minimum of 300 DPI. That seems to always be plenty, but if you get much lower than that, especially sometimes it's set to 72 DPI, you're not gonna get a nice clean trace. So, make sure that you're scanning in at at least 300 DPI. This is all fine. I'm gonna do jpeg. Image correction, you should have this option on your scanner, and I wants us to go down to "manual". And this is already set up because I played with this a little earlier. But, usually, it'll be right in the middle so this is what you're gonna be looking at. This is pretty nice, but what I want us to so is increase the brightness and then increase the contrast. So, start taking the brightness up just to eliminate any, like, stray pencil marks or pen marks, and also maybe some, something that's bleeding through from the back page. And then you're gonna bump up the contrast where you get a really nice, dark, black line. Okay, so all of this can be done in Photoshop. But, we don't, you know, I know that we all don't have Photoshop. And if we can do it upon scanning, then it just makes everything a little easier. So, we are ready to go. And I'm gonna hit scan. So that, I believe, has saved it for us. And I'm just gonna close out of the scanner. So I will go ahead and open Adobe Illustrator. I'm working in CS6, but anything I do today, you'll be able to follow along in creative cloud, in CS5, CS4, should be any of them. So, I will open a new document here. But, to do that I just hit command N. Command N, for new. I'm gonna name is document. You don't have to, but I like to kinda just stay organized. So, working from sketches. And I'm okay with all of this. We're gonna do a regular letter size. And CMYK 300. This is all good. If you need some more information about how to open up Illustrator and get set up with your documents, we covered all of that in session 1 segment 2. And we also covered how to set up your workspace. So, if your workspace looks different than mine and you would like it to look like mine, make sure to refer back to that session 1, segment to set up your workspace. So we have a blank document here. And now what I need to do is get that scanned image in here. So, you will have decided in advance where that scanned image is gonna save to. I saved mine under pictures. And here's our scan right here. So all you have to do is click on that, drag and drop it into Illustrator. And it's here for us. I'm gonna just get it into portrait by hitting "r" for the rotate tool, and just start to rotate that. And if you hold the shift key down, it'll rotate it to exactly straight up. And then we can make it a little bigger. I'm gonna hit "s" for the scale tool and just start scaling it up. Again holding the shift key to make that exactly proportional as I scale. So, there are a couple of things we can do with this, with this sketch now. I'm gonna walk you through several different ways to work from these sketches. Most often, I like to lock this in the background and trace on top of it. So that's what we're gonna do most this morning. But I also just want to introduce to you the live trace tool. So if you have an image that you've scanned in like this, as long as it is selected, we have the image trace tool over here on the right hand side. If it's not there for you, it is under "window". Just make sure image trace is checked. So, there are a couple of settings that we can go over in here. The preset, these are preset features, depending on what you're working with. And so the best thing to do when you're working with a black and white image is black and white logo. It tends to give me a pretty good result. This will often come up, "tracing may proceed slowly because the image is large". That's because we scanned it in at 300 DPI, and it's okay. So I just always hit okay. And this is just gonna take just a second and this is what we get. This is now vectorized, and so it's no longer a sketch. (indistinct talking) I will get there, yes. So, what you can play with here is the threshold. The threshold, if you take it down, which I think I need to take it up, but, if you take it down, that's gonna pick up less of the, of your black line. And if you take it up, it's gonna pick up more of the black line. And since we have such a nice, clean scan on that white background, you're gonna be able to take it up pretty high. The other thing I wanna do is expand the advanced down here at the bottom. And there are a couple things you can play with. Usually, this is all. I just leave it as is. But, the changes that you make will show you live when you select them. So play around with those, see if there's something that you like to do. But what I always like to do is hit "ignore white". What that does is it removes the white background behind your image. And so we're on a white art board right now, so you can't really tell what just happened, but it removed the white paper behind. And so it's transparent now, it's just the black line. And we are done here. So I'm just gonna close image trace. After that, this is still all kind of one, I guess it's still kind of one image, really. So, what we need to do is hit "expand". "Expand" is up, up at the top of your toolbar. What that does is then turns it into anchor points and lines. So a couple of other things we need to do in order to get this to where we really can work with it. First, it's all groups still. So we need to right click, and ungroup it. Now this is all ungrouped. And the other funny thing, I don't really even know why this happens, but it always does. And the other thing is that it has everywhere that there was white, it now has no stroke and no fill area. So, you can see if I select this back box, it has no stroke and no fill. And so, when you're working with your illustrations this just tends to get messy. So, what I do is select. Because all of these inside here are also no stroke, no fill. So like the inside of that petal I can bring out. And it's just a bit that we don't need. So what I do is select one of them and I make just it's no stroke and no fill. And tool that I use all time is under "select", "same" and "select same fill color". So when I do that, it selects everything that has no stroke and no fill and I can hit the delete button and now we're left with just black lines. Again, these are not, that's one, that is one piece. We might be good here. But, nothing is grouped together. So sometimes I will, like this, this little bit right here, is not a part of that flower. So what I'll do is go group my individual illustrations together just so I can move them around the page. So I'll just do that with these really quick. So now I have four illustrations, all grouped together, and they are ready to get colored up and start illustrating.
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