- [Karin] Hello, iPad Letterers!
Welcome back to my channel :)
My name is Karin
and I'm here to help you get the most out of your iPad,
whether that is with lettering or art or journaling.
In this video, I want to show you how to vectorize artwork
that you have created in Procreate.
This is especially useful if you need large scale prints
or if you need SVG files
for your Silhouette or Cricut machine.
One of the problems with Procreate
is that it is pixel based.
This means that you won't be able to enlarge your artwork
or it will become pixelated.
It could be so frustrating.
One of the ways to get around this
is to create a very large canvas
but unfortunately this will only work up to a certain size
and you'll also be restricted by the number of layers
that you'll have available.
Another problem is that,
Procreate won't let you export your Procreate files as SVG.
But let me show you what we can do about this.
For this tutorial, you will need the Procreate App
and then we are also going to use the Adobe Capture App,
which you can use for free.
And then to work with the SVG files,
we are going to use Affinity Designer.
You can also use Vectornator or Adobe Illustrator
if you don't have Affinity Designer.
We are going to do two different artworks.
The first one is just black and white
but then we are going to do a colored artwork too.
Let's start Procreate and create a new canvas.
The size you choose here is actually quite important.
I've tried every possible size
and I've found that you get the best results
with a medium sized canvas.
2048 by 2048 pixels is a good one size to start with.
Now for this step,
you want to create your lettering piece
and I recommend that you choose a smooth brush.
The brush I'm going to use here is called Hazelnut Creme
and it's one of my all time favorite lettering brushes.
So we're going to write the phrase, hang in there
and we're gonna create a sticker out of this.
And then we're going to place this in the center.
Now what's important when you create your lettering piece
is that you want your lines to be as smooth as possible.
So I recommend that you clean up the line work here
before we are going to export this file.
And in order to do that,
I like using the Totally Crispy brush
which creates a nice smooth edge like this.
And so now I'm just gonna go around my artwork
and tidy up any line
that I'm not a hundred percent happy with.
The more time you spend on doing this,
the faster it will be to create your vectorized file.
You'll also notice
that I have chosen to do this black and white.
I find that I'm getting the best results
just using a black lettering piece
and then I prefer coloring in the artwork later on
when we already have the vector file.
So now we are going to create a new layer
and then we're going to place it below our layer.
This and this is for the sticker background.
And we're also going to use black for this
so we're just gonna create a rough outline of those letters
just to create this sort of sticker shape like this.
Then you'll need to make sure here that you close the shape
so that we can now fill this with black.
So you can just drag in your color swatch
and then fill it with black
and of course now you can't see the lettering anymore
because we've got that black background.
So now you can decrease the opacity and have a look
to see what the sticker is going to look like
and this is looking pretty good.
All right, so now what we need to do is
export both of these layers separately.
So we can turn the background layer off
and now we are going to save this as a JPEG file.
I've tried both PNG and JPEG
and I find that I'm getting better results using JPEG's,
that's what we're gonna do.
And then you could just save it as an image.
And then we're gonna do the same thing
with the background here as well.
So you're gonna do,
tap share
and then share as JPEG.
All right, so now we're gonna start up Adobe Capture
and this is what the icon looks like.
And we're going to bring in both files
that we have created in Procreate before.
So we're gonna tap on plus input image
and then tap on camera roll
to select the file that we've just created.
So we're gonna tap on it and bring it in.
All right, so now at this stage,
we can make some small modifications.
That first one is,
you can select whether you want this to be color
or black and white.
And because we have black and white,
I recommend that you choose this
because it let you make additional adjustments.
And you'll notice this is the difference
between using color and black and white
is that if you use black and white
you can make much more fine-grained adjustments.
If you change the slider here,
you can see that you could also create outlines
if you wanted to.
But we actually gonna put this all the way to the top
to fill in the space as much as possible.
And then also here,
there's this magic wand button
so I recommend that you tap this as well
and so this sort of cleans up the edges a little bit.
And then once we are happy with what this looks like,
we tap on the tick here
and now we can refine this lettering piece a little bit.
So you can zoom in and you see now
that you can still see all that pixelations here.
But now if we tap on smooth,
this is now going to smooth it out
and so now can see that we have nice smooth lines.
You can see that there is still a few artifacts here
and this is mainly because I haven't spent enough time
refining the edges before I exported the artwork.
And then you'll notice here at the bottom
that it says off and on
and interestingly, I've got smoothing off.
So if I turn it on,
it'll smooth it even more
but I don't like the results this is creating.
So I'm really losing some of the shapes
of my lettering piece.
So you can just sort of toggle between off and on
and you can see the difference.
But I prefer off but it just more realistic
to what I want my lettering piece to look like.
So now we tap save and we can give this a name.
So we're just going to call it, hang in there
and then you can save it to your Creative Cloud Libraries.
So we just tap save, like this.
All right, so now we are going to do the same
with our blob background,
we're gonna tap input image and then select the blob
and again make sure that you select black and white here.
Tap on that magic wand
and then adjust the slide all the way to the top
and tap on the tick here.
So now we can refine
and smoothen out the lines a little bit.
So we tap on smooth and now this looks pretty good.
So now we are going to save this as well
and this one, I'm just gonna call blob and save.
All right, so now the next step is to bring
these two shapes into Affinity Designer.
And in order to do that, we need to export them.
You'll see that there's a lot of different options here
but what you really want to do is tap on Export As
and then tap on SVG.
And that we can select Affinity Designer
from the pop-up menu.
If you don't see it here, you tap on more
and then you'll have a list of apps that come up
that you can choose to open an SVG file with.
So we're gonna select Designer.
So now this has opened up the SVG file in Affinity Designer
and the next thing you wanna do is tap on the Node Tool
and then tap on one of the shapes.
And now you can see all the nodes and all the paths
that this has created.
So now of course it can carry on working on this,
you can smoothen out the paths a little bit more
if you would like to.
There is a smooth feature here,
you could tap on that
and then you can reduce
the number of paths here a little bit.
So that's a handy shortcut
to tidy up your lines a little bit more.
So you can color it in any way you like
and you're not restricted by the pixels anymore.
So this is now super sharp lines and no more pixelations.
And then we also want to bring in our blob
and we can do that the same way
that we've done the shape before.
So we're gonna go here, we tap on Export As, SVG
and then select Affinity Designer from our list of apps.
So now we've got that blob here
and we can change that color of this as well.
So maybe this one,
maybe make it a light blue
and then we can go back and we can grab our letters.
Just select all your letters
and then go to the edit menu,
tap on copy
and then we're gonna go back to our blob
and we're gonna do the same thing and paste it here.
So now you can arrange this on the shape, like this
and there we have our first artwork done.
And then the next artwork
I wanna show you is actually this one
and you can see here a lot is going on.
It has the textured background.
It has some gradients.
So this is going to be a little bit tricky to convert to SVG
but let me show you how we can achieve this.
So now we're gonna go back to Adobe Capture
and we're gonna bring this into Adobe Capture.
So we select the file
and you can see it doesn't look very good
but it's because we've got black and white selected.
So now we're gonna go back to color
and then we also wanna tap on the magic wand tool
to apply auto clean.
And you can see how it's done a really good job
removing that back ground.
So now we tap on the tick here
and see what this looks like.
And so it hasn't come out too badly
and you'll also notice
that if you for use the color capture
that there is no smoothing option available.
That's why I recommend that you use black and white
because then you have this smoothing option available.
So now let's save this as well.
And now of course let's see what this looks like
in Affinity Designer.
So we're going to tap on Export As, SVG
and then we are gonna select Affinity Designer here
and see what this looks like.
All right, so now let's have a look what we've got here.
So select the Node Tool
and then tap on one of the shapes.
And you can see here how it's created so many nodes.
So definitely this doesn't create that perfect result
but you know, we have a vectorized art.
So now we can go in and we can tidy this up a little bit.
I recommend to just delete
some of the shapes that you don't want.
For example, the background,
we don't need this so we can remove it
and then also you can see here
in the middle of your letters
you have these shapes that you won't need.
So you can just go through
and delete them all and tidy that.
But overall, I think it's done a pretty good job.
And now we have a vector object
and you can scale this as much as you want
and you don't have any pixelation anymore.
I really hope you found this tutorial useful.
Before I let you go,
I wanna do a little bit of a shameless promotion.
I've actually got a brand new Affinity Designer course
that I've created together with my friend,
Amanda Arneill.
And we are creating a variety of projects
including, repeating patterns,
how to make little flyers and business cards.
Even how to take a picture of your pet
and then creating a pattern
to put on leggings or any type of clothing
that you would like and to have.
(bright music) And I'm going to leave
a link to the course in the description of this video.
Thank you so much for watching
and I'll see you in the next video.