Illustrating In Illustrator 101 part 1 of 5

– taterboy | October 13th, 2008

Filed under: Digital Art, Illustrator, Tutorials

Sketches & Guides

This series will cover the basics of illustrating with Adobe Illustrator from start to finish, geared more toward novice Illustrator users with a few intermediate tips along the way. Some of the principles discussed are applicable to most illustration programs and illustration in general.

This collection of posts will be based on a philosophy of illustrating Quick, Clean and Correct. Discussing time saving tips, preparing your artwork so that it can be easily used by others for web and print, and how to achieve consistent results based on your style. Everyone who reads this post has their own unique illustration style. I am in no way trying to convert people to my personal style, but hope that what is shown here can be incorporated to refine that style and produce beautiful graphics in a more efficient way.

Starting with Sketches:
It is becoming more and more common for artists to sketch directly into the computer using a drawing tablet. Others, like myself, roll old-school with a pencil and paper. Then, using a scanner or digital camera to get the rough ideas into the computer. Sketches may seem like an extra step or waste of time, especially when creating simple graphics, but sketches can really help to give your vector work some flare. When working from native shapes or precise curse, there is a danger of vector work becoming rigid and/or boring. I have fallen into the same trap, thinking I could save some time on a simple graphic. After an hour of messing around and it still not looking right, a few seconds on a sketch is all it took to get things back on track.

Using guides and grids:
We will start this post illustrating a 3/4 view of a building so we will need to produce some guides to help keep things in proper perspective. As you can see my sketch is a little off so these guides will help correct some wayward lines.

Alignment and perspective can be tricky and we can waste a lot of time moving things around, looking at it, then adjusting again to get things looking correct. This method of 2 point perspective, most of us learned in early art or drafting classes. We had large art tables with rulers and t-squares to produce a horizon line and all the perspective lines for each plane. Illustrator is great with it’s very large workspace around the art-board to accommodate these horizon lines and vanishing points.

A few reasons we may neglect this step are: We remember that some of those perspective drawings didn’t really look that exciting, unless you had a smaller desk and your angles were so sharp they could put an eye out. With the amount of time it takes to layout all the lines and match everything up, it is much faster to guess. Also, holding strict to the grid can put pull all the life out of our sketch.

The pros:
1. Hopefully we are sketching something a little more exciting than the barracks styled houses from grade school.

2. The time it takes to make guides, most of the time, does not compare to the time we could spend adjusting lines over and over till they look right. We risk progressing in the illustration until new details reveal that some of the perspective is still a little off, when it is much more time consuming to adjust everything.

3. A guide is just a guide, not the illustration, we use it to save time by finding the correct lines quickly. It does not need to overpower our ability to illustrate.

This last point leads into the style dilemma. Say you are the anti-perspective illustrator, all your objects are thick at the top and thin at the bottom or visa-versa, or curved like something made from cooked pasta. A few guide lines may help find your curves even faster. No one ever said your grid had to be made of straight lines. They can be curvy, bent, skewed into all kinds of meshes. just something to think about.

Knowing where perspective is not only helps you build a solid foundation for more realistic illustration, it can also show you where you can break the rules for more stylized illustrations. I think the biggest problem with not using guides is that some illustrations come of half stylized and half in perspective making everything look off. You should pick your style and commit to it. If you are stylized then be stylized, kick those lines and angles out there, you do not want anything looking close to straight or close to proper perspective. If you are shooting for realism, then your work should be governed by the laws that govern real objects.

Grouping and pre-grouping:
Guides and grids should be grouped and locked on a separate layer.
It is a pain to work with grids that are not grouped together, at least on a separate layer they are easily locked away and hidden when not needed. Sometimes we build a grid then realize later we needed to group it. It is hard to select all the lines if there are other objects on the art-board as well.

If you are building a grid by duplicating a copy/move using command + D or copy/moving manually, you can try pre-grouping. You can pre-group your guide lines, textures, star fields, sparkles, bubbles, by taking two objects and grouping them, then using your copy/move method on one of the objects (Select the object and while dragging, hold down the Command + Option on the Mac or Control + Alt on the PC). All the new copies will be made within the larger group.

Using Align and Disperse:
We may not need a full grid or perspective guides for some illustration. Some may only need a center line or to center an object. Using a few temporary rectangles and paths can help to find the center of an object without moving the original object from it’s position.

To find proper sizing and position of objects in perspective only takes a few paths and the free transform tool. It is very easy to illustrate flat especially things like keyboard keys or windows for our building. Align and disperse everything while it is still flat, then using the Free Transform tool we can apply the grid to our plane.

Guides for Sketching:
Guides do not only apply to artwork coming into the computer. A quick way to keep sketches in perspective without T-Squares and Angles is to print out your perspective grid and place it under your tracing paper or under sketching paper on a light box. You can prepare any kind of guide (text, curves, wireframes) quickly in the computer and print them out for use with your sketches.

Now that we have our guides in place we are ready to add all the construction elements that make up our building. Next – Illustrating In Illustrator 101 Part 2 of 5: Construction

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3 Comments »

  1. [...] Illustrating In Illustrator 101 [...]

    Pingback by Everyday Illustrator | — March 26, 2010 @ 9:23 pm

  2. Awesome, worth checking out!

    Comment by Craig Williams — May 26, 2010 @ 4:56 pm

  3. i use adobe illustrator a lot and i really love its great freatures’..

    Comment by Keira James — September 29, 2010 @ 11:39 pm

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