Moleskine Madness-Valentine!

 

Happy Valentines Day!

Be good to your sweetie.

Moleskine Madness-Tutorial Day!

So, did you notice the new title? I’m going to add some tutorials on how I work or get stuff done and post them onto the blog. I will also post some of the programming experiments that I do every once in a while to merge technology with my art.

First up is how I have come to love the Live Trace tool in Illustrator CS4. Yes. I did say the Live Trace tool. I know what you’re thinking; ‘Hey! Webmonkee! – Tracing stuff is not ART!’ Well, it can be if you start with your own drawings.

I remember many moons ago, cursing, as I was frustrated, sitting at the computer trying to find a way to get what was on the drawing board onto the monitor. Sure. You could scan and alter in Photoshop. Only one problem; it was a raster image! Complications would crop up with the different resolutions because the PSD was essentially a bitmap. What I decided that I needed were vectors. Yes, vectors were my Holy Grail!

Why vectors? Because they are resolution independent; which is just a fancy way to say that whatever is defined by a point, say a line, which is two or more points, will look the same at 640X480 as well as 1024X768. Which is just one of the many reasons that illustrators use Adobe Illustrator. Everything that the illustrator creates can be used at different resolutions. If you happen to be a busy illustrator this can be a fantastic time saver. Draw everything at a comfortable resolution and then transfer to print, web, and video all at the same time!

Only one problem, Illustrator’s pen tool; in the early days it was just hard to use. Though it did get better! Or maybe I just got better at using it. The pen tool, with its lovely line, is still recognizable as a computer generated illustration. I was after something that could reproduce the look and feel of the hand drawn illustration and yet have the digital convenience. I was hoping to preserve the sensual feeling of pen to paper, that most artists enjoy as part of the drawing process; while giving the finished art the mass availability of digital media. After numerous hours learning how to control the pen tool with a mouse and later with a Wacom tablet and pen, Adobe finally gives me what I wanted! A trace tool!

Anyway, enough of this, here’s what I did. Feel free to try this out on your own and if you find it useful pass it along! The main thing is to experiment and have fun.

First step is to get your art into the computer in some sort of digital form. Here I used a digital camera to take a snapshot of my Moleskine sketchbook and opened the JPEG in Photoshop. Digital cameras are really handy for a number of illustration tasks and I use it often. Any digital camera will do as they often have 10+ megapixels in even the most inexpensive camera today.

 

I saved the JPEG as a PSD Photoshop document. Now it’s time to do a little editing magic! I get to work with the eraser tool and remove the parts of the drawing that I don’t want Illustrator to trace.

So it looks something like this when I am done:

 I erased the extraneous background items and moved one of the pages to second layer and then moved the layers closer together.

 Then I play with the curve function and get a white background. This is a step where you have to eyeball it! I’m just trying to get a very white background at this stage.

 

Then it’s a turn with the brightness/contrast function to get a dark ink line. Again, if you try this, just eyeball it. When I feel that I have it right, I save the document and close Photoshop and then fire up Illustrator. 

 

I open a print document in CMYK at 300dpi in landscape mode.

 

 Then choose File==>Place.

  

I find my file and click Place.

 

 Illustrator places the Photoshop file into the document. At this point, I take the time to scale it down to the document size.

  

I use the Shift key as I click on one of the corner handles to constrain the proportions as I scale the image to the document. Now for the really fun part! Hit the Live Trace button at the top… 

  

…and this is what happens! Now I do some additional adjustments. Come on, now! Do you really think that I would take the DEFAULT options? Well, did you?

 

I open up the Tracing Options panel. I prefer the Comic Art Tracing Preset and then I usually change the Threshold to around 210 to 220. This gives me a really nice black ink line that I like. The Path Fitting, Minimum Area, and Corner Angle are up to you. I find myself changing them for each individual drawing. When I’m satisfied, I hit the Trace button on the panel and then the Expand button that is at the upper right hand corner.

 

This is where everything turns into vector points. Sweet! I don’t think that I would want to do all of this work with the Pen tool.

Then while everything is still selected; I go to Object==>Ungroup. This separates the points from the white background. Yes, the white background is still part of the image and needs to be removed if you want to ink or paint behind the tracing.

 Then I deselect the points by clicking outside of the image and onto the art board.  

 

Then I reselect by clicking anywhere in the image where there is white space. Then I hit delete and remove all of that stinking white space.

As you can see, now I have a vector document that I can manipulate with the tools in Illustrator that was originally a drawing in my Moleskine sketchbook. I usually move the characters to separate layers to isolate the background and add layers for color and other effects. When I finish, I can make prints, different size t-shirt designs for my Zazzle store, or add the illustration to the book that I’m working on! It also gives me a certain freedom to work anywhere with pen or pencil and my Moleskine sketchbook, knowing that I can always edit the art later in Illustrator on my fancy computer box.