Hey, everyone, this is Anne for Graphic Design How To, and today I'm going to tell you how
to get hand lettering that you've actually drawn by hand like this into vector format.
So you can get into Illustrator and change it, refine it, scale it up, scale it down.
And the good thing about that is, you don't lose any quality and you can change colors
really easily.
There's a lot you can do with vectorized artwork.
So let's get started.
OK, so the first thing I'm going to do is scan this.
So I'll just turn it over like this and then get on the computer.
Okay, so now I'm in Photoshop, and I'm going to go to File>Import>Images from Device.
Yours might say something a little different here.
It depends on what kind of scanner you have.
Right now it's just doing a preview scan.
I'm gonna put it at 300 DPI, and we'll go color.
That's fine, well, maybe black and white.
I really recommend drawing the original in black.
I didn't because I don't really have a black brush pen around here right now, but I really
recommend doing that.
It helps with contrast and stuff like that.
It's less work later on.
OK, so we'll just make it a JPEG, and I'm going to go ahead and scan this little section.
Now we'll go to Image>Image Rotation>90 degrees Counterclockwise to straighten it up.
And I'm going to go ahead and unlock my Background and then rotate this with CMD T a little more
to get it just kind of straightened on my page.
OK, so we don't have too much contrast right now.
So I'm going to hit CMD L, which is Levels, and there are a lot of different ways to add
contrast, but this is my favorite way.
I like to pull this side in a little bit and see how much darker it got automatically and
then pull this other side in, and that lightens the background.
The middle, I'll push it over just a little bit more.
And that looks pretty good.
And I'll say, 'OK'.
I want to get these lines off of here, so I'm just going to use my M Tool, which is
the Rectangular Marquee.
If you have a selection, you can just hit C and then hit return twice.
And that will crop it to whatever your selection is.
OK, and this is pretty close to what I want, so I'm going to CMD A (or Select All), copy
that and then we'll go to Illustrator, and I'll just paste this into a blank document.
And I'll zoom in a little bit.
And now we can try the Image Trace.
Now Image Trace has a lot of different settings.
So usually I just push it once and see what happens.
OK, and it's pretty close.
I'm going to zoom in a little bit.
And now I'll pull up the options.
And we have some different things here.
We've got Threshold, which will make it grab more of the black.
If we go way down on Threshold, you can see what happens there.
So we definitely want it a little on the higher side.
And now let's go to Advanced, and I like it to be a little smoother than this.
This is pretty rough.
So I'm going to bring my Paths down.
And now there are a couple options down here at the bottom.
We've got Snap Curves To Lines.
You can uncheck and check and see how that affects it.
And we've also got Ignore White.
I'm going to go ahead and click on Ignore White because I only want the black things.
OK, and once we get to this point... so I'm going to CMD E (or Expand) and make sure these
are both checked and say 'OK'.
And now you can see that there are a bunch of dots, those are your handles.
And if we zoom out a little bit and then hit CMD Y, we can see we only have the black.
We don't have an outline or anything to deal with anymore, which is nice.
I'm going to zoom in now.
And now we can work with the Smooth Tool.
Your Smooth Tool is right underneath your Pencil Tool.
I have a key command set up for that (SHIFT S).
But if you have your Pencil Tool selected, and you double click that, if you have this
third one checked, you can use your OPT key and it will automatically switch from the
Pencil to the Smooth Tool, which is really nice.
So I'm going to do that a little bit.
And we'll just start smoothing these things out.
Just keep in mind that whatever edge you...you're clicked on, that is the part that you'll be
smoothing.
You can also use your Pencil Tool to sort of redraw parts of the line.
OK, so let me switch back to the Smooth Tool, and we'll just smooth some of these things
out.
I'm just clicking a lot until it really starts smoothing.
We'll get this a little more cleaned up, and I'm going to make that a little less blunt.
And when you're doing hand lettering, you want to make sure that the upstrokes are smaller
than the downstrokes.
Your downstroke should be thick and your upstrokes should be thin.
And if you can, you want to match the size of your upstrokes and match the size of your
downstrokes.
All your down strokes should be pretty similar and then all your up strokes should be similar
to each other also.
Now as you can see, I mean I'm obviously not a hand-lettering person, but I plan to improve
on that.
OK, we're smoothing out...this D looks pretty bad.
So I'm going to redraw this part with the N Tool, which is the Pencil
and maybe smooth that out a bit.
If you want to click on the interior parts, you need to click right on the edge like this.
And then we'll smooth this out.
As you can see, this is just basically the gist of it.
You just have to go in and kind of manually edit until things look the way you want them
to.
I think that's pretty good.
Now I can change colors if I want.
I can increase the size, rotate easily.
It's not quite the way I want it.
Well, it's alright.
Like I said, I'm not a hand-lettering artist, but you get the picture.
This is just kind of a quick way that you can vectorize your own lettering in case you
want to use it for a project or something like that.
That's my tip for the day.
If you liked this video, please click on the 'Like' button and I will see you next week!!!