Illustrator - How to import scanned linework into Adobe Illustrator and do a Live Trace.

This tutorial is the first of a series of Adobe Illustrator tutorials I will be creating that will teach you the basics of importing scanned line into Illustrator and producing a nice vector image.

(For this tutorial you will need  Adobe Illustrator (CS2 or above), Adobe Photoshop, and some paper and a nice black pen.)

Firstly, when you are drawing your design, cartoon, illustration, keep in mind how you will be importing it into Illustrator. I will be showing you how to create image made of one solid vector colour, so don't create an image with rendering or form, unless it is a solid black colour. Create something like this:

Obviously we all draw, design and create different images, but the key thing to remember here is solid shapes. This image is simple, and will transfer nicely to a vector graphic.


So, once you have drawn up your image, scan it into your computer, grayscale, at at least 300 DPI (dots per inch).  This is a nice resolution to scan in as a general rule, it is the normal resolution for at which Print Companies print at. Then open up Photoshop (I use CS2, but the version isn't important for this tutorial) and open your drawing.

Use the crop tool to crop your drawing down so you just see the drawing and the surrounding white paper as shown below:

Then go and adjust the levels to give the image more contrast. The levels is located in the photoshop menu Image>Adjustments>Levels or you can just CRL+L in windows or Apple+L on a Mac. Adjust the levels like so:

Bring the left handle to the middle of the big mountain on the left (this will make your black ink drawing more completely black). Then bring the right handle past the right mountain toward the middle valley This will eradicate most small pencil lines, paper texture and mistakes, cleaning things up a bit. Click OK.
Save this file as a PSD, JPG or TIFF if you like and you can close photoshop.
Great, now we are ready to import your file into Illustrator!

Open Illustrator and File>Open your edited scan. It should open up looking much the same as it did in photoshop:

Now select the cursor tool (the black arrow, 'v' on you keyboard), and click on you imported image.

Next go up to the menu Object>Livetrace>Tracing options. A box like this will open with default settings:

I will leave it to you to fiddle around with the options later, but there are already some good settings in your illustrator Presets (such as Inked Drawing or Comic Art) that usually work very well. However I have a custom setting I like to use, so put in these details below:

Then hit Trace. Your computer will work a little while producing the vector art, depending on how complicated your image is. You should have a result something like this:

This is a great start , and you can go ahead and edit any thinks you don't like about the vector later.We are almost finished but first you need to expand the Live trace. make sure you still have the vector selected and go up to Object>Live Trace>Expand. Your image will now look like this:

 

You have here the white of the paper, and the different objects that make up your drawing (in this case the eye, the arm, the leg). Now, because if you try to move the vector around you will find they are grouped, you need to ungroup the selection. Object>Ungroup or right-click the image>ungroup. 

Great. Now click outside the panel area to unselect the vector paths, and then click again on the WHITE BACKGROUND. It should look like this:

Once you have this white area selected we want to grab all the other white areas in the vector, so go up to Select>Same>Fill Colour. This will select all the other white vectors Live Trace has created. Hit the Delete button. Now we don't have any white areas left in the file.

Now press CTR+A or (Apple+A on a Mac) to select all the objects and then CTR+G or Apple+G, to group you vector.

Nice! You now have a Vector image you can put on top of any background and you can change it into any colour you wish (using the the colour slider or swatches).

From here you can edit your vector handles and correct any paths you don't like.

I used this technique to create the following Design. Enjoy! Please do leave a comment if you have any questions or anything to mention I may have missed out.

More Skreened shirts,

In my sore on Skreened 'Hello T-shirts' http://skreened.com/helloshirts/ I have created 4  more new tshirts. I have given up trying to impress the humour-biases masses on Threadless and the like (although I really do like the french T-shirt site lafraise.com) and have started down the hard road of PODs (printed on order websites) where you make a small commision everytime you make a sale on the POD website.

I like Skreened (I really don't like Zazzle and Cafepress) and have started my first shop there. There is some great quality stuff on Skreened, but its still in the margin of about 10% cool, 90% relatively boring to look at. Still it's a start.

Anyhow, here are the 4 new T-shirt designs I've created. Let me know what you think.

Skreened

I have just started an account on Skreened, a Tshirt collective, 

where they print your T's and give you (the designer) a commission.

Check out my first submission 

And buy it if you like it, its selling at a very reasonable price.

Amazing photos of Vietnam

Im totally in love and in awe of these amazing photos of Vietnam by David Terraza

 

His work reminds me of Philip Jones Griffiths

who is an old favourite photographer of mine. His war photography made me look at the world in a completely new way. 

However Terraza's work also reminds me why I am not a photographer today - firstly I do not enjoy the technical side of photography very much. Secondly any Jo can pick up an expensive camera (and anyone can buy an expensive camera these days) and take stunning photos with little or no thought of compsition, framing, cropping etc. And go on to win competitions and awards. It felt to me, after a year or so of considering photography as a career, that those who do well in photography are technitians rather than creative people. 

However, Terraza's work, while technical, is subtle and beautiful. Photos like these can change your life.

On another note, I am thinking of redesigning my website (again) to putting it up on either http://cargocollective.com/ (which costs a little bit of money) or http://www.exhibit-e.com/ (which is essentially free, but not so fancy and a bit more work)

You can now download my portfolio from my website!

Yes it's true, it's what you all have been waiting for! At last, the sun has risen, light has flooded your computer screens and you can download a PDF copy of my Illustration porfolio (or design if you like, but that is mostly for the small amount of freelance graphic design clients I get).

Just Jump on the Index page of my website Simonjfletcher.com/index and you will see the link. Also you will noticed I have made my website slightly more easier to use, by placing my most current projects in a feed on the index page. I will add more sections as my portfolio increases. In fact I am going to upload at least 2 more projects in the next month, one displaying the work I have done for an advertising company here in Sao Paulo in the past month and a half, the other another personal project of mine. Also I might put up some work I have been doing on a graphic novel concept, but Inking it is getting me down. Inking a comic page is time consuming to say the least!

Or, to make things easier, download my portfolio from this (very very popular) blog:

Brad Holland

Have you every heard of Brad Holland?
If not, please find out about him. He is one of the most important illustrators in the history of modern illustration thus far, and he recently made a fantastic post about the New York Time's Op-Ed section, and his involvement in it. He tells his inspiring story of how he made his way through illustration, and the article is accompanied by his fantastic illustrations.

 The article is on Drawger :

http://www.drawger.com/holland/?article_id=11374#comments

Some of his work:

Bumps in some good directions

Away on vacation
The fun typography makes me want to have a closer look....
 I like this llustrator! There is something about the characters and style she presents, the quirkiness and fun you recieve when looking at her work. Pigologist is her name. http://pigologist.weebly.com/personal.html

Also cehck out her Teeshirt called pollutant-monster heheheh very cool.

Also I would love to get my hands on a copy of DPI, 
check out Simon Kim's interview in a edition of the magazine. Its not the first time I have crossed paths with the magazine. It seems to have consistantly interesting content (although I haven't actually touched a real copy).

Finally, check out Green Ink. He recently posted up a beautiful post on a book he is working on.Check out his website as well, and other books he has worked on. An impressive use of collage and texture, mixed media. His blog is a treasure trove of inspiration and attention to detail.

Prints by Paul Landacre

This is a nudge towards the fantastic blog ajourneyroundmyskull

Below, the intriguing and sensual work of  Paul Landacre

Zines & Mundo

I said I would write a post about Zines, but instead I am going to take the easy way out, and throw up some links for now.

First check out http://zinewiki.com/
It is a resource about Zines, their history and is actively being updated. Unfortunately its hard to actually access the Zines, but there is a bucket-load of information.

Then Check out http://zinelibrary.info/
It has a large archive of zines uploaded by people worldwide. Contains mostly politically focused, which I sometimes find tiresome, but there are many Jems. For example see the black-bloc zine, it is basically a whismical but furtive monolog from the creator, and it implements it's design & layout in interesting and personal ways. Its quite typical of whats a zine often looks like:
http://zinelibrary.info/black-bloc-zine

But Zines can really be any handmade, hand-produce publication (in my opinion), and I am more interested in zines that take on a narrative or a visual persona (those influenced by comics for example).

Anyway due to lack of time I will just give you one more link http://akzinefest.blogspot.com/
This Zinefest is held in my country yearly, and is a great place to understand the culture and the ideas behind Zines. Yah-wen & myself were lucky enough to win this year's Zine-of-the-year prize, and our Zine is for sale at The high seas gallery

Read Our Zine

 Also I recently created an account at Illustration Mundo which is a very very cool website for illustrators, every illustrator should visit there regularly! So much inspiration!

My Profile

We won the Zinefest award!

(I should've put this up a while ago, its been over two months since the Zinefest... I've just been a bit busy, but here it is.)

Myself and Yah-Wen Ho created a small zine called '1, 2, 3, 4' for the Auckland Zinefest.
We sold out of the zines we had made, and submitted a zine to the competition for Zine of the year. Have you ever heard of a Zine? They are a kind of selfmade publication. In the near future I will try to give some background on what a Zine is, with a little history.

To see the complete Zine '1, 2, 3, 4' jump onto my twitpic page:

http://twitpic.com/2gg308


Anyway, here is a photo of Yah-wen, the force behind Potroast magazine.

This is our stand set up at the Zinefest:

This is myself and our zine, just to give you an idea of what is looks like.

To check out Potroast's facebook page:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Potroast/77771782062

FLume

For Potroast Magazine

NZ Birds

A few sketches of some of our beautiful birds here in New Zealand! Please click on the images for a more accurate resolution :)

More experiments - Can you see (or create your own) the story with these pictures?

two doodles

Process - step 2 colour

I'm lazy!!!!!!

But here we go again

Some sketches / doodles/ concepts for paid work ,-D

Some scribbles, turned into T Shirts

bio-diversity

http://niemann.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/17/bio-diversity/?em

When I have the time

Hey its another day! I'm exhausted from a great two hours at Capoeira, and trying to be highly productive on the latest Sniff page I'm working on. Plus 5 hours of sitting at a desk at work, (good times). A few things: check out Julian Casabancas's website, and his great music, especially the song 11th Dimension, its insanely catchy (just select the song to play on the bottom left corner). I ended up buying the song online at digirama.co.nz - Julian has a Great website design too! Also the the layout of the latest sniff page, I will be showing the process over the next few day I hope. Colour coming soon. And my latest submission to the brilliant zine Potroast, this one is called Begins. Also, I've been reading a very cool called Uncle Ofay's Good-Times Story Corner Adults only content sometimes, and containing some very stimulating thoughts, both visual and thematic. Here