Hi, this is Anne with Graphic Design How To, and today I'm going to show you how to vectorize and
clean up a scanned black and white hand drawing in Adobe Illustrator. And this is actually an excerpt
from my brand new Skillshare class From Sketchbook to Surface Pattern Design in Adobe Illustrator.
So if you want to learn step by step how to take your hand drawings, convert them into vector,
and then create a beautiful surface pattern design in Adobe Illustrator,
check out the link in the description below. All right, let's get started.
Ok, so first, you'll want to either scan or take a photo of your drawings and get it onto your
computer. So maybe you'll just need to email it to yourself, or if you have a Mac, you can AirDrop it
to yourself. The next step is to get our digital drawings into Adobe Illustrator. So to do that,
I'm going to go to File>Place. And then I'm going to go to my desktop where I saved my scans. Now
I have a few different ones out here. On a Mac, I can preview these by just hitting the spacebar. So
I have this one, I've got this one, this one and this one, which I scanned and cleaned up
in Photoshop. I'm going to go ahead and choose the scan phone one because it has some shadows in it,
and I want to show you how to deal with those in Adobe Illustrator. So I'm going to choose that
one and Place. And now I'm just going to click once. This will place our file at its full size,
so it is really big. And that's a good thing. That'll help Illustrator vectorize it.
So once I release my mouse, it's still selected, and you can tell that by the blue boundary.
Let's come up here to Image Trace. That is under Window. So just go to Window>Control. Right here,
that's your Control Panel. And I'm just going to hit Image Trace once. It's going to give us
a warning about it being a really large image, and do we want to continue. And we do so I'll say OK.
And now Illustrator is working to figure out what parts are black and white. And they actually did a
really good job of getting rid of those shadows. Now I'm going to come up here to this little
button on the same Control Panel. It's called the Image Trace Panel. So I'm going to click that.
And this gives us Image Trace options. The one we want to look at now is the Threshold. If I move
this over to the right, it'll kind of redo itself and it grabs more of the black. So our little ants
down here are kind of sick now. If I move it all the way over here to the left, it gives us
more white, and so some parts of the design kind of get a little thin. So I liked what it did. It
was right around 130. And this looks really nice. So I think this is a good threshold. I'm going
to click this little caret next to Advanced. And then I'm going to choose Ignore White. This gets
rid of the white background. Now if you had a lot of shadows, and you're seeing some shadowing down
here, and it's making it black, that's okay, as long as it's not touching any of your designs.
I'll show you how to get rid of that in a minute. Ok, I'm going to close my Image Trace dialog box.
You'll notice it's still selected, and we'll choose Expand. Now these turned out really nice.
So I don't have a lot of extra stuff to clean up. But I want to show you what can happen.
If you don't have Photoshop, maybe you can't increase the contrast. So I'm going to insert
another one. We'll go to File>Place. And then I think I'll use this one. So I'm going to
place that. I'm just going to click once. I'm going to zoom out with CMD minus or CTRL minus,
so we can see the whole thing. And then I'm just going to hit that Image Trace button
again. And we'll get the same warning and say ok, and now you can see, if I zoom in here,
I'll hit Z on my keyboard, which will bring me to my Zoom tool. And I'm just going to draw a box
around this part. You can see some black parts up here, and we don't want that, of course. I'm going
to get my tracing result back. And I'm going to choose Ignore White. I'll get out of Image Trace.
I'm going to zoom out with CMD minus or CTRL minus, and I'll go ahead and choose Expand right
up here. Now you can see that that has become part of the image. I'm going to rotate this first. So
I'm going to hit R on my keyboard. That'll bring us to the Rotate tool, which is right over here.
And then I'm just going to click and drag. I'll hold SHIFT to get it to snap into place. Ok,
so we have our smaller bugs. And then we have our larger bugs with the problem up here. Ok,
at this point, let's go ahead and save our file. So I'll come up here to File>Save As,
and I'm going to put this on my desktop. I'll call it Insect Pattern.
And our format will be Adobe Illustrator. I'm going to click Save and then we'll just say OK.
Now you might notice as the class goes on that my file is not actually named Insect Pattern,
and that's because as I was recording I actually forgot to save it. But of course, it's best if
you save often while you work. So now I'm going to show you how to clean these up. I'm going to
come over here to my Group Selection tool, which is underneath the Direct Selection tool. And I'm
just going to draw a box around the piece that I don't want. And then just delete it. If you click
with your Selection tool, you'll notice that all of the pieces are grouped together. So we need to
kind of isolate each bug so that it can be moved around separately. So to do that, I'm going to get
back on my Group Selection tool right here. And I'm going to draw a box around that first one.
Now, if your pieces are too close together, and you accidentally select some other piece, you can
also use your Q tool, so hit Q on your keyboard to get there. And this is the Lasso tool, it's right
up here. And you can just draw around the one you want to isolate, and that will just select it.
That way, you don't have to worry about selecting something you don't want. Now to get this bug on
its own, I'm going to cut, paste in front, group, and then hide it to get it out of the way. So to
do that, I'm going to hit CMD X, that's CTRL X on a PC. And that's cutting. So we just cut it. It's
not there anymore. But now we're going to paste it in front and put it exactly back where it was.
To do that, I'm going to hit CMD F or CTRL F. Then we'll group it with CMD G or CTRL G,
and then we'll hide it with CMD 3, or CTRL 3. Now this is just to get it out of the way so it makes
it a little easier to select the other bugs. We'll bring it back here in a minute. I want
to zoom in by hitting Z on my keyboard, which brings me to this tool right over here. And I'm
going to draw a box around our next three bugs. Then I'll get back on my Group Selection tool.
And I'm going to just draw a box around the next one. I'll CMD X or CTRL X which cuts,
CMD F or CTRL, F to paste in front, CMD G or CTRL G to group and then CMD 3, or CTRL 3 to hide.
And I'll do this process with the rest of the bugs. I'm moving to each one with the hand tool.
And to do that, you can just hit spacebar and then click and drag your screen, which moves it around.
Now with these down here, obviously, they're just duplicates of the ones above, so I'm going to just
select all of those with my group selection, and then just delete them. Ok, so now there should be
nothing left. So I'm going to unhide everything. And to do that it's OPT CMD 3, or ALT CTRL 3 on a
PC. You can also come up here to Object and Show All. Ok, I'm going to zoom in on this first one.
So I'll hit Z to get to my Zoom tool and draw a box around it. And I think this looks pretty
good. I don't like this little nub that happened here. So I'm going to fix this by getting my group
selection and just selecting the very edge of this. Now if you click in here, it's not going to
work. But if you select the very edge of the thing you want, you should only be selecting this piece.
If you click out here, you're going to get everything. So click off by clicking an empty
area, and click right on that edge. Ok, now I'm going to hit N to get to my Pencil tool. That's
right over here. And the way the Pencil tool works, if you're drawing along the edge of a line,
you can redraw that line as long as you end up going along the edge of it again in the same
direction. So I'm going to start up here, and I'm going to draw along it and redraw it ending
on the same path and going the same direction. So that redraws our line right there. Now you can see
that my drawing isn't perfect, and I actually kind of like it that way. I think it adds character to
it. So I'm not going to fix everything. I'm just going to fix things that look like a mistake. So
I'm going to zoom in here. This little polka dot doesn't look quite right, so I'm going to use my A
tool, which is the Direct Selection tool right up here. I'm going to get right on that point. And
when I do that, you'll see this little white dot with a blue dot inside. And you can tell also that
I've selected only that point because these other points out here are white, and this one is blue.
But anyway, that one point is selected. And now I can click on this dot and drag it to round that
point. And I'm going to do the same thing right over here. I'm going to click right on the point
that I want to round. And then I'm going to click that little white dot with the blue inside. And
maybe this one too. There we go. A lot of times when you image trace something, Illustrator likes
to put points in weird places in my opinion. So I'll go through and just kind of fix those.
Let's see I'm moving around in my hand tool, the spacebar. Here's another one.
Ok, that one looks like it needs to be fixed. Maybe that.
And you'll notice that you don't get a white dot on some of them.
You can see these two handles that are connected to that anchor point. And that means it's a smooth
point. This only works if you're working with corner points. So if you select a smooth point,
you won't be able to have that rounded corner white dot here. So in this case, I'm going to
switch back to my N tool, the Pencil tool and just redraw that line, like I showed you a moment ago.
There we go. Ok, everything on this one looks fine. I'll move on to the second one. Now I have
this same problem happening here. But this one looks like it has three corner points. So I'm
going to hit A on my keyboard. I'll select this one. I'll hold down SHIFT and select the other
two points. And they all have a white dot. But since I have all three of them selected,
I can click on any white dot, and pull all three in at the same time. That looks pretty good. And
now I see a point here. This doesn't seem like it should have a point. First, I'm going to select
this shape with the Group Selection tool. And I can see there's a point here. So I'm going to hit
P to get on my Pen tool, and then hit the minus symbol to get on my Delete Anchor Point tool.
So that's P and then minus. And I can just click that and get rid of it. Now if it still
seems weird, you can also adjust these handles. So I'm going to hit A on my keyboard. I'll get
right on that handle that showed up. And I'm going to pull that so it just looks a little more
natural. Here's another anchor point that I think I want to delete. So I'm going to hit P minus,
and click on that one. Maybe that one too. Yeah, that looks better. Also don't want this one down
here. And this part right here looks a little weird so I'll go ahead and fix that. First,
I need to select this piece. So I'm going to get back on my Group Selection tool,
click right on the edge of that, and then switch over to my Pencil tool by hitting
N on my keyboard. And I'll just draw along this edge and finish on the same path going the same
direction to redraw the line. And even though this one isn't too bad, I think I'll redraw it too.
Now sometimes when I do this, it doesn't quite work. If I start out going one way on the path,
and then I go backwards or something like that, you're going to get something like this. So if
that happens, just undo by hitting CMD Z or CTRL Z and try again. So something like that. Down here,
you can see this doesn't look quite right. So I'm going to select that with my Group Selection tool,
just click right on the edge. And then I'm going to get my Smooth tool.
And that's underneath my Pencil tool. I can hit SHIFT S to get there. And it's right here. And
then I can just go over this line several times with my mouse and just kind of smooth it out.
So the Smooth tool works by just going over the line several times like that. Ok,
I think this one is done. Now with this one, the legs are looking pretty strange, so I'm going to
try to fix those. I'm going to get on my A tool or Direct Selection tool, click right in here
and bring this in. Then I'll click this point and see if I can grab that handle and move it so it's
a little more natural. Working with the handles in Illustrator, they can be pretty challenging,
but it's just a matter of practice. If you try one way and it's not looking good,
just pull it down another way or bring it closer to the anchor point to get different results.
And don't forget, you can always hit CMD Z or CTRL Z to undo the last thing you did.
All right, now I'm going to use the same tools that I just showed you
to clean up the rest of these. And I'll speed up the video so it won't take so long. So when you
use Image Trace to vectorize your designs, you will probably need to do some cleanup like this.
There will probably be little mistakes you need to fix and parts that don't look quite right.
All right, so now that all our bugs are pretty cleaned up, they're looking nice. Let's go ahead
and select all of them and then resize them to fit on our artboard. So I'm going to use my Selection
tool. I'll just draw a box around all of them. And you should have this Bounding Box that comes up
with these little handles on the sides. If you're not seeing this go to View and then>Show Bounding
Box which will be right here if you don't have it on, and then you should see that Bounding Box show
up. I'm going to hold SHIFT. SHIFT will resize everything proportionally, so you're not squeezing
or stretching anything. And then I'm going to grab a corner and just bring it in so that everything
fits on my artboard. Then I'm going to hit CMD 0 or CTRL 0. That'll put your artboard right in
the middle of your workspace, and these are a little small now, so I'm going to hold SHIFT,
grab a corner, and just make them a little bit bigger. And maybe we'll move these two down here.
Ok, let's go ahead and save our file with CMD S or CTRL S. So that's how to vectorize and clean
up your sketches in Adobe Illustrator. If you want to take the next step and make a surface pattern
design with them, head over to my Skillshare class. If you use the link in the description,
and you're a new Skillshare member, you'll get a one-month free trial, and you can actually
take all my classes for free. All right, if you liked this video, and you want to see more videos
like this, just hit the subscribe button and a little bell next to it. And you'll be notified
every time a new video comes out. All right, I'll see you in the next video. Thank you!!!