From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

937 Tracing a photo with primitives in Illustrator

From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

937 Tracing a photo with primitives in Illustrator

- [Instructor] All right, now at this point, we are by no means finished working on this fairly ambitious illustration of this cat's eye. However, I wanted to take a moment to follow through on a promise in which I show you how to create the base eye path, which you could draw using the Pen Tool, if you wanted to. However, it's oftentimes more easy and more accurate if you work from primitive path outlines instead. And so I'll go ahead and turn off the eye layer here inside the Layers panel and turn on the primitives layer. And by primitive, I mean original path outlines. And so notice these three guys right here are all ellipses that are tracing along the edges of the cat's eye, and then we have this one lone free-form path that I will be drawing with the Pen Tool. And so let me show you how it works. I'll go up to the File menu and choose the New command. And then if you're working along with me, go ahead and switch to Art & Illustration, which tends to be the most flexible of the various presets. And now assuming that your unit of measure is set to points, go ahead and dial in a width value of 1,180. And then tab your way to the height value, and change it to 834. Then I'll tab down to the bleed value. Notice that all of the bleed values are locked into alignment. And so if I change any one of them to 18 points, they will all change in kind. And that will allow us, if we decide to print the artwork, to print all the way to the edge of the page. Now you want to click the blue Create button in order to create a new document like so. Next, go up to the View menu, and make sure your Smart Guides are turned on. In my case, I'm not seeing a check mark, so I'll go ahead and choose the command. Then you want to go up to the File menu, and choose the Place command in order to bring up the Place dialog box. And we're going to be working with this image right here, Dreamstime cat eye, so-called because it comes to us from the Dreamstime Image Library, about which you can learn more and get some great deals by using this URL. All right, so go ahead and switch back to Illustrator, select that file, and click the Place button. That loads your cursor with the image. And next, you want to position your cursor at the top left corner of that red bleed boundary and click in order to place that photographic image. All right, now I want to convert it to a tracing template, and you can do that by double-clicking anywhere on this layer inside the Layers panel to bring up this Layer Options dialog box. And I'll go ahead and call this layer template and turn on the Template checkbox, which, by default, sets dim images to 50%, which is going to work out great. And so I'll just go ahead and click OK in order to create that tracing template like so. All right, now I don't want this wee little thumbnail here inside the Layers panel, and so I'll click on the flyout menu icon in the top right corner and choose Panel Options from the bottom of the menu. And then I'll go ahead and select Other and dial in a value of 50 pixels for the thumbnails. That's bigger than Large, by the way. And click OK, and you can see that we now have a decent thumbnail into our layers here inside the Layers panel. Now, because the layer is locked, notice that lock icon right there, I cannot draw on this layer, nor do I want to, by the way. I want to create a new layer by dropping down to the plus icon in the bottom left corner of the Layers panel. In previous versions of Illustrator, it appears as a tiny page. And then Alt or Option + click on it. And because you press the Alt key or the Option key on the Mac, that forces the display of the Layer Options dialog box. I'll just go ahead and call this layer primitives, let's say. And then I'll change its color to possibly the most legible color on screen, up here at the top of the menu, Light Blue, and click OK. Now we have two layers to which I've assigned Light Blue. I don't want that, so I'll double-click on the template in order to bring back its Layer Options dialog box. And I'll change its color to something really boring like Light Gray, and then I'll click OK. All right, now you want to select the primitives layer, and we're going to start by tracing those ellipses using this guy right here, the Ellipse Tool. And so we're going to start by tracing the top edge of that eye. And I kind of missed it there. You can see it's not aligning properly. And so I'll press the spacebar and drag it around a little bit. And then I'll release the spacebar when I want to continue to scale that shape. And then I will release. All right, now this is a problem because I can't see what I'm doing. And so I'll go ahead and swap the fill and stroke so that the stroke is white, which is what we want. Then I'll click on the first color swatch up here in the horizontal control panel. You can work from the Properties panel if you prefer. I'll go ahead and click on that swatch and change it to None so that we have no fill. And then I'll click on this line weight arrow right here, and I'll change it to four points so that we have a four-point stroke like so. All right, now I don't want to leave anything to chance. I want you to get the exact same results as I'm getting. And so I'm going to click on the word Transform up here in the control panel. Or you may just see the X, Y, W, and H values. That's fine too. And what we're going to do is change the position of this ellipse for starters. Notice that the center point is selected by default here inside this reference point matrix. That's what we want. And so I'm going to change the X value to 644 points. And I'm going to change the Y value to 490 points like so. Now, that may not look right, and that's because our width and height values are off. And so I'm going to change the width value to 680 points. And then tab down to the H value. Now, if you just start changing the H value, you're going to mess things up, at least by default, and that's because this chain icon is turned on, which is going to constrain the width and height proportions. That's not what I want. So go ahead and turn that option off. And then change the H value to 490 points like so. And we're going to get a very exactly drawn ellipse along the top of that eye. All right, I'll go ahead and press the Enter key or the Return key on the Mac to hide that panel. Now I could draw the other two ellipses along the bottom edge of the eye and over along this left-hand edge as well, using the Ellipse Tool. Or because I'm working from the numbers, I could just duplicate the existing ellipse and modify it. And so I'll switch to the black arrow tool, the so-called Selection Tool up here at the top of the toolbox, and I'll drag this ellipse like so, by its outline. And then because I want to create a copy of it, I'll press and hold the Alt key or the Option key on the Mac. And notice that gives me a little double arrow cursor, which shows me that I'm going to duplicate that path outline when I release. All right, now I want to change its position and size, so click on the word Transform once again. And I'll change the X value to 524 points. And I'll change the Y value to 358. And then I'll tab to the width value, and I'll press Shift + down arrow a couple of times to take that width value down to 660 points. And I'll tab my way to the H value, and I'll press Shift + up arrow a bunch of times until I achieve a value of 570 points like so. And now we have an ellipse that's tracing along the bottom edge of that eye. All right, let's do it again. So I'll just go ahead and click to hide that panel, and I'll drag the ellipse like so, while pressing the Alt key or the Option key on the Mac so that I'm getting that double arrowhead cursor. And then I'll release in order to create a duplicate of that path outline. And then I'll click on the word Transform. And this time around, I'll change the X value to 676, and I'll change the Y value to 416. And then I'll tab my way over to the width value right there, and I'll press Shift + up arrow a bunch of times until I get a value of 710 points. And then I'll tab my way to the H value, and I'll leave it alone. 570 points is going to work out great, according to my notes. And so I'll press the Enter key or the Return key on the Mac to accept that change. And I'll go ahead and click off the path outline to de-select it. All right, now I'm going to go ahead and combine these shapes by marqueeing them like so. And I'm just partially marqueeing the shapes by the way. That does not select the photographic image because it's on a locked template layer. And now you can combine these shapes using the Shape Builder Tool. That's how I showed you to do it a couple of movies ago. Or if you prefer, you can go up to the Window menu and choose the Pathfinder command to bring up the Pathfinder panel right here. And then just go ahead and click on the third icon in, Intersect, in order to just keep the intersecting area of those three ellipses. And we get a very precisely drawn path outline. All right, now I'll go ahead and hide the Pathfinder panel. And I just want to add this little area right here. And so what I'll do is switch to the white arrow tool, the so-called Direct Selection Tool, which you can get by pressing A for arrow. And then just partially marquee this segment right here so that it and only it is selected. And press the Backspace key or the Delete key on the Mac in order to get rid of it . All right, I'm going to go ahead and zoom in a little bit here. It looks like we have an extra anchor point right there. Indeed, we do. And so I'll go ahead and drag it out and press the Backspace key or the Delete key on the Mac to get rid of it. All right, now I'm going to extend this path outline using the Pen Tool. And so I'll go ahead and select the tool, which you can get by pressing the P key. And I'll drag away from this anchor point right here. And notice that we have a free-floating control handle, and that's because this is a cusp point. That's not what I want. I want to make it an absolute smooth point. And so I'll go up here to this icon right here, which also appears in the Properties panel. It allows me to convert this point to a smooth point, in which we get precise alignment between the two control handles. And so if I were to press and hold the Control key or the Command key on a Mac to temporarily gain access to my white arrow tool, you can see that if I drag one control handle, the other moves as well. All right, I'm going to press Control + Z or Command + Z on the Mac to undo that change. And then I'll just go ahead and drag right about here, let's say, in order to trace around this fleshy area of the cat's eye. And then I'll finish the shape by dragging on this other end point. And again, we're getting two independent control handles because this is, after all, a cusp point. That's not what I want. So I'll return to this icon and click on it to convert that point to a smooth point. That rather messes up the location of the control handles. And so I'll press and hold the Control key or the Command key on the Mac to gain temporary access to my white arrow tool. And I'll go ahead and drag this guy down like so. When I say this guy, I'm dragging this control handle right here in order to move the opposite control handle upward as well. All right, now I'm going to switch back to the white arrow tool, which, again, I can get by pressing the A key. I'll click off the path outline to de-select it. And I'll go ahead and press Control + 0 or Command + 0 on the Mac in order to zoom out. And it looks to my eye like the path's a little bit crooked, in which case you can just go ahead and click on one of the segments like so. Maybe drag a control handle upward. You can drag this anchor point upward as well so that we get more of a fluid arc, as we're seeing right here. And I could go ahead and click on this anchor point and drag this control handle downward so that we have more of a smooth transition. And there you have the basics of placing a photographic image, converting it to a tracing template, and then tracing whatever element you like using a combination of primitive path outlines, such as plain old, everyday ellipses, along with a little bit of hand-drawn path editing using the Pen Tool.

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