In today's Illustrator tutorial you'll learn how to easily apply poses to your flat style
character, how to quickly trace your illustrations and how to apply colors.
You're watching T&T Tutorials, let's move on!
In previous tutorial I explained how to apply any proportions to your character without
thinking.
So today we'll start with this stylized character proportions.
You can start building your character body right in Illustrator.
Use only rectangles and simplify body like you can see here.
Then you can find any photo reference or simply have fun by applying poses from imagination.
Duplicate rectangles from your template, rotate and move them until you'll get needed pose.
This is a great practice to understand how it's easy to apply poses in flat style.
After this you have three options: you can draw this applied pose with pencil on paper
to draw your character on top of this rectangles; also you can simply keep this pose in mind
and draw sketch remembering all that rectangles; and in case if you have a tablet, you can
bring this template to Photoshop and draw your character in a separate layer.
This time I choose third way, but in real life I keep proportions in my head and I don't
need any rectangles.
If you're beginner, don't hesitate to use this method until you'll become confident
in drawing.
Honestly, I think that this kind of workflow is pretty time saving, so I think from now I'll use
it time after time in my character design.
You can download this sketch by joining me on my Patreon.
Now let me show you crucial tips to trace and color your character design on a fly.
I use overlapping method to trace my sketches, because it allows to trace super fast and
easy.
I turn on some music and enjoy the process.
The main thing to know is that to quickly stop creating line and jump right to the next
one, you need to hold Ctrl or Cmd and click somewhere.
As you can see, we don't need to trace full shapes.
This is the main benefit of overlapping method, but this is not the only reason why I love
it so much.
I think the strongest benefit of this tracing method is how further rendering goes.
It works the best when you have many objects, complex shapes and you really just want to
get things done instead of taking care of each small piece of your illustration.
Meanwhile tracing is done and you can see that all lines are overlapping.
You might want to pick the Shape Builder tool to cut all tails, but this is the wrong way.
Let me show you how to avoid any issues and get 100% straightforward workflow.
I don't do this usually, but if you're not confident in overlapping, you can select all,
pick the Shape Builder tool and simply target all areas to make sure that they will be separated
one from another.
If not, apply overlapping better and try once again.
Then with all lines selected, select OUTLINE in Pathfinder.
Apply stroke width again, ungroup all lines, pick the Lasso Tool, grab final anchor points
and cut them.
You can also select lines and a few anchor points at once.
We need to get clean outlines like this, no tails and no gaps.
After this duplicate OUTLINES layer and lock it.
We'll use duplicated layer for adding colors, so let's create a big rectangle and bring
it to the bottom.
Select all and hit Divide in Pathfinder.
Ungroup all, and delete unneeded color areas.
Then I recommend you to create color groups.
Select a few shapes that will probably have the same color and group them.
All that's left to do is to apply colors which might be challenging for some of you, so I
recommend you to check out my tutorial on how to pick colors from photos, how to create
your own color palettes and then apply them to your illustrations on a fly without any
problems.
To add patterns I use Clipping mask.
Duplicate main shape, select needed objects, right click and hit 'make clipping mask'
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This was T&T Tutorials.
Thank you for watching and see you in the next video!