How to make an illustration with Adobe Illustrator
In this tutorial I will tell you how to make an illustration with Adobe Illustrator. I will explain how to make outlines with the pen tool, using Live Paint to color and how to finish it with shadows and highlights using layers.
First let me tell you why you would want to make an illustration with Illustrator. Illustrator is a vector based program, this means you don’t draw with pixels like Photoshop, Paint and other programs. Vector images use mathematical equations instead of pixels. This is handy because of a lot of things:
- You can change the size of a vector image without any quality loss. This is why all logos should be made in a vector program.
- It’s very easy to change things in your drawing. You can change every color in your drawing very easy, but even a line you want to be a little more curved is no problem. (imagine changing a line in a finished pixel drawing!)
- With Illustrator you can give illustrations a very clean look, mostly called the “vector-look”.
- You can animate your illustration very easy. Flash and Illustrator go very well together.
Ok, I start with a pencil drawing. If you want you can draw directly on the computer but I think nothing beats a good pencil. Not even a tablet, I own a tablet and it’s handy sometimes but it will not make you a better artist. Then use a scanner to get your drawing on the computer.
Here is my pencil sketch: (if anyone is interested I will make a drawing tutorial some day. Drawing is not some kind of magical talent, it just takes practice.)
Open Adobe Illustrator, go to
File -> New and choose a file size.
To import your sketch go to
File -> Place and open your sketch.
If your sketch is very big or very small resize it so it fits on your screen. Now lock this layer. To lock the layer click on the empty box next to the eye in the Layers window.
Create a new layer (the third button at the bottom of the Layers window).
Now the most difficult part of the tutorial... the pen tool. I’ve spend 2 weeks trying to find out how it worked. I didn’t have this great tutorial back then of course, but you have, so I’m sure you will get the hang of it in a few hours playing around with the pen tool.
Select the pen tool, make sure the fill is set to none (click on the fill and then click on the little white square with a diagonal red line over it) and the stroke is set to black (click on the stroke and double click to select a color). Open your Stroke window (Window -> stroke) and set the weight to 1 pt or 2 pt if you like thick lines.
Here is a picture to make clear where you can find these settings:
Now click somewhere on the sketch at the beginning of a line, a red dot will appear. Now click a few inches further along the sketch line or even at the end of the line, but don’t release the mouse button yet! If you hold the mouse button down and drag you can make curves!
Release the mouse button and your first line is done. Now click and drag somewhere else again to continue with the line. Sometimes you can’t get the curve you want this way, if so click on the last point you just made. A < symbol will appear and if you now click and drag somewhere else the curve will not follow the old curve but you have more freedom to make your own curve now. If you made a line and you want to change it a little you can use the Direct Selection tool (white arrow).
If you select a curve with the white arrow handles will appear, at the end of the handles are dots you can drag to change the curve. With the white arrow you can also select the anchor points and move them. After some practicing with the pen tool and adjusting the lines with the white arrow you should be able to make the outlines of your drawing now.
The pen tool is not something you can learn in 10 minutes and it’s also hard to explain for me with just words. Here is a video tutorial that will maybe help you if you have problems with the pen tool (I didn't make this video):
Illustration from Sketch to Finish To make things a little easier, I will give you a bonus trick to make really nice lines. If you click on the pencil tool and hold the mouse button down a little menu appears. The second tool in that menu is the smooth tool. First select a line that needs smoothing with the white arrow tool and then with the smooth tool click and drag it the way you want the line to become.
Example:
When you are finished making all the outlines, select all the lines and go to
Object -> Live Paint -> Make. Nothing visible changed but now you can use the paint bucket tool. Select the paint bucket tool, choose a color for the fill color and move over your drawing.
You will see red outlines where it will fill the color. Click and it will color it with the current fill color. This is a very quick way to color your drawings!
To really add live to your drawings and make them really pretty you will need shadows and highlights. You don’t need to know a lot about how the light is falling on your subject to make them, just make sure you choose one side for the shadows and make sure all shadows are on that side.
If your shadows are on the right side, the highlights should be left. Personally I think it looks better if the shadows are touching the outlines, but the highlights never touch the outlines. This depends on your personal style tough, so just look around what other artists do and develop your own style.
If you want your shadows to touch your outlines like me, you have to do a little trick. Now the outlines and your base color are on the same layer. You want your shadows in a layer above the base color (else you can’t see them) but under your outline layer (else your shadow will maybe go over your outlines and that doesn’t look nice). This is what you have to do:
- Select everything (
ctrl+a)
- go to
Object -> Expand... (make sure all three boxes are checked)
-
Object -> UngroupIf you now click on the little arrow in front of your layer it will expand down and you see that your outlines and base color are each on their own layer! If you want you can make 2 new layers and drag these two sublayers to the new ones so you don’t have to work with sub layers.
You can also make a new layer and drag that one between the two sub layers so it becomes a third sub layer, it doesn’t matter much. Just make sure you have 3 layers with on top the outlines, in the middle an empty layer and at the bottom the base colors.
Like this:
In the empty layer you can now make shadows and highlights with the pen tool. Choose a fill color and set the stroke color to “none”. (The white square with the red diagonal line through it). Now your drawing is complete!
Now save your drawing. There are a lot of saving options in Illustrator. If you want to be able to make changes to your drawing later save it as an
.AI file. If you want that someone else will be able to make changes to the drawing save it as a
.EPS. An EPS is a small file so easy to send over the internet and can be opened by a lot of programs.
If you want to post your drawing on the internet you should save it as a
JPG, you can do this by going to
File -> Export... and then choose JPG. A pop-up window will appear. Set the quality (I always choose 10), the color mode (
CMYK if you want to print it with a professional printer,
RGB if you want to use it on the computer/internet or print it with a cheap printer), and the resolution how large you want the drawing. If you choose “high” it’s pretty large.
I hope this tutorial helped you to make an illustration with Adobe Illustrator!
If you have any questions or problems, feel free to ask in this topic! I will try to answer them.
Greetings, Nancy