Lessons

Lesson Info

Tracing & Coloring Sketches

Okay, So since I have all of these images here, I'm gonna work with my layers panel just a little bit today I don't use it too often, but if I have a bunch of sketches, it's great to be able to just lock a whole layer so that I can work on top of it and not be moving the image round. So, I'm gonna work with two layers. This layer has all my sketches on it so I'm gonna double click here and name this sketches and then to create a new layer, you just come right down to the bottom and select create new layer. Clicked on the wrong one. You create new layers right there and double click there and I'll just say, working. So that's where we're gonna be working. Move this up here. So, I will move all my sketches kind of over to the side so I can just drag one over and work with one at a time. And I don't think I want to start with... See which one I want to start with. So kind of go through these a little bit. How about we start with this one. Command zero, zooms us into the artwork that we're...

working on. So, I'm gonna rotate this guy by hitting the command, just the keyboard shortcut R and rotating him up, scaling him a little bigger and then I am going... I'm happy with his placement, I'm just gonna lock the whole layer. So now, I can't select anything and I can work directly on top of it. So, to zoom in, I hit Command + space bar which gives me that zoom in icon right there and I can zoom in here and start working on this guy. I like to work pretty close. And so, we learned about the blob brush tool yesterday, the pin tool and the pencil tool. I am gonna be using the blob brush tool. I rarely use the pencil tool, except I like to use the smooth tool that's available in the fly out menu there and I will be using the pin tool occasionally. So, the one thing that I want to make sure you know, the difference between the pen tool and the blob brush tool is the pen tool is anchor points and lines and the blob brush tool is literally like blobs of ink. So, when you use the pen tool, you're able to increase and decrease the stroke weight, which is super helpful sometimes, not helpful other times. So, I'm gonna use the blob brush tool to trace over this work. The keyboard shortcut for that is Shift + B And good point, you have to... I'm still on my locked layer, which means I can't draw over this. So, I just need to select the working layer so that I can then come in and start working with my blob brush. To increase the size of... See my little brush is pretty small right now so to increase the size, I'm gonna hit the right bracket tool and just take that up just a little bit. And since my illustration is black, I think I want to work with a different color, just so that I can be sure I know my work and I don't like any of these colors.(laughs) I'm gonna bring in the color palettes that we created yesterday if you're not familiar with what I'm doing, make sure to refer back to segment two session one. So, on the fly out menu right here, if I go to open swatch library and go to user defined, we can see this creative live color palette. This is also the same color palette that is included in the course materials if you have any time access to this course and I've created that for you. So, you can be working along with the same color palette that I'm working with today. So, to get these color palettes over into my swatches panel, I just have to click on them and I think it's time I make a decision on which one I really wanna work with today. I can't choose one, so I'm gonna choose three.(laughs) Okay. And then I will cut that out. The other thing is that I don't need these primary colors that are built into this document file. So, I'm just gonna delete them. To do that, you can click on one, hold the shift key down and come click on, you know, the next one and then just drag and drop all these to the trash can. So, that way I have black and white and the colors that I really wanna be working with in this document. So, why don't I pick like this orange color and then zoom in and just start tracing over this artwork here. So, nothing is incredibly perfect. Kind of just using my sketch as a guideline. And why are you doing this? This is how I'm gonna illustrate these sketches. Okay. So, I'm just illustrating motifs that we'll be able to use in the pattern designs tomorrow. Ivana, we had a question from Laurie and Davey who just wanted, I guess, clarification on why you trace it this way, rather than using the auto trace tool. So, there are different ways in different times to do both. I am gonna be using both through these sketches. This is gonna give you a really nice clean line and you're gonna be able to color it differently sometimes. And I'll show you exactly when I like to. You could just blow through these and live trace them all and you'll have a really cohesive look at the end as long as your sketches are really nice. I just work from several different perspectives. So I'm gonna blob brush some, I'm gonna live trace some, I'm gonna paint tool some. Okay. But I just want to give kind of a well rounded look at how we can go about doing this. Great, thanks. Yeah. So, if you love the live trace tool by all means use it. Yeah. Quick question, so yesterday I asked about it 'cause the blob brush, I love it but it tends to have such soft edges on everything. It does. So, it's great if that's what you want, but is there a way to sharpen it at all so that you can get a different effect? Not really. That's just how this is. You can, I'm not sure let's play with this. I'm not sure if this is gonna even be available. Yeah. If you decrease the size of the blob brush, like if I go way small, left bracket tool takes me like way small and I do this leaf. I'm gonna hide my edges by hitting Command + H so you can see that. It's a pretty pointy point right there and if you were to color this, just the inside and we delete this outer stroke, that's gonna be a really nice point right there. So, most of my work tends to be kinda curved, I don't do a lot. I kinda like that look about the blob brush. If you don't, you can use the pen tool. Yeah, and we'll be using the pen tool some too so, hopefully you'll feel comfortable doing that too in a little bit. When you paint with the blob, does it vector, is it paint? Yeah. So, anything that you create directly in illustrator is automatically vectors. Yes. Okay, thank you. So I could scale this indefinitely and it won't lose its integrity. Does the blob brush give it more of a hand drawn look? It can, yeah it can and you'll see in just a minute what your options are on how to color these items when you use the blob brush tool. One thing about the blog brush tool is that now I have the stroke right here. And so, like I said, it's not like align with vectors. This is an object. I love the blob brush tool. Love it, love it. So, I am going to unlock my sketches layer and grab this image and just delete it. Okay, I just hit the delete button on my keyboard. So, let's get into coloring this a little bit. I didn't go over this yesterday, but today I wanna introduce the live paint bucket tool to you. And so give me a minute to catch up. When you have an illustration or something you're working on selected, the live paint bucket tool will be over here under the shape builder tool. So, yesterday we use this.. Lemme show you that real quick. If you wanna use a shape builder tool to make this one solid image, you can just drag and drop over it like that. That makes using the blob brush tool really great or if you wanted this whole thing to be solid, you can drag over everything. I don't, but I do want to come over here to the fly out menu and grab the live paint bucket tool. Okay, so can you see the little paint bucket at the end of my arrow now? And three color swatches are on top. Orange is what I'm using now and you can just use the arrows on your keyboard to toggle through the colors that are available and it's grabbing this from my first color palette over here. So, if I know for sure what color I want, I can just come over here and click on it and that brought up kind of that limey green color and then I can toggle through the ones directly beside it. So, I think I'm gonna start with, I think I'll start with this limey green color and what the live paint bucket tool allows you to do is color in large areas of illustrations, but they have to be closed. So, if you were trying to cut, you can color in like a U shape or anything that doesn't have a closure on it. So, a lot of times I run into this because I'll be coloring like a flower stem and I'll have forgotten to close the end of the stem so you have to run in with a blob brush to enclose that in really quick before you can live paint bucket it. So, to color that in all you do is click and click here and click here and I'm gonna hide my edges so we can really make sure that I want everybody see what I'm doing. So, to hide my edges, just Command + H. So, this is what this is looking like. If I wanna change the orange, I can grab maybe this green color and come in and start clicking on the orange and the live paint bucket tries to figure out where you would like this to stop. I want all the orange to be the same, so I'll do that. So, this illustration is now outlined. One of my favorite ways to work though is just to kinda delete this outline. So, I grab the no fill square right there and then I can come in and just kinda take this away, which leaves me with this leaf that has kind of some cutout areas and some sharper points. So, this is one way to accomplish getting those more pointy edges with the blob brush tool. The only thing about the live paint bucket, is that it leaves kind of these, like I'm done with this, but it leaves these behind. So, anytime you are kind of complicating and illustration, I like to expand it and let it be as simple as possible. So, when I'm sure that I like something, I'll select it, bring my edges back so you can see. So you can see that it's kind of, it's got all that original content in it. And so if you, it's fine, if you're working with something small, but if you have a big illustration and you have all these kinds of leftover bits that you don't even need then it just kind of slugs your document down and you don't need it. So, I like to come up to object and select expand. Usually, you wanna expand all those things then I hit okay. So, that leaves us with just the final leaf. And if I come in here, like I can see like this little bit right there it's pretty obvious that I was using the blob brush tool. So, I wanna just round that off and I can do that by using the eraser tool. Keyboard shortcut for that is Shift + E and you can increase the size of that or decrease the size of it the same way by using the left and right bracket tool. And I'll just come in and kind of shave that off. Using the eraser tool is another good way to get nice points using the blob brush tool. To zoom out I use option command space bar and when you zoom out or zoom in it zooms out around wherever you are clicking the mouse. Okay, and that will jump it to the center of your art board. So, I always try to zoom in or zoom out around, you know, the part, you have to click where the part is that you want to see. Now, to get the hand tool, I might not have explained that all you do is press the space bar. The space bar gives you this hand tool and you can drag your mouse around to look at your illustration. Okay. So these dots look pretty obvious. I don't like it to be real obvious that I use like the blob brush tool so I'm gonna come in and smooth these out. So, I'll select this one and I like to use the fly out menu of the pencil tool and grab the smooth tool and just come in and kind of smooth these out. Hitting the command key will take me back to the last arrow key that I use. So, I just hold down the command key to select the next one and smooth it out. And that allows you to work pretty quickly. Nope. I went into isolation then right there. You know, these dots might not make it into anything tomorrow, but they should be perfect while they live, right? Okay. So I'm gonna work on this one now. And so, this is gonna give us pretty interesting look because, you know, I'll show you why. So, I'll select all of that and come over and grab my live paint bucket tool. The keyboard shortcut for that is K. I'm not sure why that one didn't make the cut in memory bank. (laughs) I always go over and grab it from the fly out menu but if you use a live paint bucket a lot, keyboard shortcut for that is K. And I'm gonna grab the green color and hide my edges and come in here and start. The other thing you should know is that if you are working with something that has a lot of little pieces that you wanna color, you can just drag and drop, not drag and drop, you can just drag your paint bucket over the areas that you wanna color and you'll see that they turn like this deep red and then by the time I'm done, it turns everything green. Now, that turned the outline green too but we're gonna remedy that by just getting rid of it. So, that's what I'm gonna do right now. I'll select the non-box and just come in here and start getting rid. So, it has separated this out for me. There's no rhyme or reason I don't believe somebody at home might know why it does that sometimes but we'll just go and get it all out. Okay. So, that gives a pretty unique look because none of it is really connected. And I like that look for now. So, what I wanna do is select this whole image. Everything is grouped together because I use the live paint bucket tool on it. It groups it together as soon as you start doing that. And I'm gonna expand it. Object expand, yes. And that gets rid of all kind of the leftover things. So, you can come in here and individually color these a little differently. So, this little blip that looks like it's folding over, I might wanna have like a darker green and you can even end that one right there. And then these little elements down here, we can just color independently of each other. So I'm like, oops! So, everything's grouped together. I need to right click and ungroup it. I can. Now we got it. And I'll come in here and make smooth this out too. And so these, I'm glad I'm happy that they're not perfect. I just don't like it when you can really tell that you can see what size my blob brush tool was and you can see that that's what I was using. So, I just like to kind of smooth out the end.