Hi, this is Anne for Graphic Design How To, and today we're going to talk about how to
take your drawings maybe you made with a sharpie, or a pen, take a picture or scan it in and
then use Illustrator to create vector artwork.
Maybe your final result would be an SVG or an EPS file.
So let's get started.
OK, I'm just going to draw some swirls on here.
Maybe we'll draw some wings.
I'm going to draw something a little more angular.
So you can see the best way to go about doing that.
If you want to draw for example, a box.
You really want to try to limit this kind of thing right here.
So if you can get that as perfect as possible, that'll help you a lot later on and when you
go to trace this in Illustrator.
You'll notice that they sometimes get rounded in the tracing process.
So another good way to do this is to just make your upper lines and then make your horizontal
lines and combine them in Illustrator later.
So if you're making letters, you might want to make them like this.
And then attach these two parts later here and here, because you won't get a sharp corner
here.
Otherwise, all right, let's just draw maybe a little cup
with some little water in there.
I'm going to use my phone camera to just take a picture as flat as I can on this and then
I'll email it to myself.
I'm sure there's a lot better way of doing that.
OK, so I've downloaded my image from my email so it went to my Downloads folder.
I'll just pull it into Photoshop.
And then I'm going to hit SHIFT CMD B, or SHIFT CTRL B on a PC.
And what that's doing is the same thing as going to Image>Auto Color.
So it's made it a lot more white and black.
And now we can hit CMD l or CTRL l on a PC and bring these sliders over a little bit
so that we get a really harsh black and white.
It doesn't have to be perfect, but this will be a great starting point.
So we'll say OK, and then we'll save it with CMD S....jpg is fine.
We'll go back to our Finder and now we'll pull this into our Illustrator file.
And now we have an almost black and white image.
I'm going to CMD minus to zoom out, click on it and then come up here to Image Trace.
Now, if you click the caret up here, you'll have a lot of different image options.
And I usually just choose the default at first and see how well it does...and it might take
some time depending on your computer.
OK, let's zoom in a little bit here by hitting Z, and then drawing a box around it.
And it looks like it got it pretty well.
We can always come back up here to this icon, click it, and then make adjustments by choosing
different thresholds.
We can come down here to Advanced and choose a low number of paths to kind of clean some
of these edges up.
So you can play around with these adjustments until you find something you like.
And as you can see, it's not 100% clean – it probably won't be.
So for this image, I'm going to go with these numbers 87, 28, 75, and 25.
And now we can just close this window.
Now if we CMD minus and then hit CMD Y, you can see that you can't see the shapes once
you do that, except for this artboard.
So hit CMD Y again, and now we'll need to expand this.
So I'm going to hit Expand.
When you expand, you're actually creating the vector at that point.
So let's hit CMD Y.
And now we can see the shapes of all of these things.
Hit CMD Y again.
And now we'll want to remove the white.
So I'm going to click off over here, hit Y on my keyboard, which will bring me to the
Magic Wand tool, and I'm just going to click on the white and delete.
I'm going to use my A tool to select these things, and delete those.
Let's select everything and hold SHIFT and OPT to resize it to the artboard.
I'm going to click Z to zoom in.
And now we can come in here and fine tune everything.
So I'm going to hit Shift S. And that gets me to my Smooth tool.
I can just go along the edge of these things and just smooth them up.
It's basically removing anchor points and causing a much smoother line.
My wings...if I zoom in here, it kind of comes to a point, which I don't want that.
So I can either smooth it with CMD S (it takes a lot of clicks to do it that way) I'll back
up with CMD Z.
And then I can also use the N tool, which is the Pencil and just redraw that line.
You have to start and end on the line, though.
I'll do that here too.
And I want this to be more of a point.
So I'll do that here to CMD minus to zoom out.
And then I'm going to zoom in on this to show you that these corners are not actual corners,
they're rounded off, so we can take this piece and move it up here.
I'm going to use my Group Selection tool.
I have this set up for G on my keyboard, but you probably won't have it set up for that
– you'll have to go to Edit>Keyboard Shortcuts to assign it to that if you want to use it
that way.
And then we'll take our crossbar here.
And this will ensure we have sharp corners.
CMD minus and then we'll move over here.
Z to zoom in.
And I'm just going to stretch this.
Mmm, maybe a little bit and then we'll hit SHIFT S to clean this up.
So you can see that there is going to be some work involved after you scan and vectorize
this, but I think this is a decent start to vectorizing your artwork.
So here I'm hitting N to redraw this shape.
The corners here are not great either.
So I'm going to use my A tool to select this and this, this and this, so I can get a sharp
corner on those.
I'll just click on this and Unite it with the Unite shape mode.
CMD minus.
Now all of these are grouped right now, but I would recommend ungrouping them.
So I'll hit G to get my Group Selection tool, I'm going to CMD X, CMD F, and that has separated
it.
So I just cut and paste it in front.
And now I'll get my next one with the G tool, CMD X, CMD F and CMD G if you want to group
it.
So now we can just save this as an SVG, we'll call it 'Elements' and it's as simple as that.
Alright, that's my video for this week.
If you liked it, please click on the 'Like' button.
And I'll see you next week for another graphic design tutorial.
Thank you!!!