Introduction to Adobe Illustrator

Sample Lesson - Introduction

Lesson 1.11: Put Your Best Trace Forward

"What do you mean this isn't a completely original piece of art?"
(Source)

Aaaahh, the joys of browsing the web. Where else can you go from perusing famous animated cats to reading about Pizza farms in under ten minutes?

In addition to being the number one procrastination tool for avoiding math homework, web surfing is also an awesome way to find stuff to trace and adapt into creative illustration projects. You might even have some cool photos on your phone you want to start tracing, now that you're a vector-drawing master and all. You Illustrator genius, you.

Let's get one thing straight about tracing first. In your school art classes, your teachers probably told you how important it is to train your eye to be able to draw from life, rather than copying something using a tracing method. They're completely right—training your eye is way important. Nothing can substitute your ability to record 3D information in 2D; that's a mad skill that'll add a ton to your illustration chops.

Tracing isn't a substitution for artistic skill, but in a graphics program like Illustrator, it can definitely pave the way/set the stage/what-have-you for you to exercise your artistic skills in more interesting and meaningful ways. In a variety of creative industries, it's pretty common to use tracing as a starting point—it's a quick way to get an idea out, and it's not looked down upon. (We'll talk more about what is looked down upon in a little bit.)

In an average workflow, vector illustrations usually go through so many changes that the end product becomes its own original work of art, completely different than the original object or image that was used at the starting point—and that's good. That's what we want.

So we're going to learn how to take an image from the web, your phone, or anywhere else, and bring it into Illustrator to trace as part of a larger workflow—as a starting place to make some awesome and original art. We'll be tracing art by hand, and also exploring the advantages and disadvantages of using Illustrator's Image Trace panel to automate a tracing process.

So set aside your preconceptions of whether tracing is okay or not. It totally is.

Why? Because we said so. Don't talk back to Shmoop.

Sample Lesson - Reading

Reading 1.1.11: Trace Face

The Basic Place-and-Trace Process

When you want to bring a JPG or other image into Illustrator to trace it, there are a few ways to do so. Illustrator will actually open a JPG if you use the right-click > Open with Adobe Illustrator shortcut. However, the artboard will never match the size of the JPG when you do that (oof), so the best way to get exactly what you need in one fell swoop is to create a new document, then use the File > Place command.

In the Place dialog box you'll see a little box to check called Template (we've circled it in red in the screenshot above). Check that box when you know you want to trace the image you're importing—this'll save a bunch of steps for you.

If you check the box labeled Template and place your image into an artboard, then take a peek into your Layers panel, you'll notice that Illustrator's placed the image on its own locked layers and dimmed its opacity to 50%, so you can start tracing really fast. Total timesaver!

You're all ready to draw…unless your image is enormous, right? In the screenshot above, we tried to place an image of Muffin the cat as a template, and instead of going into one artboard, she decided to sprawl out across four. Kinda like when the real Muffin sprawls out across our whole keyboard. Muffin, you rascal.

That just means that the image was larger in size than our artboard is. Easy fix, though. We can unlock the template layer, hold down Shift, and scale the size of the image to fit in the artboard.

If only getting Muffin off the keyboard was so easy.

Then, since we're super organized, we'd name our Layer 1 something clear—like "Muffin Cat"—and start drawing on this layer with the Pen tool. You already know how to do that—the only difference is you're using the locked template layer as your tracing guide.

Tracing Fast and Loose: The Image Trace Process and Panel

Sometimes you need a quick fix for tracing. Enter: the Image Trace panel.

This panel's pretty magical—it's not just good for tracing, but as a life preserver, too. Imagine this scenario: you're a famous designer-illustrator who's just landed a fancy new client, who needs you to design them a business card and letterhead. The logo provided to you? It's like 2 x 2 pixels large and a JPG. You can't make it any larger, because it's a raster image, which means stretching it will turn it icky, blurry, and probably smelly.

Your solution? Turn the JPG into a vector using Image Trace! You're a pro.

You can use the Place method to get this going, too, but you don't need to check the box for "Template" this time. Just go to File > Place, uncheck the Template box if it's checked, locate the file you want to place (for us, it's "Muffin.jpg"), and let it curl up onto your artboard, on a regular layer.

Sigh.

We're going to place Muffin on a different layer, and call this layer "Muffin Cat Image Trace"—since we have several artboards and layers going on at once in our document, and we want to distinguish this tracing technique from the previous one.

Now for the fun part. We're going to locate the Image Trace panel, which is hiding in the Window menu. Oh, and in order for the panel options to be active and not grayed out, you need to select a raster image. Muffin, that means you.

There are a ton of features in this panel, too many for us to cover them all in depth in a single lesson, so we're gonna go through a couple of them, just to experiment with all the totally different results you can get out of each feature.

The top of the Image Trace panel has a series of buttons that allow quick access to presets: here's the scoop on what they do from left to right:

• Auto Color: Selecting this button causes Illustrator to turn your image into an average limited-color rendering of itself; you'll be able to see clearly defined blobs of color, which can be kinda cool for poster art or flatter 2D graphics.
• High Color: Illustrator will create a super colorful, highly detailed, quality rendering of your images with lots of colors. Of all the Image Trace settings, this is the one that'll bring your image closest to looking like a color photograph.
• Low Color: This setting is in between Auto Color and High Color; it produces more colors than the Auto Color setting, but a bit less quality and realism than the High Color setting.
• Grayscale: Think of a black and white photo, with all the nice gray values in between. This setting turns your image into that.
• Black and White: This setting produces super high contrast, altering your image so that it contains only black and white. That's it.
• Outline: This option produces outlines and contour-like drawings of the original image.

Moving down further into the panel, we see some dropdown menus. Let's decode those.

• Preset: Presets are little packages of settings that can be helpful when you're getting started with image tracing. Some examples of presets are High Fidelity Photo, Black and White Logo, Line Art, Silhouette… You get the idea. All presets can be customized after you apply them to your image.
• View: This dropdown menu gives you a couple options as to how your Image Trace choices will show up in the window as you apply them. The default view setting, Tracing Result, makes the most sense, since it shows a live preview of how each preset or change affects the image.
• Mode: Yep, color mode. The options here are easy: Color, Grayscale, or Black and White. Grayscale gives you a full range of black to white with lots of grays in between, whereas Black and White is just that—full contrast black and white, like a logo.
• Palette: This menu becomes active when you select any of the Color preset options; otherwise it'll stay grayed out. When you're working with color, you can choose between Automatic, Limited, or Full Tone. Full Tone means Illustrator is going to try really hard to replicate all of the original colors from the image; Limited and Automatic mean that Illustrator will choose a more limited number of colors. The handy little Colors slider underneath is there for you to drag and customize your results to as many or as few colors as you want.
• Preview: Preview gives you a live newsflash of how the current settings affect your selected image. You definitely want this box to be checked, so you can, um, see what you're doing.
• Advanced: If you click that little triangle next to the word Advanced, you'll see a lot more sliders. These allow you to fine-tune all of the presets even more, enhancing things like how much detail and noise Illustrator will look for in the original image to turn into paths, and how sharp or soft the corner edges will be on more geometric traces. You'll also see a handy box you can check labeled Ignore White, that'll drop out white backgrounds on anything you trace. Cool beans.

To give you an idea of how some of these settings and presets actually look, check out the screenshot below. We've applied a number of different preset buttons across the top of the Image Trace panel on our image of Muffin. She wears them all so well!

Let's use the Black and White preset as an example as to how we might fine-tune the presets in the Advanced dialog section of the Image Trace panel. We'll drag the Threshold slider to 200, Paths and Corners to 100%, and Noise to 1 pixel. This tells Illustrator that we want it to pay more attention to subtle details and values in the original image, and convert them into black and white. It improves Muffin's figure quite a bit!

When you're happy with the results of your Image Trace settings, there's one more step you need to do to actually make the preview into a bona-fide, editable vector graphic. That step is called Expand, and the easiest place to access it is in the Control Panel. We've circled it in red in the screenshot below. Keep in mind, you need to have your Image Trace image selected in order to see that option in the Control Panel.

Clicking Expand converts your Image Trace from a vector preview into actual editable vector paths and anchor points—you'll be able to see them right away. The Expand command also creates a group out of the traced image automatically, so you're able to move all of those new paths and anchor points together as a clump. You can ungroup them, too, if you want to, or leave them as is—it all depends on what you want to do with your kitty (or, y'know, whatever your image is of).

Since we're working with a vector graphic now, we can use the Direct Selection tool to select pieces of the graphic and recolor, move, and adjust it as we please. If the image has a white background, that white background will also be it's own shape. You can use Direct Selection to select it and delete it or to recolor it. Below, we've applied some color, gradient, and pattern fills to Muffin's new vector duds and have drawn a yellow rectangle behind her. Pretty different from where we started, huh?

One thing to know about Image Trace: you can always tell when someone has used it. It's an amazing and powerful feature for quick renders and for getting out of a logo pickle, but the graphics it produces are always, well…vector-y. They look like a machine drew them…because it did. It doesn't show off your skill unless you really modify the trace result with your own drawing. Keep this tracing tool in mind as a supplement, not a replacement, for your own talents in wielding the Pen tool and drawing from observation.

Sample Lesson - Activity

Activity 1.11: Just Another Pretty Trace

Now that you have—we hope—a more evolved outlook about tracing (tracing ≠ stealing someone else's artwork and passing it off as your own), you're gonna put your newfound tracing chops to the test.

In this activity, you'll create a new document containing multiple artboards, place content into the artboards to trace, and practice 1) tracing by hand and 2) tracing by automation, using the Image Trace panel. What you'll turn in will be a visual comparison of the manual versus automatic techniques—y'know, so you really get the advantages and disadvantages of both.

Step One: Workspace and Document Setup

Open up Illustrator…obvs. If you're workspace isn't set to Essentials already, reset it, and bring out your rulers from the View menu (View > Rulers > Show Ruler). Then, create a new Print-Intent document like so: go to File > New > Print, then create two artboards, each artboard measuring 8 x 8, with .5" space between them.

Save this file back to the activity folder with the naming convention Lastname_Firstname_Activity11.ai. Here's what your document window should approximately look like:

Step Two: Place and Trace Muffin

You'll need to download the Muffin.png to use as your tracing guru, so go ahead and click here to access the activity folder with Muffin's picture inside. You'll want to place Muffin on artboard 1, so you can trace her by hand. To get started, go to File > Place—make sure to check that Template box—to place the image on a locked, dimmed template layer, ready to trace.

If the image places huge across your artboards (she's a large cat, people) simply go into your Layers panel, unlock the template layer, shift-scale her smaller on artboard 1, and lock the template layer back up.

Rename Layer 1 "Muffin Trace by Hand," just so that this layer stays separate and organized from the layer we'll work on using the Image Trace panel later.

Now here's where you wield the mighty Pen tool and trace Muffin by hand. We're going for something fairly simple, but still recommend starting with a basic set of shape outlines, using a 2-point black stroke and no fill to get the silhouette and basic shapes roughed out, just like we learned to do in earlier lessons.

Keep in mind, anything you want to give a fill, like her green eyes, and the orange and brown spots on her fur, needs to be its own closed shape.

Step Three: Recolor Muffin

After you've drawn the basic shapes that make up Muffin, you can start selecting fill colors using the Color Panel, removing and recoloring strokes, and using other features like the Shape tool, Direct Selection tool, and any others that help you draw Muffin. Bonus: this'll let you practice the techniques we learned over the past few lessons.

Since you already have basic drawing and layer organization skills from our previous lessons, we'll just give you an idea of how detailed to get with your layers, groups, tracing and coloring for this hand-tracing step. Here's a screenshot of your goal below. Aim for five colors, and a combination of shapes and lines to create a simple Muffin illustration, using layer visibility as you work.

Done with your Muffin hand-trace? You can simply drag your template layer to the trash icon in the Layers panel. You're ready for the Image Trace panel now.

Step Four: Muffin Image Trace

Let's hop on over to artboard 2, and create a new layer called Muffin Autotrace. You'll repeat the Place process to get a new Muffin onto this artboard—and this new layer—to work with.

If your Image Trace panel isn't open, you can locate it in Window > Image Trace.

For this activity, you'll choose the button preset called Auto Color, and apply it to your selected image of Muffin.

You'll see a preview render (make sure your have "Preview" checked at the bottom left of the Image Trace panel), but you're gonna change some of the settings to customize the Auto Color preset.

First, open the Advanced section of the Image Trace panel, and make the following changes to the settings and see what happens to the image:

• Colors: Drag this slider to 4 (toward the side that says "Less")
• Paths: Drag this to 100%.
• Corners: Drag this to 0%.
• Noise: Drag this to 75%.

Next, click the Expand button in the Control Panel to put your customized trace settings into effect, and make Muffin a true editable vector.

Now, use the Direct Selection tool to select difference areas of your image, and recolor them using the same colors you chose for your hand trace of Muffin. Your end result should look something like this:

Notice that although the Image Trace result has lots of fur texture and more detail than the hand-trace version, it also has a choppier, more mechanical appearance to it. Vector-y, right? Told ya.

Although you can select individual paths and manipulate Image Trace vectors, getting them to look more natural, like with your hand trace, would take nearly as long as creating your hand trace did.

Anywho, you're done here. Double check that you've named and saved your file (using the convention Lastname_Firstname_Activity11.ai), then go ahead and turn it in below.

Congrats, you're an Illustrator tracing expert.