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Coming up on today’s epsiode:

Jermbo shows us some cool techniques to turn a sketch into a vector masterpiece!

I have opened my sketch in Adobe Illustrator CS4. The very first thing I like to do is lock my original art layer, and give it a name of BG. And now add a new layer and call it base. Generally I like to do 95% of my drawing on one layer but there are times when it is necessary to add more, but I will cross that when I get there.

Make sure that the layer called base is selected, you know this by the blue highlight over the layer. Grab the direct select tool and then the pen tool. Go down to your foreground and stroke icons and make sure the fill is set to none. You can do that by clicking on the fill box to bring it to the front and the selecting the box with the line through it. It’s the third little box. The first one is for a solid color and the second one is for a gradient fill. Now let’s begin the vectorization! I am going to start at the peace holding hand. And what I am doing is outlining the entire hand not worrying about the details in side.

If you noticed that sometimes I don’t place the node exactly where I want it, I simply press the space bar while the mouse button is still down and move it where I want it to be. Now I am going into the detail parts. Take a few moments and outline the rest on the guy and add the line detail on the inside.

One trick that I use for the circle eyes and other objects is grab the oval tool in to tool bar or hit the “L” key, the draw the perfect circle. Don’t forget to save often!

When you think you have everything outlined and all the detail added, turn off the sketch layer. Now turn it back on to see if there is any detail that you might have missed, do this until all the detail is complete.

Filling Process

This part is important. I grabbed all of the outsides of the outlines, leaving the detail lines alone, and gave them a fill. What! This is all out of whack. Don’t worry because we are going to take a few seconds to place them where we need them. I want to now go over some hot keys with you. I could send a lot of time selecting an object that I want to move and go to appearance and send back or send front , but that is too time consuming.

Instead I am going to use Control plus the Left Bracket key to send back one level. ( Command left bracket on a Mac. ) I am going to continues hitting that combination until that Item is behind the other item. For example notice the shirt sleeve is above the arm, that’s not right, I know I want that all the way in the back, so I am going to hit Control plus Shift plus Left Bracket to send it to back. Just use Command instead of control on a Mac. The Same thing with the ear.

But notice one eye brow is covered up by the hair, sending it back isn’t the right thing to do so lets send it all the way to the front. The process is the same sending something back or forth, the difference is the bracket key. So we want to sent this one to the front, lets hit Control plus Shift plus Right Bracket key and BOOM! Its on top. Go ahead and pick some base colors you like for the shirt hair skin and necklace spikes . The blob bruch is coming up.

Blob Brush Features

Now for the Blob brush! I want oto go over a few settings first so double click on the blob brush icon and the options will show up. Since I am using a wacom tablet then this helps the tool be the best it can. I like to keep selected unchecked and selection limits merged also unchecked. They both do exactly what they say.

Fidelity at the lowest number 0.5 allows you to record exactly what movements you make. The higher the number, 20 being the max, the more the computer tried to guess to what you meant. So my number is 2.5, here it copies the right amount of information while fixing the small errors for me. Smoothness does exactly what it says, I like to keep this at 7. If you don’t have a tablet set then the rest doesn’t really apply to you. But I do so I will explain what they do.

Size is the size of the brush. I am going to change the fixed to Pressure so I can let the amount of pressure I place on my pen decide how big the brush is. The variation slider is saying how small can be or how big it will be. I like to set it at about 4 or 5 pts that way I get a nice variation.

The other two options can be summed up the same way as the first. Just note that you cannot have variation on roundness if it is at 100%, it needs to be less than 90% to be able to vary

Now that I have the explanation out of the way lets draw! Here I grab a fill color that is a little darker the skin and start to fill I n a shadow. So I am going to pick a light source and add a shadow to the opposite side. As you can see this is going to take some tweaking but it is a hell of a lot faster that using the pen tool and making each point, and you get a more natural flow to it. So now Illustrator is now a true illustration tool. And its as simple as that. So take a few moments to apply this to the rest of the drawing. Next is the new improved gradient tool.

Using the Gradient tool

Now that you have the art looking the way you want it I think a nice gradient in the background will look nice. So lest make a square and send it to the very back.give it a gradient and drag a color in the icon like normal. Grab the gradient tool and lookie here the display is different you have a bar. Now roll over that bar and notice that stubs appear and incicate what colors are where now double click that stub and up pops a in place edit that allows you to change your color. Ok now change the other stub. Lets add a new stub.. it’s as simple as double clicking on an empty area, and as you change colors add new colors notice that it is changing on the shape also. This makes the gradient tool 100 times more powerful and useful.

Lets change it to a radial gradient and notice the display changes to a circle you can still edit the gradient stubs but here you can grab the black dots on the out side circle and either manipulate the roundness or length of the radial and place the radial where it looks the best.

CS4 now has transparency in gradients! Now more transparent masks and all that other jazz. Just click on the sutb that you want to be transparent and change the setting to zero. To prove that this is a true transparency I will put a new shape behind the gradient and give it a color other than white and there you have it!

Go ahead and take the image I was using off of my site and practice this a few times. Don’t be afraid of trying this technique with your own sketches.