Home Photoshop Drawing Techniques Vector Draw

Vector Draw

Author: Pixeltool.com.ve More by this author

Added: Jun 22, 2005 Rating:

Level: Beginner Software: Illustrator

Welcome again. In this simple but useful tutorial I'm goin' to show you in few steps how to draw vectors using Adobe Illustrator 10. The vector work is essential and important, but the principal difference between bitmaps and vectors is the resolution: A vector image have no resolution, this one can be stretched at any size but always look perfect. By the way, vector is the default format for the works in Macromedia Flash.

To draw, we're going to use the tool "Pen" that is located in the toolbox. This tool have four different options (You can see it holding the click over the Pen icon in the toolbox) but now, we're going to focus our attention in the Pen: You only need to hit the P (the shortcut for the Pen tool). Here we go:

01. Let's start with a new file (File>New) and importing a bitmap image (File>Place). In this example I'm going to use an image from PhotoBreed. Now that we have the image into the work area, we need to select and block it (Ctrl+2). This blocks the image so that we don't move it by mistake while we draw on it.

02. Tracing: Now, we need to change our fill color to transparent and the stroke color to one that highlight over the image: Here I'll choose red. We begin drawing a point (an anchor point) and then another, following the image's border. At the time to do the second point, we need to hold the mouse's button and "pull": This will create two additional points around the anchor point. Those "directions points" will help us to control in a more easy way the curves between every anchor point in the path.

03. We make click over the previous point, and then a new point advancing in the drawing moving the directions points in every anchor point adapting the path to the contour of the image. To work with more comfort (and detail) we can come closer over the image using the "zoom" tool (Z) and to move along the image holding down the spacebar (a little hand).

04. When all the path is finished (around all image) we can "close" the path uniting the last and the first anchor points. this is the way the image may look:

05. To conclude, we unblock the image (bitmap) and erase it. Selecting our vector image we change their fill color, add a stroke, etc. He Take a look at the difference between both images:

Ok, That's all (for now). Hope you find this tutorial useful like the others. Remember to practice. To see more of my artworks, visit my gallery section.

God Bless !

Author's URL: Pixeltool.com.ve