Transcript:
[MUSIC] ties your hand, drying or painting and turn it into a fully editable vector illustrator file, lets. Go over, step one first. You have to create your drawing. You can grab a drawing that you’ve already done or start with a blank piece of paper and be creative. A high contrast, black and white drawing works the best. So I suggest drawing with a black marker or you can trace over a pencil drawing with a marker, but it is possible to digitize paintings, colored pencil drawings and pencil sketches, and I will show you those options a little bit later. Next you’re going to take a photo or scan the piece of artwork that you created. Whichever option is easiest for you. Either one will work. You can take a picture of it with your phone. Take a picture of it with your camera or use a scanner. If you have access to that, then you just need to email like. If you took the picture with your phone, you would just email yourself that photo so that you can get it on to your computer and save it to your hard drive for accessing in the next step. You don’t have to be a fancy photographer. No special lighting is required just use the highest resolution setting available on whichever device You’re using, all right, let’s get to step 3 for step three. We need to place our new photo image into illustrator, so we want to go to file and new because we want to create a new document which will bring up this screen and then we’re gonna hit this button that says create new now for most things. I just use an eleven by Eight-and-a-half landscape document, But if you have a specific size that you want your artwork to be go ahead and plug and here you can do inches. You can do points, Pikas, millimeters centimeters or pixels? We don’t need any bleed on our document and depending on what you want to use it for later, you can either do. Cmyk for a printed piece or RGB. If you plan on using it only on your screen, so go ahead and pick whichever settings. You can always change these settings later, so it’s not life or death. If you get the right one once you get this set, you can hit create that brings us up to our blank artboard that we can start creating first. We need to place our image on the document, the image that contains our artworks so to do that we go up to file place. And you’re gonna find your photo of your artwork, so there’s mine and I’m gonna place it and you’ll see when I hit place. You can see a little thumbnail there of my image and what I’m gonna do is click up here in the corner. I’m gonna click, and I’m gonna drag so my image is nice and big and fills up the artboard then. I’m going to rotate it and if you hold the shift key down, it keeps it nice and straight for you, and then I’m gonna enlarge. It doesn’t matter that that carpet is showing in the background. We’re gonna get rid of that really easily later, so let’s just get our image front and center, so we can start to play around with it now. Depending on one. What kind of artwork you are using will depend on your settings, so no matter what we are going to be using the image trace tool. And if you click on your photo that you just placed, there’s a couple ways to do this. There is a shortcut button up here on the top of your document, right underneath your menu That says image trace if you are converting a black and white marker image similar to mine, meaning there’s no color just black marker on a white piece of paper. All you have to do is click image, trace and illustrator starts working. It’s magic, it’s doing all of its little things automatically kind of behind the scenes, and voila, there is a preview of what our converted artwork looks like now right here where it says expand if you are happy with this result, which I am. I think it traced it very well. We can always go in and fine-tune it, but for me, this is exactly what I wanted. Just a nice, crisp, black and white trace of my artwork, so this is good and I’m gonna hit expand and now when you hit expand, it has added all the curves and lines and it is truly a vector image. Now you can see the points. They’re all editable. So now we start fine-tuning. The hard part is over like illustrator. Did all the hard work you now have edited it editable vector points and lines that you can change, so lets. Get rid of this background junk. I’m going to just click off of my art so that it D selects, and if you if you notice everything’s grouped together, I can click on any point and it’s grabbing all of the different shapes and pieces of the artwork so to start manipulating it. We need to ungroup it. So if you have it all selected with your selection tool, you are gonna go up to object and you’re gonna go down to Ungroup and then when you click off of it and back onto it now you can select each individual piece so the first thing. I’m gonna do is I’m going to select drag and select everything that I want to get rid of so I am. I have these little spots selected and it’s selecting the white fill. That’s in the background, So I’m going to delete, and I’m gonna do the same thing over here. Perfect, um, and you can see too if I click in the middle here there. It is a white fill inside the outline, which I love because then we can go in and change that fill instead of white. We can change it to color or we can add a pattern. You can do whatever you want. Um, so we’re gonna leave that white. Fill there for now. Um, to me? It still looks like it’s. Maybe a little crooked, so that’s easy to fix. I’m gonna click and drag, so I select the whole piece. Oh, I see some junk. I forgot down here. Let’s drag over that and hit delete. Okay, so I’m gonna select my whole piece. And if I do a ctrl R or Apple R. It brings my ruler up here, so I can click on the ruler and drag down and I it will give me a guideline, so I’m gonna put that here right at the bottom of my heart. So when I select my art, I can rotate it, so I use my selection arrow tool. I have everything selected now. If I hover up here in the corner, it gives me the little arrows, the double-sided arrows and I can click, and I can rotate my art and kind of straighten it out, and I’m just kind of visually using this guide to straighten it, and I think if I click off of it, that is pretty darn straight so now that I am done using my guide it, it might be just a pet peeve of mine, but I want to get rid of it, cuz. I don’t like it just bugs me, so I’m gonna do A control : Control : will hide that guideline and the same thing. If you want to see it again, Control : brings it back control there, or I say control because I am on a PC, but you can also use your Apple key Apple : Okay, so we have our Vectorized artwork, And if I wanted to which I’m just gonna show you how to do it? I see that there’s a little a few little imperfections here, so I’m gonna use my zoom tool, which is the magnifier glass and click-and-drag and real close here, and I want to get rid of this because it kind of it. Just it didn’t trace perfectly, but this is easily fixable, So I’m gonna use my arrow delete. I’m gonna delete this perfect zoom back out, so I can see and okay, so now you have a completely editable drawing you can like. I said you can select these inside pieces. You can go to your color palette. I’m gonna use RGB and you can start filling those and want those all the same color. So you can fill those with whatever you want. This is where your creativity comes out, so you can edit it. You can select all of it and enlarge it. The nice thing about it being vector now is that it doesn’t matter how big or how small it is because no matter how you scale it, you could make this the size of a billboard and it will print crystal-clear because it’s vector and it’s not raster. It’s not pixels, its points and formulas a good way to check if something’s vector or raster is to do a command or a control. Y, and then you can see the the wireframe. So you can see right here that its vector, and those are all your pads. Now what, I want to show you also? If you have a painting or something multi color, there are different adjustments that you need to do. It’s still very simple, but let’s go over that. I am going to place a new raster image. I just I’m gonna use this painting image, so it’s the same process, place, click and drag, so it fills up your artboard, but as you can see, this is a totally different piece of art, and maybe this is more similar to what you’re trying to vectorize. It’s colorful, it’s not black and white, and there’s a lot more detail and we can tell that it’s raster, because when we do a command, why there’s nothing there that just means that there’s no pads. It’s not vector. It’s rester so now let’s bring up if we tried to use the shortcut like we did on the first the first image that was black and white, It’s not gonna work it’s. I’ll show you just hit image trace. Yeah, see, and that’s not what we want, so we’re gonna control. I’m gonna ctrl Z to get rid of that, and I’m gonna show you the image. Trace palette options. If you go to window and you go down to image trace, it brings up your details over here, so we have to select our image that we want to vectorize. I’m gonna get rid of this menu and now we have a whole bunch of different options. Um, these are preset options, so you can go ahead and play around with these to see which one gives you the best output. I’m gonna guess that I’m gonna use the 16 color shortcut, So I’m just gonna set it for that first and see what happens here, it’s working! Take a sip of coffee. Look at that, that’s actually not too bad. A lot of details showed up, so I’m gonna expand this view there and see it now you can see. Look at how all of these it created all of these points. It didn’t quite pick up all the colors. There was quite a big color shift, so we can. We can still change that. I mean, this isn’t bad, but we can do better, so let’s do better. We’re gonna control. Z let it go back to our image there. Yeah, it is. I mean, the original image is quite a bit brighter, but I think we can narrow that down, so we’re not gonna use a default. We’re just gonna preset. We’re just gonna leave that at default and our tracing result. You can leave that there. Yeah, leave that at tracing result. Because that’s you kind of you want to see a preview of it before it actually expands it and under mode, here’s where you can change. The default is black and white, but we want to change that because we have a color image, so go ahead and do color. Here’s where you can change your color palette right now. It’s set to limited, which is probably why all we saw that severe color shift. It just wasn’t as bright and it didn’t pick up as many colors because it’s set on a limited palette, but we can change that, so let’s do full tone and we’re gonna tell it as many colors as it can pick up. That’s what we want to do like all the way up, and then if we hit the advanced arrow, we can even narrow that down even more. Do we want a high number of paths? Yes, probably because this is super detailed, the more paths that we have means the more detail. It’s gonna pick up, so lets. Put that all the way up to 100 corners is not such a big deal. I think I’m just gonna leave it. Set where it’s at for now. We can always come back and adjust it if we need to, so let’s leave that at 75 again, just it’s another tool to adjust higher or lower, depending on how happy you are with your results so noise. Let’s put that in the middle there is. Oh, this is a good time to just say again that there is also a PDF included with this training that was sent to you that covers in written form, so you can refer back to it all the settings in this palette, so it’s all written up really nicely and might be easier to understand them listening to me, so we’re gonna leave the noise in the middle method, overlapping or a buting. I’m gonna leave it at this first one, because I’ve never done it differently than that. So let’s leave it at the first one. Um, snap curves, Two lines, let’s leave that checked, replace slightly curved lines with straight. Yep, lets. Leave that! Do we want to ignore white? No, we want if something’s white. We want it to fill it with white, so let’s keep that. And then pans anchor’s colors don’t need to do anything. There let’s hit the preview button so we can see what it looks like. Ooh, that turned out really good. I can barely see a difference between the preview and the original. So I really like that awesome. Let’s go ahead and expand up on the top here. Your expand button and see what our final product looks like. So that’s it’s blue because it’s showing us all the paths, but if you are on your arrow tool, and you hit the back of your page here, so you deselect it, that is amazingly clear by zoom in and I do a control Y to see the outline. Oh, it’s doing a quick save for me, Mm-hm’m. And it’s a really big file, so it’s a little bit slow. I think it will still show me outlines. Yep, oh, wow, see, and these are all completely editable. You can click on any of those little points, even though it would be extremely hard at this point to change much. If anything what you do have. Let’s get out, go back, do a control. Y so we can see the whole painting. Okay, so what we have now? Though, is a fully scalable, meaning, we can enlarge this puppy to the size of a billboard and it will still print clearly image. If I would have used that Raster image as and tried to put it on a bulb or billboard, it would be pixel II. It would be blurry, it wouldn’t be high enough resolution, But this is why illustrator is my saving grace. Once you get something Vectorized, just like. I showed you how to do. You can scale it. To, however, big or, however, small you want resolution is no longer a factor. So you could now take this painting and you could take the artwork and have it printed on a t-shirt. You could have it printed on a billboard. You could make custom mugs. The possibilities are truly truly endless. This would make a great greeting card cover so. I’m always trying to help people find ways to, you know, earn some extra money or put their skills to good use and actually make a profit off of them because this stuff these skills are in high high demand. And I just showed you how to do it. And if you can admit that it wasn’t maybe as complicated as you thought. I hope it wasn’t anyway, but that is going to conclude this training for you. I hope you enjoyed it and as always, please, please, please contact me. Leave a comment email any way possible. Let me know your thoughts. Let me know if you have questions. Make sure that you grab that. PDF, so you have all these the explanation for all these different options on here, so it will greatly help you in the future and until next time, thank you and have a great day.