How To Turn A Drawing Into A Vector In Illustrator

Are y'all an illustrator just beginning your adventure into creating digital art? Sometimes it'south tough to know when a sketch is ready to become full-blown digital and how to get in so, quickly and painlessly. Fright not, it's very simple to change the sketch you've been groovin' on into a digital illustration in iv simple steps. FINE designer, Michelle, is here to take you lot through them.

Step ane: Prep information technology
If your sketch is in pencil, draw over information technology with a pen to provide contrast. This saves time and prevents headaches equally we movement through the rest of the procedure.

Stride 2: Scan it
Now that y'all have your illustration traced in pen, it's time to take it into the digital realm via a little magic machine called the scanner. It'south important to gear up the scan correctly. The most important item is setting the resolution for at least 600 dpi. Remember, you tin always scale down only you can never scale up.

Here's a screenshot for how I prepare mine upward:

screen shot of scan set up

Stride three: 'Shop it
What a beautiful scan you lot accept! Now, information technology'southward gear up for a footling TLC from the king of image manipulation, Photoshop. Even though the drawing already has dissimilarity, we really need the black to be every bit black as possible and the white to be as white as possible.

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At this point, you will adjust the contrast by playing around with the adjustment layers. I tend to stick with but the essentials: Blackness & White, effulgence/contrast, and exposure (unremarkably in this order). Oftentimes, that'southward enough, only each illustration is a unique snowflake and so experiment to get what you want.

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This is also the fourth dimension to clean up your drawing if y'all have any stray ink or pencil lines. I like to add an boosted layer on top and use the brush tool to add and subtract from the illustration if need be.

Pace 4: Isolate information technology
Tadah! Isn't it beautiful? At present, depending on what you're trying to do with your sketch, it can exist actually helpful to isolate the blacks and turn the background transparent.

Numero 4 To exercise this, you go to Select > Color Range and use the eyedropper tool to select the black of your drawing (simply click in the black).

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Now you accept a selection of merely the black line fine art, hooray!

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Y'all can apply this selection to add a fill so your lines are fifty-fifty more make clean and dark. Yous now have your blackness line cartoon isolated and you can play with it however yous desire!

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I hope this helps those of you in need to get a handle on turning your sketch into digital artwork. Accept fun!

Note: Photoshop and Illustrator are great and mighty tools and there are numerous strategies to get the same result. This is simply the most useful and easy manner I've come up up with. There are fifty-fifty apps like Adobe Shapes that tin turn your sketch into a vector just by taking a motion-picture show of it with your phone. The method I've shared is just my favorite and reliably produces a high-quality illustration every time. What other strategies have you tried? Share!